BANKIES midfielder Chris Black said the emotional scenes his mum has witnessed at the hospital where she works was enough motivation to encourage him to run a fundraising marathon.

The 27-year-old is set to run the 26.2 mile distance on June 6 and he will donate any cash raised to Inverclyde Royal Hospital. His girlfriend Kirsty McGlynn is running a half-marathon for the same cause.

He told the Post he was fed-up of the shorter distance runs and was keen to do his bit after hearing how badly the area where his mother worked had been affected by the Covid-19 outbreak.

He said: “I didn’t even think about it at the start and was just looking to keep myself fit by doing the 5K’s and 10K’s. I was getting bored of them and it just kept going.

“I saw someone on Twitter who had done a marathon for the Kris Boyd Charity which gave me the idea to do something similar.

“My mum is a nurse in Inverclyde Hospital, and when the news that came out about how badly Inverclyde has been affected my partner and I both had the idea.

“It helped because it’s given us a goal and we’re hoping to raise as much as we can for the hospital, whether that’s used for PPE or wellbeing for staff or patients.

“I wasn’t sure whether to donate it to the NHS or just the hospital itself but when it came out how badly Inverclyde had been affected I’d like it to go specifically to that hospital.”

Speaking about his mum, he said: “She works in the eye ward so she wasn’t directly in the intensive care unit or the wards where they were dealing with most of the affected patients, but eventually because of the amount of patients that were coming in with it, they had to get staff from everywhere so she ended up in the worst hit wards.

“She said it was terrible, just the amount of people that were coming in and what they were going through.

“Seeing it face-to-face, and with families not being able to see their loved ones dying was so emotional. Just hearing it first-hand from my mum made me want to do this even more.”

Chris has experience of running a marathon in the past and, despite the fact he hasn’t trained as much for this one, is confident that both he and his partner can complete their run. He said: “I did the Edinburgh Marathon in 2016 in 3 hours and 40 minutes.

“I trained a lot for that one and not so much for this one which is worrying me a bit.

“I don’t think she’s worried because she has been going longer for the last few weeks but at the same time I have said to her it is quite a distance so she’ll have to prepare herself but I’m really confident she can do it. She’s more competitive than me so I think she’ll want to get it done.”

Donations can be made at justgiving.com/fundraising/chrisandkirstysrun.