Hi

Thanks for visiting my page, I’m going to attempt to run the Manchester Marathon in support of the MND Association. It came as a bit of a bombshell last year when my good friend Paul told me that his wife Fee was suspected to have MND and was already losing strength and mobility in her legs. He decided he wanted to run the Manchester Marathon to raise money for MND Association, so I decided I would run too.

This is no small undertaking for me and it ain’t going to be easy! If you’d like to know more and you’ve time to kill, pour yourself a brew and read on. If not please feel free to jump straight to the donation section and many thanks 🙏

A bit about myself, I’ve never run a marathon before or even a half marathon. Back in 2018 I was running quite a lot but nothing further than a couple of 10ks. With the pressures of work and home life stacking up my running had fallen away a bit by the time the COVID era began in early 2020. COVID seemed to hit me hard, I was initially pretty ill with it but the lingering fatigue that came after it left exercising off the agenda for a long while.

By August 2023 I had started a bit of weight training and managed to injure my right knee shortly before Paul got in touch about the marathon idea in October 23, not an ideal start.

So I started pretty much straight away on the couch to 5k programme. For anyone not familiar this is a 9 week programme which takes you from not running at all to being able to do a 5K. Although my knee was sore throughout this period, it didn’t actually hurt whilst running and it didn’t seem to be getting any worse. I did this exclusively on a flat treadmill indoors and it wasn’t until I had finished that I tried my first outdoor run in what must have been about 4 years. It’s fair to say my choice of route was highly questionable, heading off into the Pentland Hills on a freezing cold January day, I quickly realised that my programme had not trained me for trail running up and down pretty extreme climbs. Also the Manchester marathon is unsurprisingly held on roads and is one of the flattest courses around so this type of training was thankfully unnecessary. Anyway I began sticking to slightly flatter routes, easier said than done around here and mainly running on roads, again easier said than done in my immediate surroundings. I have slowly tried to build up my mileage during one long run a week with two maintenance type runs a week to keep me ticking over as well. The long runs have generally been quite discouraging, as I’m much slower than I used to be and they have really hurt the more tired I have got. It’s not been plain sailing, I had to take a week and 1/2 off training for a nasty winter bug, I’ve fallen in a muddy puddle and badly bruised and cut myself and also had to take a week or so off because of pain in my right foot, reverting to some swimming and cycling sessions to keep myself ticking over. However strangely my right knee is much better now! The longest run I have managed so far is 16 miles I did this along the Union canal so almost perfectly flat, I was in all sorts of pain towards the end, but pushed through, somehow I need to add another 10 miles on top of this!

All this is to say this has not been straightforward and I’m sure the 2018 version of me would have found this much easier and would be sitting here a lot more confident that he would be able to complete this on the day. There is a 6 hour cut off time, which going by my training paces is going to be tough even if everything goes well. So anyway I do believe I can somehow get to the finish, keep your fingers crossed for me and if you can help me support the vital work of the MND Association I would be grateful and I know it means a lot to Paul and Fee.