Great North Run - Oh Dear

I've signed up for this year's Great North Run and as someone who DESPISES running, I thought i'd share  why i'm doing it and hoping to raise a bit of dollar for Cancer Research UK in the process - 

1. To get fit, healthy and all that. I absolutely detest running but I quite miss playing competitive sports and unfortunately, running is always a prerequisite for such activities so this'll hopefully help me get back to peak fitness! 

2. To raise money for Cancer Research. I'm sure most people know, or know of someone who has been affected by Cancer and it certainly has affected my life in a major way. I lost my Granda to Liver Cancer when I was just three, it's taken work collegues, friends, Aunties/Uncles, and in October of last year - my Dad passed away shortly after being diagnosed with Lung Cancer. To put it bluntly, no male member of my family has lived to see 70.

The main reason I want to raise money and awareness is that I was both shocked and horrified by the length of the actual diagnosis process, and even more so by the level of care my Dad received in the short period he was ill. I really don't think it was good enough for 2012 and I wouldn't want anyone else to experiance it, so hopefully raising a bit money will make that just a bit less likely. And improving the screening process can hopefully lead to catching the Cancer at a much less advanced stage.

No donation is too small and this shows just how far the money can go -

• £61 could buy 500 petri dishes. Sterile dishes are used to grow cultures of cells for experiments.
• £120 could buy around 40 thermometers (range -10°C to 110°C). These are indispensible for many experiments that need to be performed at very precise temperatures.
• £300 could buy a water bath, a heatable tank of water which scientists use on a daily basis. Some reactions need to happen at particular temperatures. The thermostat on a bath can help maintain this from room temperature anywhere up to 95°C.
• £550 could cover around a month’s running expenses for a clinical trial investigating a new way of giving hormone therapy to improve the treatment of prostate cancer.
• £900 could pay for around one week’s supply of the drug pravastatin for the LungStar clinical trial. This trial aims to discover whether adding pravastatin to chemotherapy is beneficial for people with small cell lung cancer.
• £2,600 could buy 10 sophisticated microarrays. These help scientists scrutinise thousands of genes in a single experiment. Microarrays are a powerful piece of gene technology which allow researchers to compare how active different genes are in cancer cells and healthy cells.  
• £4,000 could buy a -80°C freezer for long-term storage of biological samples

So if you'd like to donate, then just to click the link on the right or follow here! 

Training 

I started training at the turn of the year and downloaded the rather brilliant Nike Plus iPhone app to record all the runs I do. I really can't say enough good things about the app - it records pace, distance, time and utilises google maps to clearly show your run route, giving feedback at the end of each run. The website records all the data too, so you can clearly see your progress, and most importantly - contains set training plans raging from training for novices (me) to 10k and half marathon plans. I could barely run a minute on my first day but the program increments gradually to the point I'm running about 1-3 miles a day at the minute rather easily, something i'd never have managed a few weeks ago. The Rocky IV soundtrack is a massive fucking motivator too, feels like i'm living in a montage when that's on repeat.


That's about it really at the moment, i'll try to update this blog to keep track of my fundraising and training progress as the months go on.


 I also got my sponsorship pack today and my running vest really is a treat,  something i definitely can't pull off:

Song for the Day - John Cafferty and another classic montage