Great Rugger Run for Mental Health Charities
Tim Tunnicliff does not live a conventional life. For the past five years he has travelled the world from Alaska to New Zealand and Central and South America to South East Africa, where he spent three months coaching rugby.
Having been a First XV player and head coach for Old Colfeians, he found retiring from playing rugby quite a challenge.
“It wasn’t just losing my team, it was more like losing my identity, not being able to do something I felt I was good at, and mourning the loss of that identity,” he recalls.
Running filled some of that emptiness and, together with travelling the world and designing websites on the road to fund his nomadic existence, became a new passion.
At the end of the summer Tim touched base again and, remembering two opposition players and one teammate who committed suicide around the time he himself stopped playing, decided to lace up his running shoes and run between 104 clubs in the South of England to raise awareness and funding for four mental health charities.
“I’d been out of the rugby family, was missing it and wanted to get back involved and do a bit of good along the way,” he says.
“I had just stopped playing at a time when I heard three people had taken their lives. I was shocked and tremendously sad. I’d always thought of them as tough guys, the opposing players I’d taken on one-on-one in the front row and greatly respected. It made me stop and think about the mental health of people handling a transition in their lives and how difficult that can be. I didn’t find it easy myself – rugby was such a big part of my life.”
So covering 542 miles and calling in at 104 clubs from Reading Abbey to East Dorset Dockers who, having supported the run on social media presented him with a team shirt as he arrived on training night and on to Withycombe, where lots of members turned out to welcome him, Tim has replenished his need for club rugby.
He even ran into Twickenham Stadium to be greeted by Conor Oshea and Nigel Redman and finished at Old Colfeians where he was cheered through the gates.
He has currently raised just under £7,000 but people can still contribute to help the four mental health charities: blOKes; LooseHeadz; Brave Mind and Give A Ruck.
Then Tim is off on his travels again, first to Barcelona, then on to Morocco and who knows where beyond.
