A STOURPORT man who swapped running a marathon through the streets of London for his back garden has smashed his fundraising target for two very important causes.

Dominic Cooke was all set to run the legendary event last month, which would have been his first ever marathon, to raise money for the Make A Wish Foundation.

With the legendary run cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, Dominic was eager put to his months of training to good use to achieve his goal to raise £2,000 for the charity.

He challenged himself to run the equivalent of the marathon in his garden and also added NHS Charities Together to benefit from his running efforts.

The 22-year-old ran the course on Sunday, May 10 in five hours and six minutes, clocking up 1,833 laps of his garden.

He smashed his target to raise £2,000 by hundreds of pounds to help the Make A Wish Foundation and NHS Charities Together and donations are still coming in.

Dominic said: "I had put in all this training to raise as much money as possible, I didn't want it to go to waste, I was gutted.

"I was quite surprised with the time, I thought it would take longer than that.

"It was difficult, it was the first time I had run beyond ten miles as London was set to be my first marathon. It was hard because of the constant turning, you take five steps then you need to slow down and turn around.

"I'd say it was definitely more difficult than doing the London marathon, as you can't build up a pace and there's not so much to look at to distract you.

"You can only look at your own garden so many times!"

He set up two donation pages, one for the Make A Wish Foundation and another for NHS Charities together, to get his total over the line, both of which are still accepting donations.