A Journey of a 1000 miles starts with a single step

My new obsession - Running

I initially started running just to get back to a reasonable level of fitness after my stay in hospital.

I had started some short jogging/runs to assist me in my recuperation, only around 3-4 miles to start of with. I do not think I could have done this unless I had been reasonably fit before the accident.
I started entering events, recording my times to get a measure of how I was progressing over time. There are 10 years of running and cycling event results on the event results page

I concentrated mainly on off road running as my coordination was not reliable enough to run on roads with the hazard of veering off in front of traffic.

I came to the conclusion that if I was going to be running then I may as well do something useful especially as I had been so fortunate with only having minor affects from what was a very serious accident. I decided to use my running as a means of raising funds for Headway – the brain injury association, as there were other people who suffered far worse affects from less serious accidents.

With this in mind I entered the Neolithic Marathon, an off road marathon from Avebury to Stonehenge in May 2004 and raised £1200 for Headway and £800 for the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust

Within a few weeks of completing this I was looking for a harder event to use for fund raising for 2005. Another off road event, the High Peak Marathon in March 2005 seemed suitably hard; 40 miles around the Derwent watershed in the Peak District in the winter, and in the dark as the event did not start until 11pm. This time as there were 4 of us in our team and we raised £3000 again for Headway

In 2006, I did something that should be have been easier, not in winter or the dark. I ran the Pembrokeshire Coast Path at the end of May. ‘Only’ 170 (or 186 depending on your source) miles which I did over 6 days.