the beginning

It started as a sort of joke I sent Jason an email suggesting we should enter Gloucester marathon, Jason called my bluff, and so it began...

I've known Jason for quite a long time. We went to school together. Though this is a slightly misleading statement.

I don't ever recall actually seeing or speaking to him at school. I do remember reading about him in the school newsletter as the unfortunate exchange student that had his appendix removed in a German Hospital, but that's as close as it got.

5 years later when placed in the same AS Level Maths class I finally met this elusive figure, a friendship developed based mainly on playing copious amounts of shithead (a card game) and eating spaghetti hoops on toast (often at the same time).

This is the third part in a trilogy of challenging and or stupid things.

First was hitchhiking to Fort William, climb Ben Nevis and hitch back. This seemed like such a fun, adventurous and most importantly cheap way to spend a week in the Easter holidays, and it sort of was.

We made it to Fort William, Climbed Ben Nevis in the snow. In fact nothing went wrong until we got back down to Carlisle. Where we got in a car which had little in the way of brakes being driven at 90mph by a hysterical woman with beard and boot which contained around 15 subway sandwiches. The adventure came to an abrupt end soon after and we got the train home.

2009's sequel was a bike trip from Bournemouth to Barcelona. Almost entirely fuelled by cous-cous, brie and pain aux raisins we covered 2719 km with little other than getting lost in a cow farm in northern Spain for a whole morning, and it taking 2 weeks to shake off an unwanted travelling companion this went rather smoothly.

Both of these seem incredibly straightforward and dare I say easy compared with the idea of running for 26.2 miles in one go...