YouthNet blog
An insight into youth issues, volunteering trends, charity life and more from the UK charity YouthNet
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Tuesday Jan 09, 2007
First steps
Donna Shayler will be running the London Marathon in support of YouthNet this year - here's the first of her regular updates on how things are going:
Hi,
My name is Donna Shayler and I work at Vodafone Enterprise. The Vodafone UK Foundation is one of YouthNet’s partners – you can read more about the partnership in the case study section of this website. I’m very excited to be running the Flora London Marathon 2007 on behalf of YouthNet!
Well, new year, new resolutions eh. Everyone does them and everyone breaks them. So to stop falling into the same rut as I have for the last 3 years: ‘I am going to run a marathon, I am I am!’ and then I don’t, I decided to commit to a charity to stop myself backing out.
There are a lot of reasons that I want to run a marathon. I’ve done a few 10ks and kept feeling I could go further, I was signed up for the Great North Run but did my back in and was out of action for the whole summer. It always looks so amazing on the TV and I say every year I would love to do it and finally, and perhaps the main reason, my mum died last year and she always had faith in me doing one. So these 108 days of torture ahead of me are for you mum!
Running for YouthNet is also a very good reason. I am a great animal lover and also feel very strongly about Cancer Research, but not being glib, so do a lot of other people, and there are plenty of other races in aid of these good causes. YouthNet is a young charity, not so well known and it is charities like this that need the exposure of events like the London Marathon, perhaps even more than the charities that we all know. It is a good cause, does important work and I believe the money raised will make a big difference.
So although I run 2-3 miles every couple of days on the treadmill, suddenly setting off to the gym in a force 5 gale on Sunday morning felt very different. I had to double the distance almost immediately if I’ve got any chance of running 26.2 miles on 22 April. But I did it. Put my Rocky Soundtrack on my headphones and set off (only thing I ever run to – still inspires me to speed up after 5 years). And to be honest and not sounding too big headed, I found the 5.5 miles quite easy. And after walking 4 miles with my dogs and a two mile walk into my local town, I felt I started my training quite well. Of course it is early days, I have my plan, I have my clothes ready for all weathers, and I have spoken to my youngest German Shepherd, Solo about becoming my training partner. He seemed quite happy about this, especially with the ‘walk’ thrown into the conversation every few words, his head cocking side to side seemed to show he was all for it! Problem with a male dog is that they like to ensure they have pee’d on everything that they pass, so a lot of running on the spot may be in order. I’ll be there on BBC1 being the only person running on the spot every 2 minutes. However, hopefully we will see plenty of rabbits, so I’ll get some sprints thrown in as well.
Well first blog done, not much to tell but will update everyone next week after my first full week of training. Hope you enjoy reading this and please support anyway you can and wish me luck.
Posted by Jim Valentine ( 3:58 PM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Posted by Kuljeet Jagdev on January 11, 2007 at 05:11 PM GMT+00:00 #