Hi and thanks for visiting my page! This year is going to be a year of gruelling training, events and fundraising for me - here's a bit more info about how it's all going to pan out.

The Lake District is my favourite place in the world, so when I saw that there was an event called "Lakes in a Day" - http://www.lakesinaday.co.uk/ I decided it would be a brilliant thing to do. Of course, the slight snag is that it involves running 50 miles across the North-South length of the Lake District, over anything that happens to be in the way. Blencathra and Helvellyn, amongst several other peaks, represent the addition of a much higher level of challenge than if it were flat! Oh, the other thing is that I haven't run further than 12km on a treadmill or a road in the last 2 years.

I'll be doing this with Tom, one of my best mates and an ideal person to do it with, seeing as he actually likes running and has completed a couple of marathons in the last few years. It's fair to say that for both of us it will be a really tough challenge. We want to run it, not walk it, so a large amount of training is going to be necessary. So, we've made a training plan that starts in January and builds to the October ultra. We will be running the Calderdale Way Marathon (28.5-mile version) on June 2nd, will complete the Yorkshire 3 Peaks (Date TBC) and our training will see us reach a significant milestone; 2018 k each in 2018. 

We have chosen Yorkshire Cancer Research as our charity. First off, almost everyone knows or is related to someone who has suffered from or died of cancer. And we've chosen Yorkshire Cancer Research rather than Cancer Research UK as we both live, work and train in Yorkshire, and often smaller charitable organisations are overlooked and struggle as a result of larger names. 

I'll be writing a weekly blog about our training and experiences. Partly because some of the training will be brilliant and/or horrendous - we'll be in the Lakes once a month and will be running through, over and around some of the country's most beautiful scenery on a regular basis - and partly because it will be an absolutely life-changing year in terms of health, challenge and both physical and emotional ups and downs that I don't want to forget.

So, if you feel that our stated ambitions are ridiculous enough, we welcome your contributions!