Every Metre Counts: Run the Bucharest Marathon for the Children of Climb Again
There is a moment on the climbing wall that anyone who has visited Climb Again will remember. A child who arrived a few months earlier unable to lift one arm above her shoulder reaches for the next hold — and holds it. Her mother, Rodica, describes what came next: after nine months, her daughter was completing full routes on her own, building strength in her right hand despite significant involvement of both legs and her left hand. That is the quiet, unglamorous work behind the numbers: more than 3,700 children have taken part in Climb Again’s programmes, over 750 receive therapy each year, and the organisation now runs four centres in Bucharest, Iași and Arad together with more than 30 partner schools, including schools for deaf and blind children. In a country where over 850,000 people live with a disability, and where isolation is often harder to overcome than the disability itself, Climb Again’s message is disarmingly simple: a normal life, lived independently, should not be exceptional.
On 10–11 October 2026, the streets of the capital become the most effective fundraising route Climb Again has. Joining the Bucharest Marathon as part of the Climb Again team is straightforward: register for your distance — the 42 km marathon, the half marathon, the relay, the 10K or the Fun Race, which welcomes families, first-timers and colleagues who would rather walk it than race it — then open a personal fundraising page on the Galantom platform and share it with your network. The minimum target is 400 lei per runner, every participant receives the official Climb Again race kit and t-shirt, and the money goes somewhere specific and measurable: therapeutic climbing scholarships of roughly 80 sessions a year per child, free access for families who could not otherwise afford therapy, specialist equipment, the development of the centres, and the training of Romania’s National Paraclimbing Team.
For the members of the British Romanian Chamber of Commerce, this is also one of the rare corporate social responsibility opportunities that asks something of a company beyond its budget. A marathon team is not a logo on a banner; it is colleagues training together at 6 a.m., a finance director and a graduate trainee on the same relay, and an internal fundraising story that people genuinely want to tell. Climb Again offers three levels of corporate involvement — Explore for companies taking part for the first time, Grow for deeper employee engagement, and Impact for long-term partnerships with visibility — and Romanian legislation allows companies to direct up to 20 per cent of their corporate profit tax to accredited causes, which means much of the support costs the business considerably less than it delivers.
Very few of us will ever stand on a podium, and most of us will finish the Bucharest Marathon somewhere in the anonymous middle of the field. It does not matter. Somewhere in Bucharest, Iași or Arad, a child will spend this winter learning to trust their own body, to ask for help, to fall and try again — and the cost of that year of therapy will have been covered by people who simply decided to run, and to ask their friends and colleagues to chip in. If your organisation is looking for something worth putting a team behind this autumn, this is it. Registration and full details of the campaign are at climbagain.ro/maraton, and the Climb Again team can be reached in: daniela@climbagain.ro | 0764 016 832.
Every metre counts, and every metre is climbed by someone.
