A little run around the block
‘You are doing what?!’ My Mother exclaimed when I told her of my plans for my 50th birthday.
‘I’m going to run a marathon distance over 24 hours and raise some more funds for Place2Be’ I replied
‘Oh good God’ she said. ‘You are mad!’
With my original plan of dragging a tyre around the New Forest for 200kms curtailed by you know what, this seemed a good Covid friendly alternative.
A week before my birthday I had seen a fabulous short film made by Australian film maker called Beau Miles who ran a series of 1.1 mile loops from his home on the hour every hour for 24 hours making up a marathon distance. I desperately needed of a goal and a way to mark by 50th birthday on March 8th and thought ‘hmmmm, I wonder if I could do that’
I don’t for a minute class myself as a runner, rather a shuffler. I shuffled my way around 3 half marathons in my mid 30s and 12 years ago I trained for the London Marathon but injured myself a couple of weeks before and couldn’t take part. Since then, my shuffling has been very on and off and even more so in the last year. In recent weeks I have probably put my trainers on twice, having been concentrating on long walks with a weighted backpack so for me to consider such a challenge did confuse my Mother somewhat and I completely understood that.
And why, oh why would I want to tackle that kind of challenge on my birthday which is meant to be spent chilling, eating and drinking? Because I wanted to hit my 50s with a renewed adventurous vigour and to remind myself what a bit of bodily stress and a mental challenge feels like. For the last 12 years my body and brain have been stretched to the max whilst working on or taking part in expeditions all over the world, often putting in long and tiring days at altitude as well as knuckling down for many a 24 hour stretch of human powered travel and I truly miss that. For the last year I have been giving myself a good mental bashing for losing my mojo and today, whilst walking my dogs in the rain, it dawned on me that actually not having that expedition mental and physical stress or those goals has probably been good for me. This time has allowed me to destress (bar the obvious stress of the pandemic and all it entails), for the odd injury to heal and for my body to feel some sort of equilibrium.
A little bit of planning for my 24-hour challenge went on last week as it’s the planning for any project that helps you make a success of it. I took the advice of 2 friends and endurance experts Matt Buck from Running Adventures and Abbi Naylor, please click on their names to watch the chats we had about how to tackle my challenge. As much as I’m used to long expeditions, I’m not so used to shorter challenges or the running/shuffling bits and their advice was invaluable. Matt said don’t concentrate on the running bit but to sort my admin for when I’m not on the move. Food, hydration, motivation. Abbi advised me to look at the 24 hours as 24 mini adventures, to change a piece of clothing after each run and to regularly brush my teeth. Fabulous advice all round!
7am, Monday 8th March. I hadn’t slept well on the Sunday night but knew that I could do nothing about that other than look forward to the next 24 hours and to remember the advice that I often give clients, be on Team Tortoise. I stepped out of my front door with Lily my Spaniel and looked east along my first route to see a fabulous sunrise. What a great start!
As the morning continued and I was coming down from my adrenalin high of actually having a challenge to get my teeth stuck into, I looked at the list of jobs I had written to fill the time in between runs. Who the hell was I kidding! It's amazing how quickly 45 minutes can disappear and if I was going to get through 24 hours without keeling over, I had better concentrate on the job in hand. You head out of the door on the hour, it takes around 15 minutes to do a loop, you get home, take off your trainers and socks, have a snack or a drink or both, change a piece of clothing and or have a shower, do some stretching and then it’s time to get ready for heading out again.
After 6 runs I gave Lily a rest as Mum had come over to help with the dogs whilst I was coming and going. I took her out again at 4pm and she basically turned around to me and said ‘I’m done with this’ so after 7 miles, she had done her bit, bless her.
During the day a few fabulous friends came over to run with me which really helped to break up the day. I usually run on my own at my own pace so when one friend dragged me around at a faster pace mid-morning, I knew that I needed to dictate the pace and do what I needed to do at a pace I knew I could sustain. As lovely as it was to run a little faster, now was not the time to be hitting PBs on my 1.1-mile loops.
I had planned 8 different routes from my front door to mix things up a bit and as I live on a hill, knew that at the end of each route I would be slogging up said hill. It’s not a massive hill but it’s still a hill and although I ran up it a number of times, I was also happy to wander up if I had gone over my 1.1 mile distance. I wasn’t out to kill myself. The whole point of my challenge was to complete it relatively in one piece with a smile on my face rather than hobbling over the finish line in tears.
The daytime shift was the easy bit (it’s all relative). I had 100% lucked out with the weather and although it was at freezing point early morning, the temperature rose just enough during the day and when the sun came out I popped on a t-shirt or two. I’m not a warm weather fan so the lower temperatures definitely helped me to enjoy my challenge all the more and as the sun started to set and the temperature dropped once more, I was in my happy place again.
Whilst I continued with my challenge Mum was in my garden pruning my roses and the dogs were helping her to clear up. If anyone had told me that I was going to run a marathon on my birthday I’d have told them they were bonkers but here I was, gradually knocking off the distance, a mile and a bit at a time.
My great friend Kathryn joined me for my halfway loop at 6pm just as it was starting to get dark and when night fell I knew things were going to get a little tougher, especially after bed time. Caroline came over at 8pm and we did a speed walk for loop number 14 before she interviewed me outside my garden gate for her programme on Odstock Radio. I was then running solo until midnight and hit the £1000 mark which was super exciting and a real mental boost. I hadn’t really thought about how much would be raised but this totally blew my mind.
Mum and I were discussing how to deal with the dogs through the night in the hope that she may get some sleep. She offered to stay up and snooze on the sofa which I wasn’t keen on. Lily is a tad dependent on me and every time I left the house without her she would stick her face through the gap in the curtains worrying if I was going to come back. After my 10pm run I was making a cup of tea and the dogs decided they’d had enough of my in/out shenanigans and settled themselves into their beds in the kitchen so Mum and I took the opportunity to head to our rooms. Me with a small stash of food, a bottle of water and a flask of coffee to keep me going through the small hours to dawn and Mum very glad to be having a bed for the night rather than the sofa. It was only then that after living in my house for over 5 years I realised that my front door is very squeaky and with nothing else to sort it other than a bottle of Skin So Soft from my bathroom cabinet, I gave it a go and it worked perfectly. My main concern at that point wasn’t about getting through the night without falling asleep but whether Lily would hear me come and go and start barking. I think her 7 miles had whacked her out and she didn’t make a sound bar a little whine just before 3am when I clearly came down the stairs like a herd of elephants.
Mum had already commented on what amazing friends I have with all of the lovely cards I received, the comments on social media which she was following, those who came and joined me and the amount of money being donated but when a friend offers to do a midnight and 3am shift you know you are supremely lucky. Alex met me along my road for a power walk at midnight and we ended up doing over 2km. I mentioned that I’d like to see Salisbury Cathedral at night so when our 3am loop came around we walked through the deserted city streets along to the cathedral gates to find them locked so walked along to another set to find them locked too. Quite understandable but a little disappointing from my side, we then headed back to her house and I walked up the hill again to mine having completed a nice 3km. It was great putting extra metres in the bank to make sure I got over the marathon mark and fab to walk with a great friend quietly talking all things adventurous in the wee small hours.
The countdown was really on then with only 3 more loops to complete. I was starting to inch towards the witching hour, the hour before dawn when your body is telling you, screaming at you that you really ought to be asleep and when the temperature drops a few degrees before daylight starts to creep into our part of the world. I had seen this part of the night/day so many times up high on mountains and actually loved that feeling of life waking up again. The birds starting to sing their dawn chorus, which I was told by a friend was them actually trying to find a mate so basically they are shouting ‘SEX, SEX, WHO WANTS SEX!!’ and I could see the dawn light creeping up over the horizon and I knew I was near the finish.
After my 22nd run I had a text from Mum who was next door in my spare room asking if she could join me on my last loop. ‘Most certainly’ I replied.
Roll on 5.15am when I got in from my penultimate loop and time to wake the dogs up, have a much-needed cuppa, some food and look forward to a family loop for the last in my 24-hour challenge. Each hourly loop had most definitely been a mini adventure. I noticed something different with the passing of the hours from dawn through daylight into dusk, the cold of the night with bright shining stars and back to dawn. I was glad of the advice given by Matt to sort my food admin beforehand which I had to for the most part but if I were to do it again, I would make sure I had more snacks with me to get me through the wee small hours. With no access to my kitchen, I ought to have taken a few more upstairs and had been a tad wobbly through hunger and tiredness in the early hours but nothing that wasn’t worth pushing through. I knew my loops were short and I would only be out for around 15 minutes but it’s a good reminder of what it’s like in the early hours.
My last loop was amazing. Freezing cold and frosty with the moon on its way out and the sun starting to join us again, very little traffic about and with the birds in full voice Mum and I walked along the River Bourne for a short distance before hooking back home for the final time on my ‘Move a Mile with Me’ challenge.
The whole 24 hours went incredibly quickly and it’s amazing what you can pack into such a short amount of time. The support that I had had throughout the challenge was second to none. One aim of my challenge was to encourage friends and strangers to virtually move a mile with me too and to donate £1 for each of those miles. I had friends in New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Africa and America joining in and family in Holland putting in some miles too, including my 90+ year old Uncle in his home in the Hague doing a Captain Sir Tom Moore by walking some laps of his hallway. Go Philip! I had a peloton of support pushing me on which felt incredible and I can’t thank everyone enough.
I’ve just been asked if it went as well as I had hoped but in fact it went better than I had expected. Who’d have thought I would ever run 29.4 miles.
I now have plans to do a series of bi-monthly 24-hour challenges called ‘Move a Mile Monday’ and will keep you posted when I am further down the line with what / where / how and when.
And the Why? Well, why ever not!
If you fancy supporting my fundraising efforts and the UK’s leading children’s mental health charity Place2Be please head to my fundraising page - www.justgiving.com/fundraising/JosMighty90
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The stats:
Amount raised - £1,676 (for this challenge and counting)
Average donation per mile - £57.00
Miles covered - 29.40
Time on feet - 7 hrs 40 mins
Steps taken - 59,051
Hours slept - 0
Number of smiles throughout the 24 hours - countless
If you’ve enjoyed reading my blog, please do spend 3 minutes and 51 seconds watching the little video which I have put together to record the memories. Enjoy.