Greetings to all six of my readers, or however many of you are out there.
I am updating my marathon blog again, which can surely mean only one thing. That's right, I have lost all sense of sanity and am running the London Marathon again in 2013. If I make it to the start line, and hopefully to the finish as well, this would be three consecutive marathons. A hat trick, if you will.
In 2011 I ran for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf and in 2012 I ran for Action on Hearing Loss. For 2013, I will be focusing on disability of a different nature. My charity of choice is Whizz-Kidz. They help disabled children by way of providing them with wheelchairs and other mobility or specialist equipment and support to allow them to have the best quality of life possible. Did you know that there are around 70,000 children in the UK that could benefit from the right mobility equipment but don't currently have access to it? In this day and age, that's just not acceptable. So hopefully by running these 26 miles again, I can raise more awareness of the cause, and plenty of money with it.
I will admit that my first choice of charity was in fact Breast Cancer Care as my mother is currently undergoing treatment for cancer and at the moment it's a cause that understandably means a lot to me. Unfortunately the charity had so many applicants for so few spaces that I was unable to represent them this time. Let me be clear though, this does not make Whizz-Kidz a second choice charity by any means - I am just as passionate about assisting this equally deserving cause and I encourage all those reading to help me in supporting them.
I may have completed the marathon twice before, but I am under no illusions as to how challenging it will be to run it yet again.
As I write this, I have a bag of frozen peas resting on my right foot. During my most recent run at the weekend, I picked up a pain in my foot, close to my big toe. As I was several miles from home, I had to continue running with the slight pain. The pain was much more pronounced after I had returned home and taken my shoe off. It was as if the shoes masked the pain somehow, which bodes well for the marathon, because if I were to hurt my foot halfway through, there's a good chance that I might be able to ride through the pain and finish the marathon, depending on how much I hurt myself. However, my main concern is recovering from this niggling foot injury and I don't know how long that will take. It could be a few days or it could be a few weeks. Rather now than in March or April though, but it is rather frustrating all the same.
Why am I running the marathon again, then? I raised lots of money in the last two, and in the previous race I ran like the proverbial clappers and finished with an amazingly quick (for me) time -- what more could I possibly want? It's not about beating my previous finishing time. To be absolutely frank (hold on, I thought I was Martin, not Frank) I'm unlikely to finish in a faster time than my 3hrs 38mins 58secs. I want to keep on raising money and awareness for deserving causes. I just know that if I don't run the marathon this year, I will miss the thrill of taking part, the atmosphere of the crowd and the event in general. Running for me is like an addiction and I've caught the running bug. If I had my way, I would keep on running the marathon until it's a physical impossibility for me to do so. I suppose there are worse things out there that one can be addicted to than running.
