For those that don’t know me I’m the Account Manager for the Ministry of Defence in the UK and on the 26th of September I’m running 100 miles from the West cost of England to the East coast in under 24 hours to raise money for a children’s charity called Small Change.
How did I get myself into this? We had just had our second child, my 35th birthday was approaching and I felt I needed to do something extreme to push myself and I guess to prove I wasn’t over the hill! My wife was in the process of setting up a charity called Small Change, which works with small-scale grass roots projects around the World helping children. They are all run by amazing individuals, often solely dedicating their own time and money. Clifford runs one of the projects that we support, feeding up to 80 children living on Nairobi’s streets every night, often the only meal they get each day. The charity provides a fundraising stream for them to enable them to continue doing what they do and give some support whilst also ensuring for our donors that their money gets right to those being helped. So with such a worthy cause I had little excuse and focused my mind on what challenge I could do to help raise money and awareness.
Google Earth image of the run route and stops
After a few weeks of planning we decided to run coast to coast across England following the route of Hadrian’s Wall. From the West Coast at Bowness-on-Solway near Carlisle to the East Coast finishing in Southshields near Newcastle, 100 miles taking in 1,500m of ascent. Being 6’2” and 16 stone I’m not the ideal shape to undertake an Ultra Marathon so I needed to get training and that started in earnest in April of this year. I hadn’t done any serious training for over 2 years since my daughter was born and it was painful to say the least, I drew a route on a map which was 10 miles off road and decided to just get out and run it, 1h30min later I finished and felt awful… how am I ever going to be able to run 10 times this distance….. I signed myself up for a series of Triathlons and have been steadily improving my times and starting to enjoy them. Over the last 2 months I have been running a halfmarathon 2 times a week off road and starting to believe this will be possible, and then GSX in Vegas happened, which took the edge off my training to say the least!
Topography of the run
The charity was finally set up last month an enormous effort for Katy who is a full time mum looking after our 3 year old and 6 month old and this weekend 26th & 27th September I’ll be finding out if I am indeed over the hill or not. Over the last few days I have been finalising all the details of the route and its brought home just how far this is going to be. It’s the equivalent of 3.8 marathons back to back climbing over 1 mile in vertical ascent and were trying to achieve this in under 24 hours of running! I just wanted to finish this with a huge thank you to everyone who has supported this endeavour and donated to our charity page it really will make a difference to so many children’s lives.
The donation site can be found at: https://www.goldengiving.com/fundraising/SmallChange
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SmallChangeChat
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SmallChangeChat
Training in Wales, I’m on the left Andrew Dobson (Solutions Architect for public sector) on the right.
Training run in Santa Monica before GSX
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