Charity
The dad who answered nine hours with nine endurance challenges
His daughter Norah lived nine hours. In her name he ran, climbed and walked nine gruelling events, raised £87,000 for baby-loss charities, and started talking to other grieving dads.
Norah Coniam was born in 2018 and lived nine hours. That is the whole span of her life, and it is the number her father built everything else around.
Ross Coniam, from Watford, came out of that day into the part nobody photographs: the months afterwards, a father grieving a daughter almost nobody else had met, and a depression he has since talked about openly rather than quietly. What he did with it, in 2019, was set himself nine endurance challenges, one for each hour of Norah’s life, under the name #Nine4Norah.
They were not token efforts. The list included the London Marathon, the Isle of Wight 106km ultra challenge, the London to Brighton bike ride and the Three Peaks Challenge. The last of them was a 135-mile walk that finished at Norah’s grave, which is the sort of detail that tells you this was never really about fitness.
The nine raised more than £87,000, split across Sands, 4Louis, the Iolanthe Midwifery Trust and Keech Hospice Care — the organisations that sit with families on the worst day and the ones that fund the midwives who have to deliver that news. He was later given a Points of Light award for it.
The money is the measurable part. The part that is harder to count is what he did next, which was to start a Dads and Lads support network, because he had noticed how little room there is for a father to say out loud that he is not coping. Bereaved dads are routinely treated as the support act to their partner’s grief. Coniam has spent years arguing, mostly by example, that they are grieving too and that saying so is not a betrayal of anyone.
We celebrate Ross Coniam because he took nine hours of fatherhood and made them count for years, for families he will never meet.
Who is Ross Coniam?
Ross Coniam is one of the girl dads celebrated on girl.dad, based in Watford, England. The short version: He turned the worst year of his life into money, awareness and a place for other bereaved fathers to speak.
What kind of story is this?
girl.dad files it under Charity, published 7 September 2026.
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