IT takes an awful lot of determination and sheer guts to turn out on a cold, windy and very wet Sunday afternoon and run five kilometres – especially if you are not any kind of serious athlete.

But that’s what more than 1,500 women aged from teens and early twenties to their seventies did yesterday in Burnley’s Towneley Park.

Their motivation was quite simple – a dogged desire to raise money for Cancer Research.

Such Race for Life events have mushroomed in recent years and Blackburn’s has become another highly successful annual occasion.

What makes them special is that almost all of those who take part have either experienced cancer themselves or have someone near and dear who has succumbed to this scourge or battled through to recover from it.

Personal and shared experience is what makes these kind of events so popular and what makes so many thousands of others who perhaps can’t actually run willing to dig deep to help finance the scientific race to find a cure for the big C.

It’s fantastic to see so many making such efforts for a great shared cause.