'Running for mum': sports charity challenges and therapeutic places

This chapter explores the spatial relations of grief, loss, memory and accomplishment through the growing phenomenon of sports-based charity challenges. For many who take part in events such as fun runs, completing the event helps raise money for a particular cause that is often motivated by their own personal loss or bereavement. Drawing on preliminary fieldwork undertaken with participants in the Mother’s Day Classic - a major fundraising event for breast cancer research and education in Australia – the chapter argues that training for and participating in this and similar charity sporting events provide a range of spaces in which therapeutic encounters occur. The chapter argues that the MDC offers an emotional geography that is publicly enacted against a curative therapeutic landscape of sporting achievement and celebration of lives lived and lost, in doing so, providing insight and understanding into the role of charity in fitness and leisure worlds.