MAYO HURLER CATHAL Freeman plans to run an entire marathon in his back garden while soloing a sliotar this weekend to help raise funds for the Irish Cancer Society and Health Service Executive.
The UL medical student sent out a tweet earlier this week promising to run the marathon if it got 2,000 retweets.
Borrowing this idea from @jcampbell0104:
— Cathal Freeman (@DCFreeman11) March 31, 2020
If this tweet gets 2,000 retweets - I'll run a marathon (42km) while soloing a sliothar around this patch of grass.
I'll set up a fundraising page before doing it - all money raised will go to @IrishCancerSoc and @HSELive for PPE 👍 pic.twitter.com/9GZLeCVUnQ
It quickly reached that figure in the space of a few days and now Freeman is in the planning stages for the marathon.
The Irish Cancer Society’s annual fundraiser Daffodil Day was scheduled for late March but had to be cancelled due to the spread of Covid-19. Freeman is also to raising funds to provide HSE workers with vital personal protective equipment as the coronavirus crisis grips the country.
“I was sitting at my desk and meant to be studying,” he tells The42. ”That wasn’t going too well so I was on Twitter.
“I just came across this random fella called James Campbell in England. He was sitting in his kitchen in isolation no more than the rest of us and took a picture of his back garden which was about six metres long and said, ‘If I get 10,000 retweets I’ll run a marathon in my back garden.’
“Firstly I gave him the retweet because I thought it was good craic and said to myself, ‘I’d like to do something like that.’
“Without really thinking about it too much I stuck in the hurling bit as well and that’s going to be different. Here we are now and as you can probably tell there’s not a huge amount of preparation or planning into. So we’re making it up as we go along.”
He has a 30-metre loop set out with old hurls in his garden. So it will require roughly 1,400 laps to reach the 42km target.
“There won’t be any land-speed records broken,” he laughs.
Freeman has already received great support across the county, with some team-mates ribbing the Tooreen club man who admits himself he’s “fairly injury-prone.”
“I’m getting a slagging from the hurling lads about the amount of time I spend on the physio table and the number of training sessions that I don’t finish.”
It will take place on Sunday at 11am and will be streamed live on Facebook live through Mayo GAA TV.
“People were getting onto me about making sure it was streamed. I had no idea about how to get a stream up and going and taking in donations while the stream was happening.
“So the guys in Mayo GAA TV, Paul Cunnane and Kieran O’Hora were brilliant, they got in touch and with one phone call, they basically took the whole thing off my hands.
“They’re putting together a package now about we’re going to stream it and all I’ve got to do is set-up the camera and they’ll take it from there. So I’m very lucky now to have the support of brilliant people like that.”
Click here to head over to Cathal’s GoFundMe page
Here’s the link to the Go Fund Me and thank you to everyone for the support! https://t.co/mfEEE77gmK https://t.co/ygTLfpqf3r pic.twitter.com/RnDS4Y1y5p
— Cathal Freeman (@DCFreeman11) April 3, 2020
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