MATTHEW Parry has spent a lifetime proving people wrong.
And now the 24-year-old, who was born severely premature and told he would never be able to walk, is taking on a half-marathon challenge for charity.
Mr Parry, from Abingdon, has had cerebral palsy since he was born in Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital with complications at 28 weeks, weighing just 1lb 14oz.
“From an early age they said I would never walk,” said Mr Parry, “but I have proved a lot of people wrong, including top doctors.”
His 13.1-mile run will be completed on a treadmill at the Feel Good Fitness gym, in Queen Street, Abingdon, tomorrow.
Mr Parry, who has not set himself a time limit but hopes to finish within five-and-a-half hours, wants to raise £1,200 to fund a charity trip to Kenya next month.
He said: “I’m raising money for a charity called the Nasio Trust, to go out to Kenya and help build a kitchen for disadvantaged orphans with HIV.”
Mr Parry completed a 10km run in London last year but has never run 13 miles in one go.
Asked how he overcame the predictions of his doctors and began running, Mr Parry said: “I put it down to saying ‘you ain’t going to achieve anything unless you give it a go’.
“From what I can gather, when I was born, the way I developed cerebral palsy is that both my lungs collapsed and filled with water and my brain haemorrhaged and it was starved of oxygen. I was told I was lucky to survive.”
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