Thanks for taking the time to visit Leigh's JustGiving page for the Royal Parks Half Marathon. I managed (somewhat to the surprise of a number of sponsors !) to complete the course on Sunday (Oct 11th). My time was 1 hr and 55 mins, which to the unitiated is not far off the time Paula Radcliffe takes to complete a FULL marathon. Clearly room for improvement ! The best time for the day was under 1 hr and 10mins ! Despite being beaten by a squirrel, runner bean (geddit ?) and multiple super-heroes, it was a great experience. Congratulations should also go to the other members of the CFA SHINE team, all of whom completed the course (most substantially quicker than me !) and have raised in total over £7000 for SHINE.

Thank you immensely to everyone who sponsored and/or gave support on the day. If anyone still wishes to contribute, the tills are still open for business and you can simply still do so from this webpage.  

For those that dont know, SHINE is a charity helping disadvantaged kids in inner-city schools in London and Manchester. My own involvement with them is working at a Saturday school at St Aloysius in Islington, but they do fantastic work at a host of schools. As some of you may know I have been working on a number of educational projects since redundancy earlier in the year and hope to work even more actively in the years to come !

History

The idea of the half marathon was one of those (crazy) brainwaves when a professional analyst body CFA UK mentioned they had some slots for the race and that SHINE was their charity for the year. Thanks (blame ?) are due to Will Goodhart for the idea. Having last run in cross-country over 3 decades ago (peaking with a 248th placer finish in the Northern Schools championship of 1977), I naturally felt extremely confident at the prospect. Katriina was less so, suggesting I should buy some extra life assurance.....

Six weeks on, I have survived thus far, learnt about pronation (not being an anglophile but describing my flat footedness), worked out how to convert km to miles, know every hill in North London and that a half refers not to a beer measure but to running distance. I now look forward to the run on Sunday October 11th. For anyone wanting to come along there are full details on the Royal Parks Half Marathon (www.royalparkshalf.com) with great activities for children and adults alike.   

Thankyou again for your support. Some details on donating through Justgiving are below.  

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate - I raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

So please dig deep and donate now.