Red Cross Blogs

Gearing up for the London Marathon

By Kerrie McEvoy
March 9, 2010 at 5:45 pm

Back in February 2009 I decided to take some positive action in my life.

I was tired of the rut that I had fallen into and I had become heavily dependent on vegging out on my sofa. Then one day, for no apparent reason, I put on my running shoes and huffed and puffed my way around the block. Normally at this stage I would have given up after my first outing but something spurred me to keep on running.

One night, after playing a particularly energetic gig in a local London club, I got chatting to a friend at the after party and we started talking about our mutual, new found love of running. She told me that she was training for the London Marathon and that I should join her. Filled with the post-gig adrenalin I said ‘yes, where do I sign up’ – possibly a little bit too enthusiastic and hadn’t really thought it through properly but that was it, I had made a firm decision to take on the challenge of my life.

Undertaking a marathon is a huge challenge; aside from the 26.2 miles that you must cover on the day there are the months of dedicated training, sweat, tears, strains, spares and dreaded shin splints. But I have decided to do all of this in order to raise money for the British Red Cross. I wanted to run for BRC because their work is vital and far reaching, they provide humanitarian relief, education and promote peace amongst the people that they help.

I applied for a place on the British Red Cross marathon team because I wanted to use this opportunity to achieve my lifelong ambition to help raise some much needed money for the people affected by the disasters Haiti, Chile and Darfur. Knowing that every penny I raise will help alleviate some human suffering makes the pain of pounding the pavements everyday worthwhile.

My fundraising so far has involved approaching my friends, colleagues and extended family, who have all been very generous, but now I feel I need to step it up a gear. I am organising a fundraising gig which will take place in Kingston-upon-Thames on 13^th March. I have asked six of the finest DIY rock bands in London to come and play my show and all of them have kindly donated their time and musical talents. It’s going to be loud, sweaty, noisy affair and it promises to be a whole lot of fun – all of the money I raise will go towards my fundraising target. As well as the music, my friends have very kindly offered to run a cake stall, the will selling some fine sweet treats whilst dressed in their prettiest 1940s style tea dresses. We’re going to rock for the relief efforts.

My training has been going really well, I’m up to 15 miles on my long runs at the weekend and I’ve been forcing myself to do as much dreaded interval training as possible. Last week my schedule was interrupted as I was touring Europe with my band, but despite being on the road for over a week I managed to get in a couple of runs. Normally when on tour you drive to a gig, sound check, play the gig, get back in the van and drive to the next gig, you rarely get an opportunity to see the beautiful cities that you play in, so this time it was nice to take some time out to go for a run and see some of the sites.

I will update you in a couple of weeks with my running progress – I’m hoping to do 17 miles this weekend and my all of my fundraising efforts. I should have some pictures of the gig to post online by that stage too. Right, I better get back to the training and promoting this gig!

You can sponsor Kerrie on her JustGiving page.

Got your own place at the London Marathon? Sign up to run for the British Red Cross now.

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Tags: london marathon

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Fundraising and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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