Rosedawn Ramblings

On Sunday 15th October, I'll be taking part in the first Birmingham International Marathon. With my two previous big city road marathons ( Manchester and London ), I followed a detailed training plan, incorporated speeds sessions, gradually built up my long run distances and went to the race start as prepared as I could be. In Manchester, everything on race day (except the course measurement) went according to plan. In London, the pre-race pressure I put on myself for a specific finish time got the better of me and the wheels came off at half distance; the rest of the day after the high point of Tower Bridge is just a painful blur. I'd had the same idea in mind for preparing for this race too. I signed up last year with a discount code earned by running in the Birmingham Half, probably the furthest in advance I've ever entered a race. I'd planned 12 weeks of structured training following my Race to the King adventure. I wanted to see if I could get close to my mara...

I t's been a while and I'm not sure why. I've been running a lot until this last week, got a new job, visited lots of new and interesting places and had lots going on. I've just got out of the habit of writing and I feel a bit sad about it... it's like I lost my voice (which is a pretty desperate state of affairs for a chatterbox like me). Two things have shaken me from my silence... Last week, I went along to a reception hosted my Peter Hooper from Cox Bank Publishing, the man behind the Sporting Stories initiative. It was a gathering of authors - it was great fun and I particularly enjoyed chatting with paralympian swimmer Jenny Booth and finding out what motivates her to get up at 4.30am for training sessions at the pool. But I felt a bit of a fraud... my blog has been without an update for so long, did I still count as a writer? Photo Credit: Cox Bank Publishing And then at the weekend, I received this message via Twitter: And that got me thinkin...

For the last week, we've been on a small group tour with  Aussie Wanderer on Western Australia's Coral Coast. T his trip was one of the first things we booked when planning our Big Trip, inspired by Neil Oliver on Coast Australia to travel north from Perth up to Exmouth and back, a distance of over 1,200kms each way (excluding all the side trips). We travelled over 500 miles in one day alone and covered over 2,000 miles in total.  We've survived shared bathrooms and travelling with a group, though there were only 6 of us on the tour so that wasn't too bad.  It's been tiring (lots of very early starts and a few late nights too) but worth every moment - we've seen, experienced and learnt about so much more than we'd expected (even if we didn't get to see dugongs and turtles) and laughed a lot too. There hasn't been much time for reading though... I'm slowly working my way through Make My Wish Come True by Fiona Harper on iBooks. Our driver...

Previously on 24... earlier in the year, I was given the opportunity to join Team Write this Run at the London Enduro - a 12 hour team challenge on Wimbledon Common. It was a great experience, a different kind of running and lots of inspiration from my team mates. We decided that one event and 12 hours just weren't enough, so we secured ourselves a place at the 24hr Spitfire Scramble at Hornchurch Country Park  and started preparing to run again. There was one change to the team with Christina joining Lenka , Josie , Hannah and I for team Write This Run part 2. Much of the last few months has been spent preparing for this 24 hour challenge. My goal was to run at least 4 laps of the 5.8 mile course, possibly more. Training went well until the final two weeks where I barely ran a step... my hope as I travelled down to Hornchurch on Friday afternoon via taxi, train, bus and tube was that the enforced rest would help! I was the first of my team mates to arrive and found us a go...

Over the last few weeks, I've been building up to the challenge of running 10k laps as part of a team for the London Enduro organised by running / blogging passionistas at Write This Run . I've practised off-road, hilly and multiple runs and as I wrote in my last blog post , I was as ready as I was ever going to be to take on this new challenge. But what should I expect from my first experience of an endurance event? A three hour journey to Wimbledon Common on Saturday afternoon gave me lots of opportunity to ponder the question. There were a few negatives buzzing around in my end... The usual pre-race nerves were being intensified by all the unknowns - the location, terrain, night time running and of course my team mates were all new. But there was lots of excitement too... I was a grown up big kid setting off on a new adventure! But would I actually be able to do this? I arrived at the start area for the London Enduro just as the afternoon 10k and half maratho...