Ian and Mavis Hale have a long history with Bidwells Oxford 10k. After volunteering nearly every year since its inception, this year, the couple will be the official race starters. Ian tells us how they first got involved.
Long-standing volunteers to play key ‘race starter’ role in sell-out Bidwells Oxford 10k
Ian and Mavis Hale have a long history with Bidwells Oxford 10k. After volunteering nearly every year since its inception, this year, the couple will be the official race starters. Ian tells us how they first got involved.
I worked with Mike Cleaver in the early 1980s and remember him coming into work one day and asking if we’d help with a 10k run he was organising in Blenheim Park to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy UK. It was 1982 and he’d been inspired by the inaugural London Marathon the previous year, and that was how the Oxford 10k came about.
I knew that Mike’s son, Daniel, was living with muscular dystrophy and my wife, Mavis and I wanted to help. We had four healthy children and saw this as a way to give back.
In the first year, we handed out programmes, then became race marshals in year two, before joining the race committee. In 1984, the run moved to central Oxford.
Mike stood down from the committee after Daniel died in 1990, but it was a popular run, and we knew it was raising a lot of money for a worthwhile cause, so we didn’t want it to stop. We formed a new race committee and took on a lot of the organisation, from contacting runners and sending out race packs to collecting the sponsorship money for the charity.
Everything was done by hand in the early days. We used to all stay up late on the day of the race so that we could get everyone’s race times to the Oxford Mail by 11pm to be published in the paper the next day. Obviously, everything is done by computer now with chip timing.
A lot has changed over the last four decades, but the friendly, community atmosphere at the run remains the same. We still feel a real connection to Mike, Daniel and others who are living with muscular dystrophy and know that it’s making a difference.
We are honoured to start the race this year. Hard to believe it is 42 years since the first one!
