AT 68, Ron Skinner has never climbed a mountain before.

Now he is in training to trek across the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountain range.

When his friend Roger Brodie, a retired police officer from Abingdon, invited him on the adventure, he could not refuse.

“If someone throws a challenge at me, I have to do it,” he said.

But the divorced-father-of-two from Boxhill Road, Abingdon, is also repaying a lifelong debt. When he was nine years old, he caught polio but a family doctor misdiagnosed it as flu.

Luckily for him, the doctor’s son had just come out of the Army as a doctor, and diagnosed him with polio, which, he said, “saved my life”.

Mr Skinner added: “I was in an isolation hospital in Dover for 18 months.”

The former employee at Didcot’s Tesco distribution centre said: “My age made me take a proper look at myself, take a grip and say ‘I’m going to do this’.

“This challenge is a big thing at my age but now I’m retired I have the time.”

He and Mr Brodie will fly to Malaysia on October 16 to begin acclimatising and training before embarking on their hike on October 29.

Setting off from Langtang, Nepal, they will trek for 16 days across the frozen mountains to the country’s capital, Kathmandu.

Mr Skinner is also using the challenge to raise money for Maggie’s cancer support centre at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford. A member of the Abingdon Lions fundraising collective, he helped cut the ribbon on the new centre with a donation of £2,460 – one day’s running costs.

Maggie’s Oxford provides information and practical and emotional support to people diagnosed with cancer and their friends and families.

Mr Skinner is now training three times a week at Abingdon’s Results Gym, running on the treadmill to strengthen his stomach muscles and tone his legs.

It is not his first fundraising trip – three years ago he travelled to Zimbabwe with a young Zimbabwean man he met living in Oxfordshire.

They raised £2,300 for a good cause, travelled out to the country, then found a school just outside Harare to donate to.

For his Himalayan challenge, he has set himself a fundraising target of £1,000 and already has £800 from the Lions and the Tesco distribution centre.

  • To sponsor him online, go to justgiving.com/ron-skinner or donate £10 by texting NBGU82 to 70070

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