After a road accident, I had to learn to walk again before I could take part in the London Marathon

After seven-and-a-half gruelling hours, with the finishing line in sight, the significance finally hit home. Allan Wood, 46 at the time, broke down in tears. His 13-year-old son Matthew rushed out from the crowd and they walked the last 900m of the race together. Thirteen months after being hit by a van and almost dying, Wood, against all the odds, had completed the 2019 London Marathon.

It was the second time in three years he’d crossed that line – but back in 2017 things had been rather different.

Wood has always been a sport lover – with two sons and two stepsons, he had to be. Football, motocross and ­cycling were popular, but rugby union came first, and Wood played and coached at the local club in Tamworth, Staffordshire.

He’d never run a marathon, but through a work ballot – Wood is a heavy goods vehicle mechanic at TNT FedEx – he earned a spot in the 2017 race and pledged to raise money for Wooden Spoon, the “children’s charity of rugby”, one of three charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Appeal.

Though he wasn’t much of a runner, Wood was an avid watcher of the London Marathon. “It’s the most inspiring day in the world,” he says. So, in late 2016, he began to train for the event. Starting at a mile (to pick up sausages and eggs for breakfast), Wood followed a carefully pieced together programme, slowly building up his fitness.

The 2017 race was “the best day of my life”, says Wood, before qualifying his comment after a jokily stern glance from his wife, Louise. “I shouldn’t say that. But it’s the closest I’m ever going to come to being a professional sportsman, to have that feeling of 50,000 people clapping me.”

Yet it didn’t go completely according to plan. Wood wanted to turn in “a reasonable time”, but the occasion got the better of him. “I wasn’t prepared for the fun element. For the first seven miles, I was running way too quickly, well above what I should’ve been doing.”

He knew he should have slowed down, but was enjoying it too much. After 15 miles, the four-hour pacer in front of him disappeared into the distance, and Wood hit the dreaded wall. “Two lads from the Army ran past me with big weights on, then a rhino. I was thinking, ‘Oh my lord’.”

He made it, eventually, one minute short of five hours, and celebrated that evening with his family over fish and chips and a couple of beers. It was only when he took the train home the next day when it hit him: he hadn’t done himself justice. So Wood entered the work ballot again, and was accepted. Once more, he planned to raise money for Wooden Spoon.

The accident happened on St Patrick’s Day 2018, five weeks before the race. Wood was around seven miles into an 18-mile run on a bright, chilly morning. On a long, straight stretch of the B5000 – not a busy road on a Saturday morning – a car was approaching slowly.

“I remember thinking, ‘wow, they’ve given me a lot of room, that’s nice’,” Wood recalls. But he couldn’t see the speeding van behind it.

“The memories are very fragmented so I don’t remember a lot of it,” he says, “but I just couldn’t get out the way. I tried to dive, and then I remember this horrific pain. I just lay there. I was so cold.” And then it began to snow.

In some ways, Wood was fortunate. Members of the public arriving on the scene included two critical care nurses, a doctor and a fireman. “And an ex-­undertaker,” he quips. “They saved my life. I remember people putting clothing on me, and a horse blanket. Online, it was reported that a horse had been hit – I’ll take that.”

The van that hit Wood had no brakes, bald tyres, and hadn’t passed an MOT since 2014. The driver was jailed for 20 months and banned from driving for two years and 10 months.

Wood spent two-and-a-half weeks in an induced coma and five weeks in hospital. His injury list would make even the hardiest of surgeons queasy. “If we start from the top, I have got minor brain damage. Every rib was broken, six were multiple.

“I had collapsed lungs, my pelvis was ripped in half, I’d broken my back in various places, and I was paralysed on the left side from the waist down. ACL, MCL, my knee was smashed, my ankle was smashed…”

Despite the accident, and possibly because of it, donations kept flowing in via his JustGiving page. “I can honestly say, if you want to get some sympathy, have an accident,” Wood jokes.

But it left him feeling a little uneasy, knowing that he wouldn’t be on the marathon start line. As the race came and went, Wood realised he still had unfinished business: to run the London Marathon again. “I called it the impossible dream,” he recalls.

First there was the not-inconsiderable matter of learning to walk again, which took until September 2018. ­Despite his surgeon’s concerns, Wood’s determination kicked in.

“There are videos of me in tears, pushing myself on the treadmill. I was ­pushing myself to the limit, the only thing that got me out of bed was training.”

Training wasn’t without its setbacks. In October 2018, Wood was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of his accident; “That knocked me for six.” He says the mental recovery has been just as tough, if not tougher, than the physical.

It was in March, just before last year’s marathon, that Wood finally admitted he couldn’t run the distance – but not doing the 2019 race was never an option. So he walked it instead, in a brace. It took seven-and-a-half hours, and all of his mental and physical strength.

“At the time I hadn’t thought of it as being that much of an achievement,” he admits. Today, as his recovery progresses frustratingly slowly – he still uses a crutch when needed, takes ­painkillers, and has more operations pending – he sees things in a more positive light. “It was amazing, I’d done it against all odds.”

Did it provide the closure he needed? Yes, he says: he’d proved everyone wrong. He has been offered a spot in this year’s race, but has turned it down. “It’s just too much. And my friends need a rest; all I do is keep tapping them for money,” he says.

Yet over the past three years, Wood’s efforts, and his friends’ wallets, have raised thousands for Wooden Spoon, a charity that couldn’t be closer to his heart, as a rugby player and fan.

“Since I’ve started supporting them I’ve seen what they do; the sensory rooms, the wheelchairs for wheelchair rugby clubs – the difference they make to the lives of the severely handicapped is huge.”

Clearly, he remains an extremely ­determined person. “I don’t know whether determined is the right word. Stupid, maybe, or pig-headed. I never get beaten.” And that means, one day, Wood hopes to be running again.

“Maybe a summer marathon, or even a triathlon,” he ponders. You wouldn’t bet against him.

To make a donation to the Telegraph’s Christmas Charity Appeal, visit telegraph.co.uk/charity or call 0151 284 1927 before Jan 31 2020