So for the last few days I have mainly been pinned down to my computer doing research for my trip around this great world. In essence I am trying to do as much of the ground work as possible so I can throw a few extra words at various articles based on contact with the places I am going and as a template for the videos I want to make as I go round the world.
Really quite exciting to get to the stage where you are essentially looking at when and where you are going to be where and doing what give or take a day or two!
I was also out yesterday watching the Snowdon Marathon, it was the first time I have been around the event since running it a few year ago. It wasn’t that I avoided it, just that I was working most of those weekends. This year a few of my friends entered, which for anyone would be tough, as the Snowdon Marathon is meant to be the hardest in the UK.
Yet these people I know who entered it for the first time were mothers to at least two children, held down a job and probably do most of the housework. In between juggling those major life commitments they still found time to get out running, and not just a few miles here and there, a full marathon training program. Where the last training runs are 22 miles or about 4 hours or more.
As well as these superhuman mums, three of which I know who have destroyed my Personal Best for the course, there were several male friends who have all beat my PB and set their own in the process. I am in awe and humbled by of you all.
As I watched I felt pangs of jealously and was almost as tearful as some of them as I remembered what it meant to me to achieve the ambition of a lifetime. As a marathon isn’t a fun run you enter on a whim, it turns into a relationship with yourself and your body. You bring to it a whole backstory and in running it you hold a mirror up to yourself and see the good, bad and ugly. What starts of as a ‘race’ or ‘challenge’ rapidly becomes much more of a ‘life experience’.
What my friends reminded me was that through the pain, training and dedication there is a journey that whilst only 26.2 miles in reality, is a much longer one for the soul.
Whilst I think I am going to be out of the country for next years event, I think I will try and find marathon I will be back for. All part of my celebration of life as reach 40. The training will be hard especially when I am away, but I figure that those long runs will be a great way to explore foreign lands and figure as part of a longer journey I am planning next year.