life's no disaster....

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about exercise for the MS Society that they said would be used as part of a blogging section to be launched with their new website.  There were grand plans about having a few regular writers who would engage with the audience below the line and generally enrich the content of the Society's website.  They asked for writers via Twitter, and when I pitched with the idea that I'd write about exercising with MS, they seemed really keen.  I submitted my first post and then waited.

The website was somewhat delayed, and by the time they launched it, I never saw my post up amongst their other bloggers.  Oh well.  I didn't really think anything more about it, although I did stop visiting the site.

As I was roaming around the internet this evening, I found that they actually did publish it.... in August 2011.  They put it in a somewhat different place to where I was looking, but they did publish it.  As I'm more than a year late, it seems a bit of a waste of time to start engaging with people below the line, but they did at least put it up!  It's a bit of a shame that they didn't email me with a link with where it was so that I could get involved and perhaps write some more for them, but never mind, eh?

If you're interested, you can read it here.

Somewhat coincidentally, after weeks of pretending that I wasn't going to be running the Robin Hood half marathon this year - in spite of the fact that I've now done about 75% of the training - I finally gave in to the inevitable and entered the race.

Once my entry was in, it seemed ridiculous and wasteful to run the race and not at least attempt to raise a bit of money for a good cause.  My two previous runs in this race have - with the help of LB and my wife - raised well over £7,000 for the MS Society... a figure that still seems incredible to me and is testament to the generosity of people like you.  I've left it a little late this year (the race is on 30th September), so I'm not expecting to raise anything like that much money, but anything is better than nothing and the first £500 of anything I raise will be matched by my employer, so it's worth making a bit of effort, I think.

I'm changing charities.  The MS Society is what I like to call my self-interest charity.... whatever I squeeze out of people is going somewhere that is clearly relevant to me.  This year, I'm going to run for Macmillan, the charity that provides support and information to cancer sufferers and their families.   I think that almost everyone I know has had their life touched by cancer in some way.  My own father is a cancer survivor, my grandfather died of prostate cancer and several of my friends have been affected... some with happier endings than others.  It's also the chosen charity of my employers, so I'm hoping that I might get a bit of easy publicity and raise a little more cash than I might have done otherwise.  Well, it's worth a go.

If you feel so inclined, you can find my JustGiving page here:

http://www.justgiving.com/brokenrunner/

As I say in that MS Society article, MS is a handy excuse for not doing stuff, and I’m determined not to use it... or any of the other manifold ailments that seem to have come along with it. If the Paralympics taught me anything at all, they taught me that you can choose to be defined by what you can do rather than by what you can't.

At least I'm not pretending I won't be running any more.

I should mention too that my wife is running both the Robin Hood AND the London Parks marathon the week after.  Even I'm not that daft.  She has a fundraising site too and you can find that here.