Her family, and people she’d never met, helped Beckie Watts through her first marathon in memory of her beloved son

WORDS: LISA JACKSON

INSPIRATION

Alex, Steve, Ciara, Beckie and Ryan at The 401 Festival of Running in August 2017

If my son Alex was still alive, he would have said ‘Well done mum, I’m so proud of you’ with a big cheesy grin when I finished this year’s Brighton Marathon in his honour”, says Beckie Watts, 36, from Bristol. “Even though I’d been running for two years, I hadn’t planned on doing a marathon, but I decided I’d fundraise for CLIC Sargent, a children’s cancer charity I’d been supporting ever since Alex was diagnosed with cancer. When Alex passed away in December 2017 my reasons for running Brighton changed: not only was I doing it for the charity, I was doing it for him too.

“I used to say that exercise was a naughty word. To me it was always far too much effort. I started the Couch to 5K programme on 4 January 2016 (Alex’s 12th birthday) in a bid to get fitter and lose some weight and in the first 60 seconds of ‘running’ I was so out of breath that it felt as if my lungs were on fire and my heart was going to leap out of my chest!