“I've Always Used Sport to Cope With Stress”

Lorry driver Kevin Freeman took up sport to help him through his wife’s battle with MS. Next year, he’s off to Kona…

I didn’t really start exercising until I was in my early 30s. I’d started to put on a bit of weight, and my wife Jeanette was quite ill at the time with MS, so I got into running to help me both physically and mentally.

I entered the New York marathon a few months after I took up running, to raise money for the MS Society, so that pushed me to start properly training. It was a really slow time, something like five hours. It was bloody tough, and when I finished I said ‘I’m never doing that again’. A couple of weeks later I was back running again.

I was a cab driver at the time, so I used to train early mornings before work. Sometimes I’d just park up in and around London and run through the different parks.