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 I updated my marathon photos on flickr with the official ones  Colm has uploaded his marathon photos  Rosie has uploaded her marathon photos Just waiting for James’ now! They all got such great pictures, I am thrilled! I think you can now appreciate looking at the pictures that I was having the time of my life on that run 
 Garmin data since Feb 2010 One more week to go. Getting excited, and apprehensive. As you can see, my training has been a bit patchy, I have not managed as many runs as I would have liked, but work has kept me busy and injury meant I wasn’t running at all in January and not much in February. However a recent burst has caught me up a bit and I am feeling as ready as I’ll ever be. Certainly the fittest I have ever been in my life. It feels good. In the last year my body fat has gone from 25% to 15%, I lost a stone in weight and my resting heart rate has dropped from 75 or so to 55. 55! I hurt my foot racing barefoot (I know, I know) in October last year but have since bounced back and fingers crossed, am ready for the big 26. So I am totally going to do this (see me doing the positive thinking thing already?). Look out for me on Marathon day, next Sunday the 25th April. I am runner number 40310 and I’ll be in a Hope for Children vest. I should be doing about a 9:45 minutes per mile pace, on average. If you see me – YELL Yes, you can still sponsor me!  In Lycra and NipGuards after running 21 miles in training. So this year I will be running the Virgin London Marathon. This is quite a challenge for me as I only started running regularly 10 months ago. It’s getting close to race day (25th April) and so I wanted to share with you my race number, so you can follow my progress online on the day: it’s 40310. I also wanted to share with you my sponsorship form! I’m running for Hope for Children. It’s never too late to sponsor me and any donation would be gratefully received If you will be there spectating and fancy keeping your eye out for me, I am aiming to run about a 4:30, so that’s about a 10 minute mile pace, and I start at 9:45am, so you should be able to figure out where I’ll be when, assuming my run goes to plan If you’ve been following the automated Garmin Connect posts on this site you’ll see my training regimen, which is a bit behind what I’d like, but the best I could manage in the little spare time I have. My longest training run so far has been 21 miles, and I’m very very proud of myself for managing that! 21 miles of constant running is a lot of progress for a guy who collapsed in a heap after run/walking 3 miles just 10 months ago I am about to start my taper towards race day now, but might manage one more long run this week if time permits. As always you can track my progress here by looking out for the Garmin Connect links which pop up from time to time… Last weekend myself and six friends/colleagues took part in the Maggies London Night Hike, a 20 miles sponsored night hike around the streets of London, to raise money for Maggies cancer centres. We started out at 9pm from City Hall, near Tower Bridge, and walked until about 7am, with various stops en route to drink coffee and visit London Open House weekend buildings, such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Channel 4 building and Horse Guards. We made it pretty much intact, although we picked up a few blisters between us (I was unscathed, thankfully). It was fairly tough with the distance and the fatigue (we’d all done a days work already that day so walking all night was tiring stuff). A couple of team members were certainly a little grouchy towards the end – but then we all have our ways of coping with sleep deprivation We raised in total just under £5000 for the charity, which is the most important thing, and something I’m very proud of. We also got to accomplish something, and see some cool sights, some of which I documented through the monumental struggle of lugging my SLR along the course of the route (!)
Our motley crew ready to get going.
Our little jaunt on the London Eye.
Some of the sights we saw on our journey.
Some of the rest stops we took on the way (love the last pic of Fash looking bleak – that was at mile 18 or so)
Arriving at the finish line! You can see the full flickr gallery of the hike, or even view the annotated route on everytrail below: |
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