The little things matter more to Adam Woolliscroft than to most people. That's because he knows the difference that something as little as a millimetre can make. In 2010, he broke his neck playing rugby. Had the vertebrae broken 1mm more, his spinal cord would have been severed.
Life as a paraplegic could have resulted from a miniscule movement in the wrong direction. "On impact there was an almighty crack - you hear it internally and externally. I just knew something really bad had happened, there was no doubt about it," says Woolliscroft, 39, a sourcing consultant and father to five-month-old Sienna.
He was immobile for weeks, and had three operations to fuse his neck. Then he faced the long road to recovery. A keen sportsman and runner, he set himself an ambitious goal to run the Great Wall Marathon in Tianjin just six months later. "I had to have a target, and it had to be a decent one. It was my handrail to recovery," he says.
Though the Briton was an experienced endurance runner, the short recovery time frame to prepare for the 5,164 steps over the marathon distance was a tough call, even for him.
"When you have high standards, [the goal] has to be something big. I had to able to say, 'Look guys, within six months, I'm going to do the Great Wall Marathon.' In the circumstances, that's an achievement that makes it easy to ask people to support your cause," he says.
Woolliscroft raised funds for spinal research and the Ben Kende Foundation, a charity set up and named after a talented local rugby player who injured his spinal cord and became a tetraplegic just a month earlier.