Wednesday 29 December 2010

And they're off!

...except they're not, because I'm not starting until January 2011. However, I thought I'd at least make a start by getting this blog set up and putting a post on it. And here it is! Or at least here it will be as and when I've finished writing it.

Anyway, if you've reached here you probably already vaguely know who I am, so I'll skip that bit and move on to what I'm doing. As the post in the sidebar says, in 2011 I'm going to attempt to run 1000 km in just under a year in aid of an as-yet to be confirmed charity, under the auspices of the upcoming 10th anniversary of Join Me, a fun little group dedicated to making the world a marginally nicer place I've been involved with since it kicked off almost a decade ago. While I can't tell you what the specific good cause will be yet, I can say that in the past we've raised thousands of pounds each year for a whole load of local, national and international charities - money has gone on things as diverse as buying books for a homeless person to building a school in an African village. A large amount of money is raised each year at the biggest Join MeET of the year, Karmageddon. And 2011 will see the 10th Karmageddon meet, or K10 for short.

This gave me the idea of doing a "K10 10K", but to be honest that's not really a massive challenge. Admittedly it's not a walk in the park either (well, unless you walked 10 km round a park, in which case it would quite literally be a walk in the park), but I do enjoy the odd jog so I wanted to do something that would push things (and me) a bit more. So 1000 km (or 10 x 10 x 10 km) it is. As Karmageddon usually happens at the start of December, that gives me approximately 11 months to get to my target of 990 km in the bag, with the final 10 km to be run on the day of K10 itself. And until then I'll be grinding out somewhere between 10-15 miles per week every week (25-ish km) come rain, shine, snow, wind and blisters. Though preferably with as few of the latter as possible.

In the coming months I'll be adding a justgiving.com page once we've established what charity or charities Join Me will be supporting this year, and at that point I would be immensely grateful if you might see fit to sponsor me. All I'm asking for is for 100 people to sponsor me £1 per 100 km I complete - so £10 over the whole year. If I can hit my target, that will be £1000 raised. If I can exceed that target, that'd be even better. You can't donate yet, but if you'd be willing to pledge that you will, please do add a comment or drop me an email and I will add you to my list of people to pester mercilessly down the line.

To prove I'm really doing this and not just sitting in my pants eating cake (though I reserve the right to do that as well), I'll be posting recordings of all my runs to Facebook via the Nike+ website and my Nike Sportband, and if I can figure out how to post my progress directly from the Nike+ site to here, I'll do that too. I'll also be uploading pictures of the routes I run and the terrible choices of music that I listen to while running, so you too will have the chance to get as sick of the same views and tunes as I do. :)

My first run will be sometime in the week of Jan 3rd-7th, lungs permitting (I'm just getting over a bout of flu, so perfect timing). So until then, thanks for reading!