Man whose London Marathon dream became ‘nightmare’ after collapse set to return

A man who collapsed near the 25-mile mark at the 2021 London Marathon is set to return in 2023 to raise money for St John Ambulance, whose quick actions he credits with preventing “more lasting damage”.

Keen runner David Blackmore, 36, from King’s Lynn in Norfolk, collapsed with heat stroke in 2021 during his first London Marathon attempt and was unable to finish, saying “my dream turned into a nightmare so close to the end”.

However, he is set to return when the race – which he said he “grew up watching” and “always wanted to do” – returns on April 23, adding the incident in 2021 has “only had a positive impact”.

“I felt fine until about mile 22-23, and then I couldn’t really remember much else,” Mr Blackmore, a TV journalist, told the PA news agency.

“The only thing that I can remember… was a feeling that my head was made of lead and really heavy, and me justifying to myself that actually I could just run for the next three miles, four miles with my hands holding up my head.

“From what the St John Ambulance people have told me, (I was) displaying all the symptoms of heat stroke/heat exhaustion, which is being dazed and confused.

“They said to me, ‘Look, if you want to walk it… you could’ because I only had a mile and a bit to go. But in all honesty, when I had my phone back, I couldn’t work out how to use my phone – where your brain would normally just do things naturally, suddenly, it was having to try and think about what actually you need to do.

“I was just like ‘No, my run is run and I’ll just have to come back again’.”

In the period since his collapse, Mr Blackmore has completed marathons in Brighton, Vienna and Atlanta, as well as completing a virtual challenge to run the length of Route 66 in the US and raising money for the East Anglian Air Ambulance in August 2022 in the 435-mile Lap of Anglia challenge.

Now he is raising money for St John Ambulance, saying it “made perfect sense” to do so “to say thank you”, and towards the end of March he passed his £2,000 target.

“The more I can talk about it and the more I can talk about the work that they do, the more then people can realise just how important it is to have charities like St John and the volunteers,” he said.

“If I’d been left where I was, and hadn’t been treated, it would have led to being hospitalised and you just don’t know how your body’s going to react when it is just that hot and it’s lost the ability to cool itself.

“All I’ve been told from them is that they had to kind of manufacture some kind of tarpaulin stretcher, because I just wasn’t in a position to be able to walk. They had to manufacture something and be a bit creative to actually carry me back to the tent.

“Sometimes it sounds a little bit overdramatic to say that they saved my life, but if they hadn’t acted in the way they did, as quickly as they did, it definitely could have led to more lasting damage.”

Mr Blackmore said he will be drinking more in order to prevent another collapse this time around, while his main aim is to fulfil a childhood dream.

“First and foremost, I really just want to complete it,” he said.

“When I watched it as a kid I was always looking at those people that were running down the Mall at the end, and that atmosphere, and that’s something that I always wanted to have.”

To find out more about Mr Blackmore’s fundraising efforts, visit www.justgiving.com/fundraising/davidblackmore86.