DiAthlete - an inspiration

On Saturday we did a DAFNE Online presentation at Addenbrooke's Hospital Cambridge for their patient day. However we were just the warm up act for the next speaker who was billed as the 'inspirational speaker'. I must admit to being a bit dubious when I saw this on the agenda, but no they were right . The speaker was Gavin Griffiths who is also known as diAthlete and his story should be an inspiration to us all. He was diagnosed as Type 1 at 8 years old and like most of us spent the next 8-9 years being told what he could not do and got increasingly frustrated by this. Unlike most of us, he decided he was going to prove all these people wrong. His first way of doing this was to run 29 miles in 3 hours for charity. He then just took on more and more challenging tasks. Probably the biggest of which was to run from John O'Groats to Lands End, 30 miles for 30 days. As he said to us, Eddie Izzard does it and the whole of the UK media are there, a Type 1 diabetic does it and hardly anyone cares ( not even the national Diabetes Charity, but lets not go there). He has plans for bigger challenges yet and listening and chatting to him just shows you what you can achieve if you DON'T let all those people who tell you Type 1 limits you !! Respect !

Please check out his website http://www.diathlete.org and look out for him. One of the things we chatted about was the medical exemption card fiasco and he is fighting the fines made for not having a valid card. He was one of those fined for not having one despite moving from juvenile care ( where you don't need one) to adult care and never being told he actually needed one. He has got the fine refunded for people and is now fighting to get back the cost of the prescriptions that he should not have had to pay for. As with his running challenges, he is not letting people discriminate against him just because he is T1 !! Respect Again.

The only bad thing I can say about him, is his life's ambition was to play for Crystal Palace, which just proves no one is perfect