Virgin London Marathon

Virgin London Marathon


Let the fun begin…

About a year and half ago I started to do some jogging again, having not run for about ten years, to improve my general fitness. I wrote a guest post for the Project PeopleRun if you want to know a bit more about that journey, you can read that here. For those who are regular readers of my blog or have seen my twitter stream you will know that I built up to running the EDF Birmingham Half Marathon in October 2010, as a personal challenge/motivation and to put a long standing ‘ghost’ to bed. Now on to the next challenge…

Virgin London Marathon

Back in May this year (2010) a small group of people I have ‘met’ on Twitter (some I have also had the pleasure of meeting in person) decided we would all apply for places in the 2011 Virgin London Marathon; amongst them were Paul Weston (@paulweston33) and Hannah Coleman (@dreamwalls). The ballot was to take place in early October, we all waited with anticipation to see if we have been successful (the ballot ratio as I understand it is about 1 in 6 are successful). As it turned out, I was the successful one in our group of 5 or 6. When the letter arrived telling me of the success, I was immediately filled with excitement… and then the ‘size’ of the task ahead started to kick in. That’s a normal enough response and I know with the correct training and the support of my family, friends and you I am going to be successful.

Running for Bliss

As soon as I secured my place on the London Marathon, I started to think about who I should run ‘for’ in terms of a charity. There are som many great causes out there. Having lost three relatives to Cancer this year, that perhaps would have been the first choice. However, within a couple days of the ballot I was contacted by Bliss the charity that provides support for premature babies; their strapline “For babies who are born too soon, too small, too sick”. This struck a chord with me, as my own daughter had been born prematurely and it seemed fitting that I could ‘repay’ in some small way for the wonderful care she got in our local Special Care Baby Unit and the support we got until she was big enough to come home. We were very lucky, apart from being too small to come home straight away my daughter was healthy. While she was in we met with many other parents who were less lucky, whose children were poorly and needed even more care. Once again the support and professionalism I saw was great.

Training

I will be kicking off an 18 week training programme this week (w/b 13th December 2010) and will keep you regularly posted on my progress. As with the half marathon training, I will also post training updates on Posterous. This is a commitment and like it says at the bottom of this page… honour your commitments!

I hope you will come along with me on the journey and provide support and encouragement to help me “Honour every commitment. Keep every promise. Achieve every goal.” 😉