Hello there,

In case I haven't already told you, I've made the seemingly ludicrous decision to run the Berlin Marathon this year.

Yes really.

It all started on dark and rainy February night. A good friend of mine (known as Ruth/Hooper/Hoops/Natalie) was due to be running the London Marathon for the quite excellent charity Sparks. Halfway through her training, she somehow managed to tear a hole in a calf muscle therefore ruling herself out of the Marathon. This was especially upsetting as she had been enjoying the training, would've ticked off one of the things on her "things to do before I'm 30" list and wouldn't be able to do the run for Sparks, a charity who she had worked closely with and loves their work. Now dealing with upset/crying girls is not one of my strong points so I rashly declared that she could choose another marathon and I would run it with her. This would be excellent for two reasons: firstly, and most obviously, it would mean that we could hopefully raise more money for Sparks and; secondly, it would be bloody hilarious watching me trying to get fit enough to run 26.2 miles. Which is really far.

All was good. We even managed to rope in young Maxwell to run too. However it started to go a bit wrong, Max missed out on entry to the run and then Ruth's leg got worse meaning that she cannot run. The net result of this is I'm going to be running the thing on me own.

Therefore I am now, selfishly and shamelessly, wondering if you (or whoever) fancy donating a couple/few quid in sponsorship for Sparks. If not then hello and thanks, if so, I bloody love you and thanks. For those that don't know Sparks is a charity which helps make sure all babies are born healthy and stay healthy. More about them and the brilliant stuff they do is here: https://www.sparks.org.uk/

Oh, and I also started a blog about it to keep track of how it's going which, if you're exceedingly bored, you may want to have a peek at: http://immediatelyregretthisdecision.blogspot.com/

Cheers

Jonathan

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