My first blog post – what is this all about?

Good morning/afternoon/evening reader (delete as appropriate), and welcome to my first ever blog post. Before I start, let me apologise for a few things. First – as someone from a town in the North East of Scotland, I may say some things you don’t understand. If I do, feel free to ask fit am I spikkin aboot. Second, I have the bad habit of waffling when writing anything. That and the fact I am not in any way an able author will make this difficult for me. However, it was something I wanted to do anyway – for reasons I’ll possibly get into at some point.

Let me start off with a little story for you. Back in December 2014, a group of colleagues and I were having a beer after work, as we often do. That’s when I found out that three of them were going to be running in the 2015 New York marathon, having qualified via the New York Road Runner 9+1 program. In the past, the very distant past, I used to be able to run long distance to a standard I was happy with. By very distant past I mean back at Peterhead Academy when I was a fit and healthy 14 year old. Having had a drink or two too many,  I then blurted out “That’s cool, when you are doing training races next year I’ll help you out and enter”.

Who can guess where this is going to lead? Well, fast forward a little to around April 2015. Running again became a conversation piece, this time at lunchtime. I asked when their next race was and they answered it was the Marathon. One of my colleagues reminded me that I was going to help them in their races. Oops. Obviously, I wasn’t going to run the marathon in 2015, but I knew then that I was not going to get away with my drunken slip.

Again fast forward to the Marathon, and after they finished I was asked when I was running that year. I felt guilty, and signed up for a 5k race in early December because of the guilt. That race, along with witnessing the camaraderie of my colleagues in the run up to marathon had me hooked again. Running a marathon is always something I have wanted to do so I signed up to run nine races, volunteer for one and gain entry to the 2017 NY marathon.

So there you have it. It is January 2017 and I am now qualified to run in the marathon, and I think I have to confirm my entry in a couple of weeks. I am guessing that this is going to be a one off event for me, and therefore I thought that it would be interesting to write a blog about my journey. In this blog I will discuss how easy (or obviously difficult) the process was and tell some interesting stories about past races. Feel free to share your own stories, suggestions and comments as you see fit.

So that’s it – here’s to what will be a busy, exhausting year, and the hope that I’ve learned a lesson to not blurt out my ideas when drunk.