A Run for all

Mike Tomlinson is sitting at his kitchen table pouring over a road map of Britain. He’s clearly exhausted. In June he watched 11,000 people cross the 10k finish line of this year’s Run For All in Leeds, the race set up by his late wife, Jane. It was an incredibly emotional and poignant day for Mike and Jane’s three children and one which was preceded by months of anxious organisation and sleepless nights. The event was a fantastic success, raising over £750,000 for the chosen charities of those taking part. But still that is not enough for Mike Tomlinson. Before his wife lost her seven year battle against breast cancer, she raised an incredible £1.75m for the children’s and cancer charities supported by Jane’s Appeal. Mike is determined that he and the children – Suzanne 23, Rebecca 20 and Steven 11 – will together take that total to £2m before the anniversary of Jane’s death in September. So after the completion of June’s Run For All, his attention turned immediately to another fundraising challenge for July and August – cycling the length of Britain with daughter Rebecca. ‘We always were going to carry on after Jane died. It was never even considered that we would not continue and do more fund raising,’Mike says. ‘We have to get the charity to a position where it can move forward.’ The 1,400-mile cycle from John O’Groats to Land’s End follows closely the route taken by Jane in her first big cycling challenge in 2003. For both father and daughter it is a very personal celebration of Jane’s life, in particular the journey through Yorkshire from Settle to Leeds. Mike was born in Settle and the route from there to the Tomlinson’s family home in Rothwell was one of Jane’s favourite training routes. Settle is also where the couple had often talked of settling when, Mike says, ‘we got to a certain age’. Mike admits that since Jane’s death, visits to a place so special in their shared, now shattered, dreams have been hard and emotional. But Mike is not given to public displays of despair and the cycle through Settle, and the invitation to 100 members of the public to join the ride that day, is another determined example to make a positive out of personal adversity. ‘We are doing the ride to remember Jane,’ Mike says. ‘This is about celebrating Jane’s life and trying to get over the £2 million mark.’ Mike Tomlinson is incredibly physically fit – earlier this year he ran the London Marathon in under four hours and now he’s cycling an average 60 miles a day for three weeks. ‘If I’m going through bad periods I tend to go through them by myself and I don’t display it publicly or with my friends and family,’ the 47 year-old says. ‘When I am feeling low I do two things – I change the sheets and I go out and take some exercise.’ But neither physical fitness nor the very admirable focus on celebrating Jane’s life can mask the strain of his relentless schedule. Mike is running Jane’s Appeal and picking up the fundraising baton at the same time as working full-time as an IT specialist, trying to find his feet as a widower and a working single parent, and fulfilling a promise to Jane to campaign for the Government to end inequalities of access to groundbreaking drugs. He won’t tell you it’s easy, but he shares the straight-talking pragmatism of his wife. ‘I don’t have the same pressure as Jane had because I am not poorly,’ he simply says. ‘I don’t feel sad for myself because I was very lucky to have Jane.We had a great marriage together for a lot of years and we had a great time. I’m sad because I see what Jane is missing with the kids.’ The Tomlinsons are clearly a very close family. At this year’s Run For All, all three children were at their father’s side, very proud to start the 10k event set up as their mother’s legacy. Mike is as conscious as when Jane was alive about protecting and respecting his children’s privacy, and does not think it appropriate to talk of their grief or how they are coping. In his own day to day life he is still caught unawares by his grief. ‘I probably thought I had moved on more than I have, I thought I was further down the road of recovery than I actually am,’ he says. ‘I feel that I haven’t really moved forward emotionally and I haven’t moved forward in terms of sorting things out practically at all. There are practical things that I maybe should have done last September that I still haven’t done. ‘I think tiredness is really holding me back. I haven’t had a minute to myself and I really think tiredness doesn’t help. I think I have probably expected too much of myself physically; going back to work, doing the charity work, being a single parent and looking after Steven. And I also expected much more of myself emotionally to move forward.’ Mike’s emotional journey has been made harder still by having to complete the third book of his and Jane’s life story following her breast cancer diagnosis. How Good Is That?, due to be published this autumn, tells the story of Jane’s incredible 4,200-mile bike ride across America last summer and of the final months of her life. As with the first two books, Mike and Jane each write their own parts and, for Mike, that has meant revisiting some incredibly difficult times. But, he says, there are also memories he has enjoyed reliving and he has at times found great comfort in being able to put on headphones and hear Jane’s voice on tapes of interviews during her American ride. ‘I have enjoyed writing the book. I think it is a great book, the best one yet,’ he says, returning, as ever, to the positive.

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