"...in each month? Are you sure?"

When you wake up one day, and the first thought that comes into your head is "I know...I'll do a 5k, a 10k and a Half Marathon race every month next year!" and you believe it to be the idea of a normal person...you know that you have the bug. I ran my first ever mile (as an adult, I did XC when I was 11 at school) on April 1st 2010 and it took about 11 minutes and I have been jogging/running/taking part ever since. This year, I decided that the only way to fight my reversing metabolism would be to run it into submission. And, as I am turning 36 in December, I thought doing 36 races in my 36th year of being alive had a nice ring to it. The 36x36 Challenge was born, although technically I will not have completed all 36 races by my 36th birthday, I will have done by the end of December. If you hold it far away, on an angle and squint a bit it makes sense!!!
It's now mid-January and I am one race down. The excellent and ever-popular Princes Parkrun on Saturday 5th January. A crisp and even morning, we gathered in the park and discussed if we were going to smash it or take it easy and fit it into a training plan. As I had let my psychological 'chimp' operate my soul through the whole of December as usual, my goal was more marathon-like than sprint as I just wanted to 'get round'. I wore my club vest just in case I pulled a sub-16 out the bag but I did have to put a T-Shirt on underneath it. Not because of the cold but because there was a little too much 'December Side Boob' on display through the arm hole of the vest. Come June I will try and pass them off as pecs...but there is just no hiding them this soon after Chrimbo!!
I plodded a respectable but unimpressive 23:19 out and stamped it with a 'Room for Improvement'.

So blogging eh? Not something I've tried before and I don't know if I should be writing for me to read or if I should write it with the notion that somebody else might actually read it!! I'll just tap away on this keyboard once a month or so and see what happens!!

Looking forward to January's Half Marathon, which is The Four Villages in Helsby on Sunday 20th and the following Sunday is The Chernobyl 10k in Preston. I do hope the weather holds off a bit because if either of these get cancelled...it was the worst attempt at something like this ever!!!