12 Marathons – 12 Months

Hmm – what to do, what to do

Well, it’s almost a year since I finished 12 in 12 and I’m seriously considering giving it another go. I’ve set myself a new goal now of running qualifying times for the World Marathon Majors (and thus guaranteeing entry) which I would like to do in a single year but there’s a lot of work to do before then. My experience on 12 in 12 showed my that marathon running is not a superhuman activity and with the proper training and discipline you can regularly run these distances – I was meeting marathon runners who were competing weekly!!

So, the bottom line is that I will be doing this again – probably not in 2012 but maybe in 2013. However, I am looking at opening this up as a challenge to everyone and making 12m12m.com a community site where anyone who wants to do a 12-in-12 can use this site as a portal, which I could have up and running by the start of 2012 if there is interest so comments are welcome on this.

In the meantime I will start blogging here again and hopefully this will develop into something that others will want to do.

Last Post

Well all good things must come to an end as they say. This is my last blog post on 12m12m but I will keep the site open for now so that anyone who is attempting something similar and wants to look back on how I fared on my own challenge can do so. It’s been a great year and I have no intention of stopping, though I’m now working on fewer, faster marathons and seeing how much I can improve on my times.

If anyone is interested in the 12m12m.com domain then I’m open to offers – my largest donor wasn’t interested in taking it on (see an earlier post) so I’m holding onto it for the time being.

If you want to keep in touch with what I’m up to then you’ll find me on DailyMile.com which is more than adequate for blogging my running nowadays, other than that I just want to say thanks for reading and a big thank you to all my donors who helped me to raise just over £2700 for charity.

Watford Half Marathon

A nice start to the racing calendar for this year, the Asics Watford Half Marathon. Quite a challenging half actually, fairly flat for around 4 miles then you hit a deep dip followed by a hard climb. After that you have a steady gradient to the 7 mile point which can be hard going. The last 5 miles however are relatively easy going with a nice flat straight to the finish. Very pleasant route along country lanes and tracks, sometimes through woodland – hard to believe you are so close to Watford most of the time. As a result, traffic on the majority of the route is minimal and there are plenty of spectator spots so you are never short of a few shouts of encouragement. A very well organised event overall with all credit to the Watford Harriers for their efforts in putting on such a popular race.

Overseas Award

As you may remember I ran one of my marathons in Newfoundland along the Baccalieu Trail in the summer. Since my chosen charities didn’t really cover Newfoundland in any way I agreed to do the run on behalf of the Lion Max Simms Memorial Camp Foundation, a project run by the Lions Club there that runs a camp for children with special needs and disabilities. My run raised over $800 for the foundation while I was there and I only just found out today that I was nominated by the Lions club last year for their Fellowship Award which was granted to me this week.

I’m really touched to receive this and only wish I could have been there to receive it in person but I am looking forward to going back there in the future. I might even be coerced into running the Baccalieu Trail again… but maybe I’ll try and find a flatter section of it next time around because without doubt that was one of the hardest routes I’ve ever done!

Front Page News

I was delighted to see that I made the front page of my local news magazine this month – makes me want to do it all again!!

Have a look here: http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1qq1d/MyNewsBusheyJan11/

Over £2,600 and rising

Donations have continued to come in since I finished marathon number 12 pushing the total to over £2,600 across my four charities with the most so far going to the Peace Hospice so a big thank you to everyone on their behalf for your generosity.  My donation pages stay open until the end of February so there’s still time to make a contribution if you feel so inclined

As a final push I will be running the Watford Half Marathon on Feb 6th for the Peace Hospice before officially closing this site down but I’m already looking at more races this year including a couple of marathons I did last year. My big challenge for 2011 so far is going to be the Paras 10, a 10 mile off-road endurance run with a 35lb full pack so that will be interesting!

So, thank you again and please do spread the word – if I can crack the £3,000 mark before the end I will be elated!

Hard start to the year

I’m definitely paying for the couple of weeks off running I had over Christmas. I’ve been suffering from stiff legs the day after running and today’s long run had me dragging legs that felt like lumps of lead for a few miles. Thankfully I loosened up after 5 or 6 miles but my left foot suddenly went quite numb for a few miles before suddenly coming back for no reason. It’s nothing I’ve not had before but the stiffness and getting a numb foot on training runs have not been a feature for well over a year (though often a consequence of full marathons). I’m hoping that things will get back to normal now though, the first week back out on the road was always going to be tough.

I’ve put a few stakes in the ground already for this year, my running calendar starts with the Watford Half Marathon in Feb and then the marathons begin with Stratford again. However, as I said before, this site will be closing down soon as I’m not doing the whole 12 in 12 thing again. I’m planning keep a blog running at http://jeffcarteruk.com for the time being (which is currently just an alias to this site) but to be honest there are so many other services for blogging your training (Dailymile, FetchEveryone etc) that keeping an additional site running seems like a lot of additional effort – but we’ll see how it goes (and whether anyone is reading what I write of course).

Anyone ready to pick up the baton?

Well I know I wasn’t the first to run 12 marathons in 12 months and I certainly won’t be the last but I probably grabbed the easiest domain name to remember when promoting it. I’ve got no intention of doing this again so I don’t really have a need for this domain any more so I’m giving it away in the New Year.

However, I thought this would be an opportunity to make one final push for my charities so the deal is as follows – whoever has made the single biggest donation to any of my 4 charities by midnight GMT on the 31st of January 2011 will get ownership of 12m12m.com

The bar has already been set – the biggest donation I’ve had was £300 so you’ll need to top that if you are interested.

I’m still going to be maintaining a running blog though at http://jeffcarteruk.com (currently aliased to this site) so make a note if you want to keep following my activities after I hand over.

To all who have supported me so far, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The End…

Well that’s it, my last marathon completed today and a total of 1,016 miles covered since I decided to take this on. As you will have seen on my previous post, the intended last race was supposed to be the Luton Marathon last weekend but that was unfortunately cancelled by the organisers at the last minute leaving me high & dry. I did look around for alternatives but they were either full or difficult to fit in due to location etc so in the end I decided that the best option would be to organise my own local route and do it on my own. So, after plotting an 8.85 mile loop of the local roads I set off around 10:30 this morning and after 3 laps I rolled in just under four and a half hours later.

My house doubled up nicely as both lap counter and water station with my wife running out each time with a banana and an isotonic drink to keep me going. The last lap though was very, very hard. I was starting to feel the cold and my legs were seriously cramping up, forcing me into a jog-walk for much of the last lap but I occasionally found a little burst of energy from somewhere and thankfully the last 3/4 mile was roughly downhill. As I approached home I was very touched to see the family and the neighbours outside holding a finishing tape (photos to follow) which is officially the only one I’ve managed to break but that’s not hard in a race of one… Anyways, I’m off for a nice warm bath now and look forward to a nice meal this evening. This is by no means the last entry for the blog as I’ll be letting you know what I’m planning for next year so please keep popping back when you have a moment. I’ll also update you on the fund-raising totals as well as I’m keeping the donation lines open for a couple of months since some of you pledged a donation when I’d finished them all.

All it remains for me to do now is to thank all of you that have supported me for the last 12 months as I battled my way through this and to thank my wife and family for putting up with all the endless evenings and weekends of training and sweaty running kit all over the house – I promise to get on with all those DIY jobs that have been mounting up now…

Cheers
Jeff

So close and then … disaster

Just found out this morning that my final race of the series, the Luton Marathon, has been cancelled due to the conditions making it too dangerous to run. This is a real blow having got this far but I can understand their reasons for doing it and there’s not a great deal anyone can do about it.

Having said that however, I’m still going to complete what I set out to do so in the coming days as the weather improves I will be looking at doing my own self-supported 26.2 mile run as I have done for two of my marathons this year. It’s not what I wanted but I’ve pledged to do 12 and I owe that to everyone who has donated so far.

I’ll be posting an update as soon as I’ve got something sorted so please keep checking back.