Monthly Archives: November 2010

A little niggle

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A little bit of car cleaning at the weekend has led to a rather inconvenient niggle in my left leg. I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure I’ve pulled something. It has happened at completely the wrong time (is there a right time?) with my debut attempt at a half marathon just around the corner.

Bugger!

I’ve not done any training for 5 days and I’ve only got one 10 miler under my belt. I’ve had various bits of advice on what to do about this. My mum, for example, has suggested purchasing some magnesium oil. Honestly, I don’t know where she comes up with these things. Surprisingly, I’ve not stumbled across any of this stuff in the shops, so there’s that solution out the window. A chemist today advised me to apply heat to the affected muscle and to keep it moving. This sounds more plausible and I’ll gladly give it a try because it’s bloody freezing in our house at the moment anyway. An Iron Man has also suggested I don’t attempt any long runs whilst nursing this minor injury, and just to get in a few shorter ones in my final week before the race. That sounds sensible too, and coming from an actual Iron Man, I’d be silly to ignore it.

I think I’ll be okay by 28 November. I’d better be, because I had another sponsor today and I don’t want to let anyone down! Whilst I’m on that subject again…please do sponsor me if you’d like to!

Fingers crossed!!

Doing it for the kids

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Did I mention I was running a half marathon? Sorry, I am aware of how much I keep going on about it. It’ll all be forgotten in a few weeks!

This is quite important though, because in doing this whole running thing, it’s given me a good opportunity to raise money for Nelson’s Journey, a Norfolk-based charity which supports children and young people under the age of 18, living in Norfolk, who have experienced the death of a significant person in their life such as a parent or sibling.

I hate death. It sucks. I know it will happen to us all eventually, but that doesn’t seem to make it any easier. Our family dog, Tyler, died in February this year. It was one of the saddest moments of my life.

I’m not sure how young kids cope with death at all, let alone the death of their parents or brothers or sisters. That’s why Nelson’s Journey is an important and worthy charity, and that’s why I’m running this half marathon for them.

If you’d like to sponsor me, please click on the JustGiving badge below, which will take you to my JustGiving page for this event.

Thank you :o)

A half-arsed attempt at running a marathon

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I’m not entirely sure how this actually turned into a reality, but in just over three weeks time I will be running my first ever half marathon. That’s 21.097494 kilometres in new money and 13.109375 miles in old. As an indication of how little I know about running marathons and half marathons, it is only as I write this post that I have even noticed that a marathon distance is not exactly 26 miles! Hmmm!

Anyway, I provide the distances in their kilometre and mile units of measurement because on the whole, since I’ve got into this running malarky, I’ve been tracking my progress in kilometres. You see, although 10 kilometres is less than 10 miles in actual distance terms, saying that I’ve run 10km sounds more impressive than saying I’ve run 6.21371192 miles. It’s a psychological thing I suppose.

The exact run I’ll be doing is the City of Norwich Half Marathon. As I said, it’s only just over three weeks away. I can’t decide if that’s a long time or not, but I think I’ll be ready.

I didn’t decide to run the half marathon and then start running. Oh no! I just happened to start running with my housemate because…well…because he was trying to get fit and just kind of asked me to come along for a run! It was 5km, which was about 2km further than I’d ever run before. A nice loop around some nearby roads in Norwich. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it, and in a way I didn’t, but I continued to run. One week later I did the same route again. Two days after that I ran it a third time. One day later I ran it a fourth. It wasn’t the actual running I enjoyed; to get through it I had to force myself to think about something else, anything really, even if it meant thinking about a run I’d done before or one I might do next. I just had to take my mind of the actual thing I was doing at that moment. What I did enjoy was feeling that I’d achieved something.

Keeping this up wasn’t going to last. The amount of things I’ve started which have continued beyond a couple of weeks is laughable. However, one day at work I received a work newsletter email which mentioned a couple of guys had entered the race. I checked it out on the Internet, but I wasn’t really considering running it. Then, shortly afterwards, I bumped into one of the guys who’s name was mentioned in the email. We started talking about it and before I knew it, I’d verbally committed to running for Team HP!

I was excited and nervous. I checked the date of the run and it happened to be an already busy weekend in my calendar. But, I didn’t want to let them down and I knew that if I didn’t sign up to this, I’d probably stop all together. So, I did it. I signed up and even bought the t-shirt!

Since then, I’ve continued running fairly regularly, increasing my distances and improving on my times. As I write this, my total distance to date is 105km, taking a total of 8 hours and 44 minutes. Good or bad, I’m personally quite proud of this and am determined to keep it up to complete the run, however long it takes me!