Hard as Nails

A jolly good mate of mine ran the Great North Run a couple of years ago, it's a half marathon held in October, up north. I was watching this years race on the big tellies while I was on the rowing machine and thought that a half marathon in October would be absolutely ideal to get a measure of my metal before the DW race that will be held 6 months later.

I have been emailing him for the last week or so on the hows and the wherefores on entering into marathon running. It isn’t easy and seems that you either get gifted one of the few free places, or run for a charity place, and you have to raise money for the given charity (usually £300 - £800 or so). Now I don’t mind raising money for charity, far from it but I do wonder if my friends, family and colleagues will get a bit charity fatigued with a couple of fundraising efforts so close together.

Anyway, both Nigel and I are pre-registered with the Great North event through this site www.greatrun.org and then when they are allocating places for this race at some point next year, we will get emailed and I’m hoping they will give further instructions from there.

During the course of these emails with my marathon running friend, I said something along the lines of That Great North Jog thing will be a nice little training run for the real endurance stuff next year, or words to that effect. I didn’t mean it to sound as flippant as it may have come across but I received a grim reply warning me not to underestimate the exertion required for a marathon, and that this kayak thing is a mere trifle.

I actually suspect that this probably wasn’t how it was meant to come across, but it doesn’t matter, I got a spluttery and indignant and replied telling him that this race was tougher than the hardest of nails.

And then a bit later in the day I read this article from the Telegraph.

“It is a race so punishing and physically tough that entrants can experience sleep-deprived hallucinations, exhaustion and hypothermia, not to mention the aches, pains, cramps and sores that come from sitting in a confined wet space for more than 24 hours.”

The article was almost enough to make me change my mind about this whole thing… Only almost though. I’m going to link it for future reference when I plan on having a day off from the gym.