Run in the Dark returns to Athlone on Wednesday, November 13, with an 8pm start at Spar Garrycastle for all participants.
Participants can join the 5k or 10k run which is being championed by Athlone Community College. Athlone is one of fifty cities worldwide that will host a Run in the Dark event on this particular date which will see over 25,000 people taking part across the globe.
Run in the Dark is the Mark Pollock Trust’s principal fundraising event. Unbroken by blindness in 1998, Mark Pollock became an adventure athlete, including being the first blind person to race to the South Pole. In 2010 a fall from a second story window nearly killed him, Mark broke his back and the damage to his spinal cord left him paralysed.
Commenting on his mission, Mark Pollock said, “as I lay in hospital for 16 months, digesting the impact of my accident, I was physically and mentally broken. With the help of so many people around the world, I have established a new life living with blindness and paralysis. Now, I donate my paralysed body to experimental research as I explore the intersection where humans and technology collide and catalyse collaborations that have never been done before. My goal is to participate in finding the cure for paralysis in our lifetime.”
Paula Cunniffe, CEO of Run in the Dark, remarked, “Through Run in the Dark, we aim to inspire people to build resilience and collaborate with others so that, together, they achieve more than they thought possible. For some that means gathering a group of friends or colleagues to train hard and get fit. For others it means building a team of experts to perform better. For us, at the Mark Pollock Trust, it means supporting Mark to deal with the ongoing physical, psychological and financial impact of his catastrophic spinal cord injury while also allowing him to pursue his personal mission to cure paralysis in our lifetime.”
To find out more about the event, or to register, visit www.runinthedark.org/athlone
