THREE siblings are hoping to raise £2,500 for charity by completing a marathon challenge in memory of their late father.

Mark Witcomb will be returning from his work with the Ministry of Agriculture in Afghanistan to run the Dublin marathon on Monday, October 31 with his sisters Francesca Bishop and Antonia Firebrace.

Their father, Richard Witcomb, was a maths teacher at Malvern College and sat on the board of the Malvern Hills Conservators. He was 60 when he died in 2007.

The family are running in aid of St Richard’s Hospice as a way of thanking the charity for the care Mr Witcomb received.

Mark, a former pupil of Malvern College, said: “The support dad and the family received from St Richard's was absolutely wonderful, we could not have asked for a more caring and peaceful atmosphere, which helped us all through an incredibly difficult time in our lives. Our father was a very keen runner and completed two marathons during his life. He would thoroughly approve of this as a way to raise money for this fantastic cause.”

He added that training for the event while in Afghanistan has not proved easy.

“The treadmill has broken and I’m getting pretty fed up of the one minute circuit around our compound,” he said. “One bit of more substantial training I did was to actually run the Kabul marathon in September.This was 20 times around the US Embassy compound and, scarily enough, the embassy was attacked by the Taliban literally a week later.”

To sponsor the trio go to justgiving.com/Antonia-Firebrace.