Hi everybody, wishing everyone here well for the New Year and beyond.
Just to be clear, I'm not here to promote our charity, Climbers Against Cancer, which raises funds and awareness on cancer.
A little background is required though.
As our name indicates, we are a climbers' charity, our founder John Ellison was a climber but sadly is no longer with us.
We are also a small volunteer charity and don't have the resources to run a fully-moderated forum, so we asked Cancer Research UK if we could 'piggy back' off theirs to start a conversation, and they kindly agreed.
We finance research projects worldwide and since last year we've expanded our scope to projects about living with and beyond cancer too.
So now here's the question!
Since we started sharing details of the latter projects, we've had a series of messages from climbers who are frustrated with not having specific advice.
They want to continue to climb ('it keeps me sane' they say) during and after treatment, but they feel most of the information available seems to target more sedentary individuals.
Weight gain during prostate cancer treatment has been cited, thin skin on fingertips during chemo is another, general fatigue...
Does anybody know of a resource - a forum or Q&A for example - which deals specifically with sport and cancer?
There's good research to show that sport can help prevent cancer and improved outcomes. We'd love to keep our community climbing as much and as long as possible.
Any help would be much appreciated.”
Keep up the good work Cancer Research UK!