An inspiration…

Just before the 2008 I set up this blog to follow my training and push people towards my sponsorship pages. Back then I thought some people may find it enjoyable to follow my ups (and many downs) and learn a bit from it (I was also hopeful that people would get over the poor spelling, punctuation and grammar!) Over a year later I’m running the marathon again and still blogging – and hey here’s a new link to my sponsorship page of 2010…

Anyway for many months I suspect the readership of the blog was minimal, a few cursory glances but that’s about it, however in September 09 I published a blog post about my weight loss and general health. From being the kid in school who would use almost any excuse to get out of running I was now doing it of my free will and enjoying it! Just last week I was talking to a school mate and his brother (who is still at Forest – my old Secondary School) whilst out on my 4M warm up jog and said I bet if you told the teachers who you went out for a run with this morning they wouldn’t believe it – that’s if they remembered me! Anyway, I spammed that post over face book and Twitter and it actually got read a few times and it appears there is at least one person who read it and took notice of it.

A school mate is about to embark on a 50k trek and as is typical for every sponsored event I got the obligatory ‘Facebook Sponsor Me’ email. I had a squint as to what it was as it didn’t look like the typical race for life one plus it had a silly name! Anyway the challenge looked cool so I emailed saying I’d send money and he replied that day saying I had been a bit of an inspiration to him – he had read some of my blogs, gone out and bought a nike+ and was now running and had roped in more and more. How cool is that!

I don’t think he is alone in picking up running because of me, I’m pretty certain a number of my uni friends took seeing me run that 26 miles and realised that running is possible for anyone, I ran a 10k last summer with mates who I never expected and know there are others running 10ks this year too. I think people see what I was and think well if he can do it so can I.

I love the fact others are running and that maybe I have been an inspiration for them, I would love to reach out to others too and help get them the confidence to put a pair of trainers on and go for a run of any distance!

Keep running and this time next year it maybe you training for the marathon!

N

ps please feel free to comment on this post – would be great to know who has read this all the way to the end