Teacher hopes to smash £2m target at marathon

Gill Punt has raised more than £1.9m for Cancer Research UK

A PE teacher is hoping to reach a £2m fundraising goal when she runs her 29th marathon in October.

Gill Punt, from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, started taking part in endurance events in 1999 after her father died from bile duct cancer.

"It was never a goal to hit that kind of target, it was just try and find something positive out of dad's death," she said.

The 55-year-old has been shortlisted for BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester's Make a Difference Awards and will find out if she has won at a ceremony on 25 September.

Ms Punt has completed 28 marathons, more than 70 half marathons and is a double Guinness World Record holder.

In October she will be running the TCS Amsterdam Marathon, dressed for a third time in a polar bear suit.

She said she had no plan to stop until a cure for cancer was found.

Mrs Punt was 28 when her father Mike died of bile duct cancer, a rare disease which often shows no symptoms

The mother-of-three said her father, who died aged 55, remained her main inspiration to continue fundraising and raising awareness.

"He never got to meet my husband and his grandchildren, he missed out on a lot," she said.

Ms Punt said at the start line of every race she thought of him and wore a ribbon attached to her running vest so he was "over her heart".

The teacher, who works at South Bromsgrove High School, wears another ribbon in memory of a close personal friend from the town, who died from cancer in 2024.

"It hits home when you lose lovely people like that and then that inspires you to keep going, because we need to live in a world where we are free from cancer," she explained.

Gill Punt completed the polar night marathon in January in under five hours

Mrs Punt's favourite marathon so far has been the polar night marathon in Norway "because it was so completely different".

Dressed in a polar bear suit, she set the world record for the fastest ice marathon dressed as a mammal.

It is not the only record she has achieved.

Earlier in her race career, she recorded the world record for the fastest marathon in a full-bodied animal costume - at the London Marathon in 2016, again dressed as a polar bear.

Cancer Research UK described her fundraising as an "incredible achievement".

Birmingham-based research nurse Karen Turner said the money she had raised was funding life-saving research.

"There will be so many people who will never be able to say thank you to Gill but she will be affecting so many people through this," she added.