Charity place secured for London Marathon 2014

So some more excitement – got myself a charity place in the London Marathon next year!  I’m sooo pleased and get a little happiness every time I think about it.  Get to run London for a 2nd time!!

The charity is Look UK, who are a small, national charity helping families and carers of children with visual impairments.  While I believe that virtually all charities do good work, I’m especially happy to support the smaller ones that haven’t got the big advertising budgets that the larger ones do.  In fact, I only found out about this place via a post on Runner’s World.

I LOVE London, and was thrilled to run it in 2013.  I wasn’t planning on running it again until I got another ballot place, but I thought I’d miss it so much next time I couldn’t resist.  I’ve got a target of £700 to raise (plus the £100 registration fee), which is a lot but far less than what most charities require which is closer to £2000.  So it’s doable, and with a bit of sweet talk with the marketing and events team at work, may even be able to get some support for a decent cake sale event for the students.

Go on the runnerworld.co.uk forums and there are plenty of people who don’t like London, or say it’s not worth it.  Even to say that you’ve got a place results in a deluge of comments such as “oh – last time I checked there were 100 other UK marathons to choose from nowadays!” or “it’s just a circus through Deptford”.  Plus a lot of complaints about how people think there are too many charity places and not enough for “real” runners (although figures released last year did actually show there were almost twice as many ballot places as charity places!).  Hmm well everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and many people don’t like the hype around London, but I do!!  Out of the 5 I’ve run, it’s by far the best – only Berlin comes close.  I love the electric atmosphere, the famous landmarks, the capital city, and the way the spectators come out in their millions to watch and celebrate a great day of British sport.  As I was running it last year, I was thinking about how I would certainly love to do it again next year.  At the time, I was saying to myself I’d do anything to run it again in 2014!!  (Although by mile 20 I was vowing NEVER to run a marathon again!).  Afterwards I thought I would certainly love to do it again, but probably only if I got another ballot place somewhere down the line.  But I changed my mind when I found a charity willing to accept a much lower target than usual, and signed up again!

So that means next spring I get to run five marathons!  I’m starting to freak out a bit, but as long as I stick with the idea of running 4 of them purely for fun and not chase any target times I’ll be happy.  There are 2 back-to-back weekend of marathons – Brighton then London at the beginning of April, and then Liverpool then Kent at the end of May.  Half way between the two is Milton Keynes!

The plan is to train to run back to back longer runs at a slower but steady pace, so I can get round each but then recover as much as possible in between each race.  Ideally I’d like to run Brighton at a reasonable pace, around 5.05 – 5.20 (my PB is 5.03) and then rest for the next week with a few walks in between.  Seeing as London is just one big street party I will just aim for anything between 6.00 – 6.30 as it will be a chance to simply enjoy the atmosphere.  There will be so many first time novice runners going for that sort of time so I won’t be at the back!!

Then 3 weeks until the MK Marathon.  I’ll be able to get a decent few runs in, maybe up to about 10k, and just check out how my legs are feeling and avoid injury.  I’ll aim for anything under 6 hours! 

Another 3 weeks til the Liverpool Marathon.  I really only signed up for this for the atmosphere as there are loads of bands along the way, so I’ll plan to run/walk this one and maybe have a bit of a dance at each band – one every mile!  I’ll see how it goes on the day but it will be another slow one, so around 6 – 6.30 will be fine.  Finally, just 6 days after that (not even a 7th day of rest!!) it will be the Kent Marathon.  There won’t be the bands or crowds to pause and dance to this time, so I will pretty much need to do this one at a steady pace all round (which is why I’ll need to take Liverpool slowly so I can have a bit of a chance to recover). 

Not sure if this is actually going to work, or whether my legs will fall off halfway across Tower Bridge!!!  The thing I’m looking forward to is just an opportunity to run a few marathons purely for fun and not worry about a time – but it’s a bit of a step up as I’ve done half’s for fun but not full’s!  No doubt I’ll start regretting this mid-May! 

So by the looks of things, Kent should now be my 10^th Marathon, well within the target of 10 before I’m 30 J