They were discussing the bombs in Boston and asking listeners what effect this had on their thoughts and plans for this weekends London Marathon.
The link is here, skip to the 2:18 mark and hear what I had to say. I just wanted to get the message across that us that we are all together and will help each other when the time calls for it.
I got this book for Christmas from my brother. It came at the perfect time, the next 3 weeks will be interesting to say the least as I get back on the road to weight loss.
I’ll keep this one short and sweet because if anyone really wanted to list all the highlights of the year then I would be typing away for hours. My main moment last year was training for the London Marathon. I followed my training plan to a T, ate right and worked extremely hard. It all paid off on race day. After that I was stuck in a post Marathon slump that I’m still trying to get out of.
2012 was a year of huge ups and huge downs for me but nobody can take away what it felt like to run that race last year. Nobody.
Below I’ve put some other important moments for me too.
And I survived the year, can’t forget that it was supposed to end last year!
You’ll understand the title at the end, it was just a regular 2 day weekend. You know? A weekend…but I did get up to 3 different activities from Saturday to Monday and it felt like a fitness treat!
I kicked off Saturday with an unexpected 11 mile run with Toby, Steve and more crew. We met at 1948 and were testing out a possible new RDC route to the lovely heights of Primrose Hill. We were expecting the run to roughly be 7 miles. Now i’m not blaming anyone but lets say that for one reason or another, we had ran 6 miles by the time we got to the top of the mount!
Read more or click the crew!
Image credited to DaddyDark
Last week I talked about my long awaited return to Run Dem Crew in the Baby Cheetah group, fast forward a week with more running, smiles and Body Check’s galore I decided to see if I could step it up to Cheetahs again.
Before I stepped out of 1948 after counting our 145 strong crew I’ll admit that I was nervous. All of other groups were still around, baby cheetahs, greyhounds and more. I still had time to back out. I was afraid. Afraid of letting the group down, not being able to keep up and not having my oyster card to get back to HQ if I really couldn’t go on. I didn’t want to do that at all.
The other groups slowly started to disperse in search of Big Ben and suddenly I was left with the Cheetah group only. No pressure, then. Whenever we start a run I try and make myself smile, open with a joke like ‘oh why have I done this’ and so on. It eases my mind at least. We set off down Bateman’s row and I immediately felt the faster pace. Tonight was a sub 8 minute night.
I had to keep my mouth shut and get on with it. When I was lighter and fitter I used to be able to fly through at the front of the pack but now I accepted that those days lay in the future for me and I have to accept that right now, it will be hard to run. I couldn’t summon the vocal energy to shout ‘BOLLARD’ or dish out directions either, there were others that could take care of that tonight, I just had to run with my crew and not let them down.
The route was all kinds of crazy, we were supposed to get to Big Ben via Farringdon, lets just say that we went on our own journey to Covent Garden instead and headed back before it got too late! After the first few miles at roughly 07:40 pace I was feeling it. Savouring each traffic light and stop that the crew was haulted by. Welcome rests for my body to recuperate, I really regretted forgetting my Lucozade in the car! Charlie asked me if I wanted us to split up and I said no, I thought that the gap between the front and back wasn’t too big yet so we were good.
We stuck together and I kept on chugging along with the hope of being finished soon. The run taught me a lot. It reminded me why I run. It challenged me and showed me yet again that if you don’t put the work in you will never receive the plethora of benefits available to you. It’s the same for life. You have to put hard work in now for what you want, otherwise you will never reach it. So I kept on pushing on because I know that one day (…in May…around the time of the Copenhagen Marathon… shhh!) I want to really be working towards being the best I can be. Best physical shape, mental shape, everything. If I want to be anywhere near that sort of level I need to use the experiences I have had in running so far, runs like Tuesday just gone to get me to where I need to be.
Before I knew it we were well on our way back to 1948 and on Batemans row yet again, sprinting to the finish line. Thank you Cheetahs for getting me through that run and Charlie for the constant words of encouragement along the way.
image credited to Run Dem Crew
I haven’t been to RDC for a month. I am a RDC Younger and have gone every Tuesday since last year June but because of holidays and other things I haven’t been able to see my running family. It’s a very odd feeling that’s never happened before and if you look at my nike+ history you’ll see that I run mostly on a Tuesday evening.
I was back and I was ready. I wasn’t scared or worried about my speed like before I just said, “I am going to go to Run Dem Crew and enjoy myself then see what happens”.
I went into Baby Cheetahs because Cheetahs has been way too hard for me lately. I just wanted my runners high and I did get that in Baby Cheetahs. I’m not ready for Cheetahs yet. I’m 14 stone, extremely far from my peak but I feel like I can run again which is important.
I like running again. I am happy again. There were about 140 in the house on Tuesday, it’s really nice to have new people down. Once the season locks off there will be 140 people seeing each other for 3 whole months and that is a great thing.
We put our hands up for baby cheetahs and I managed to miss who was leading our group. We were heading to the Emirates stadium, after the weekends results and me opening my mouth on twitter I guess that was the only place to go. I hate running to the Emirates for 2 reasons.
2 very good reasons to not want to go there. We set off together and once I checked the pace that we had to go I just set out to try and help out with the group, make sure people were ok, especially at the back. Once we got to the mini wembley half-way point everyone was warm and really ready to go. We stuck together and really ran as a pack, footfall together. We were like a school of fish on the concrete. We were in the zone.
The guys at the front seemed so comfortable, I told them to go into Cheetahs next week. When you hit your stride it’s weird, you can talk and run hard but relax at the same time, all in one motion. I talked to them about the races that I have done this year and it was very interesting to talk to people who are new to Run Dem. People who aren’t quite sure about everything (yet) it’s great to build those early relationships and who knows, I may be working with them sooner or later.
After RDC I moved straight on to my crew RDCY Hackney which you can read about here.
