The Edinburgh Half-Marathon!

Hi!  Kate here :)

As part of my fundraising efforts, I'm running the Edinburgh half-marathon later this month, on the 26th May.  Just 2 1/2  weeks to go..... gulp!

I've been a runner for a couple of years now, and I totally love it.   No matter how hard it may be to drag myself out of bed in the mornings and get out there in some very attractive skin tight attire, (particularly at 5.45am which is what I'm doing on Tuesdays at the moment!) it's difficult to beat the almost meditative headspace that running provides, as well as the fantastic post-run endorphin high.

However, apart from a few performances with the incredible NVA for Speed of Light, I have never run with other people, let alone in any sort of race (unless you count sports day back at school....but let's not go there!).  The Half-Marathon will be my first ever proper experience of this, so I'm super excited but really rather terrified at the same time.  I'm totally up for the challenge though! Apart from my major goals of a. actually finishing and b. not coming last (or getting swept up by the sweeper bus that travels behind the runners at race-time-limit speed), if everything goes to plan, if I could run the race in around 2 hours 20 minutes I would be well chuffed.

Here's a video of me enjoying a 10 mile training run a few days ago.  It was pretty windy!  I'm grinning because I'm about to eat a yummy strawberry and banana energy gel, and I know that around the next corner is an amazing 2-mile downhill stretch :D weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee~!

Life really is amazing. If someone had told me 3 years ago that I'd be about to run a 13.1 mile race along with thousands of other people, and would enjoy it too, (let alone that I would be doing it so I could go to Africa to work on an incredible project with an awesome charity) I would have wondered what planet they had recently arrived from.  And yet here I am!  Loving it :D

~*~

In other news, I want to give a massive shout out and thank you to more fantastic sponsors: there have been so many of you and Kasia and I are just so grateful and amazed! Neil, Caroline, Ian, Migs, Rich, Katie, Astrid, Thomas, Caro, Helen, Moira and Ivona you are ALL COMPLETELY ACE!!  Thank you so much!!!!

Kate xxxx