Almost 12 years ago, Jeremy Rabinovitch and his wife Amanda suffered a heartbreaking tragedy when their daughter, whom they named Lois Grace, was stillborn at Barnet General Hospital.

Over the years, the couple have kept Lois’s name and memory alive by raising thousands of pounds for Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal deaths charity.

And on Sunday week, Mr Rabinovitch, 46, is taking things to another level as he participates in the London Landmarks Half-Marathon.

When Lois was due to be born, the Elstree couple already had a four-year-old daughter, Charlotte, and were looking forward to their new arrival.

“Amanda had had a check-up earlier in the week and everything was fine,” Mr Rabinovitch recalled. “We went to the hospital on the Friday morning — she was having contractions — and she was taken to a room where they were going to hook her up to various machines for tests.

“I went home to collect all the stuff [for Amanda’s projected stay in hospital] and when I got back, my mother-in-law was there and she told me that they couldn’t find a heartbeat.”

For ten hours, Jeremy and Amanda waited on the maternity ward for her to give birth to what they then knew was a stillborn child.

“We could hear all the other women and the babies crying and we knew that we weren’t going to have that.”

That agony was compounded after Amanda gave birth as the couple were left alone overnight, still with the cries of other newborn babies ringing in their ears.

Every awful step of what followed — including having to register a birth and death at the same time — remains etched on Mr Rabinovitch’s mind.

Lois Grace was buried at Edgwarebury cemetery.

After the stone-setting, the couple decided to try to have another child and their now ten-year-old son Blake has completed their family.

Mrs Rabinovitch works as a teaching assistant at Hertsmere Jewish Primary School, where by chance “there was another family who had gone through exactly the same thing, about two years before”.

They told Jeremy and Amanda about the Sands charity and eventually the couple met more than half a dozen other sets of parents with identical experiences, offering support and help to the grieving family.

“We thought that the best way to honour our daughter was to help Sands,” Mr Rabinovitch said.

For the first few years, that meant holding lotteries and fundraising teas.

But with the help and encouragement of two friends who are raising money for Norwood and an Alzheimer’s charity, Mr Rabinovitch secured the last place on the London Landmarks Half-Marathon and has been fundraising through a Just Giving page.

He freely admits he’s not, and never has been, a runner — not even at school — and the training has been arduous.

“But I kept telling myself, ‘this is not for you, this is for your daughter’.”