Great friends Craig Allen and Neal Rawlinson go the extra yard (23,056 yards) to run The Great North Run, with half a freezer strapped to their backs, raising awareness & funds for mens' mental health.
Getting a 15kilo refrigerator fitting is not something one expects to do in one’s day job, but that’s exactly how Craig & Neal spent their build-up week to the Great North Run.
For a few years now Craig had been mulling over how best to celebrate the passing of his best friend, Josh, who took his life a few years earlier, whilst raising essential funds for Andy’s Man Club, an incredible men’s suicide prevention charity, which seeks to end the stigma surrounding men’s mental health via freeto-attend, peer-to-peer support groups.
Craig’s day role is as a budding foodpreneur (Gold Standard Nutrition/ GSN), championing a new generation of convenient, frozen ready meals for timepoor, health-conscious individuals (high in protein/low in sugar), convinced him that the perfect homage to his best friend would be for him and his good friend and fellow GSN pioneer, Neal, to cut one of their chest freezers in half and strap it to their backs.
“Essentially,” explains Craig, “We wanted to personify stronger together with an open act of sharing the burden, because all too often men are afraid to share their innermost feelings so suffer in silence, often with horrific consequences.”
N.B. Every year there are approximately 6000 suicides a year (74% of which involve men).
“We already suspected that Sunday would be far harder than even our training regime suggested,” pondered Craig “and we soon were proven right with a number of added complications that included waiting in for an hour before we got going, one of my straps snapping after only 4.5 miles, the unrelentingly awkward shape and weight of our loads and the ever-present hinderance of rain. Thankfully the incredible support of the crowds and fellow runners got us over the line.
Something Josh wrote two years ago before he passed remains so poignant that Craig & Neal were insistent that his words should sit front and central of the freezer’s branding, underpinning their central IT’S OK TO TALK message.
“I forgot who I was once, I thought that maybe I am a man not worth knowing, that was finished and should be forgotten about. I simply wasn’t relevant any more. But then I remembered that I have a story worth telling and a man with a story worth telling is always a man worth knowing.”
Craig & Neal are now well on our way to hitting their £5k target, but every penny matters, so if you have anything spare in your pocket, please donate generously shorturl.at/MuEEX
Mygsn.co.uk