Rudding Park Hotel Manager, Nuno César de Sá and his wife Rebecca are celebrating after having broken the Guinness World Record for the fastest time running a marathon. The Leeds-based couple ran in the Marathon in in 3 hours 43 minutes 17 seconds, beating the previous record of 4 hrs 2 min 16 sec. This incredible achievement has also seen them raise over £7,000 for The Brain Tumour Charity.
Rebecca and Nuno both know the tragedy of a brain tumour diagnosis. Just this year, Rebecca’s best friends’ lost their sister, Sally, a young mum at just 47, to a brain tumour in January. A month later, Nuno’s wonderful step-mum Rina, 60 died just six months after her own diagnosis. The loss to both families in a short space of time motivated the couple to raise awareness for The Brain Tumour Charity and funds for research.
Nuno did his homework for a Guinness World Record Record they could try to break and after much searching, handcuffing themselves to each other seemed to be the obvious choice, although it would present some challenges on the day.
Nuno explains:
The main difficulty was that the chain was really quite short, so even a little jolt pulled our arms so it was difficult to get into your natural stride of running. I was worried other runners wouldn’t realise we were handcuffed together and might try and run through us, or that we’d trip up, but we survived and thankfully we were still speaking to each other when we got to the end!
Rebecca says:
The Brain Tumour Charity is the UK’s largest dedicated brain tumour charity, committed to fighting brain tumours on all fronts. They fund pioneering research to increase survival and improve treatment options as well as raising awareness of the symptoms and effects of brain tumours to bring about earlier diagnosis. The Charity also provides support for everyone affected so they can live as full a life as possible, with the best quality of life. A diagnosis can be so sudden, daunting and devastating. More funds are needed to raise awareness and to provide further research.
