Mike Barnes ran three marathons in a fortnight, each one for his daughter Laura

Mike Barnes did not start running because he wanted to be a runner. He started because he needed somewhere to put his grief.

His eldest daughter, Laura, died of bowel cancer in December 2019. Barnes, a retired primary headteacher from Goosnargh in Lancashire, was 70. He began to run.

Four marathons and £45,000

Since 2022 he has raised approximately £45,000 for Bowel Cancer UK, according to the Lancashire Evening Post. He has run four marathons. In April 2026, aged 74, he set himself the task of running Brighton, Manchester and London within roughly two weeks — and on 26 April he crossed the London finish line alongside his daughters Emily and Harriet, running their first marathon.

“Running helps with the grief, as I carry her memory with me on every run I do.” — Mike Barnes, BBC North West

“I’ll stop running when you know bowel cancer has disappeared.”

The honest bit about how hard it is

Barnes does not pretend it is easy. Asked about the toll of three marathons in a month at 74, he told the LEP:

“Yes, it’s hard… But it’s nothing compared to what people are going through with cancer. So why would I moan?”

We include that not because we think you should run three marathons, but because it shows the mechanism. The difficulty of running became small relative to the reason he was running. That is what purpose does: it does not remove the effort, it shrinks it.

Finding your own reason

Most people who start exercising after 50 for a vague reason — “I should get fitter” — stop within a few months. The ones who keep going almost always have something specific:

• a person they are doing it for, or in memory of
• a charity total they have promised
• an event with a date, entered and paid for
• a group of people expecting them on Tuesday

Barnes had the first two and then added the third. If you have none of them yet, that — not the trainers, not the training plan — is the first thing to sort out.

A note on starting at 70

Barnes’s story is sometimes told as if starting to run at 70 were a medical miracle. It isn’t. Plenty of people take up running in their 60s and 70s safely; what matters is starting gently (walk-run intervals), building slowly, and getting a GP’s view first if you have heart, joint or blood-pressure concerns. What is remarkable is the consistency. Four years, four marathons, £45,000. That came from the reason, not the knees.