Awareness goes national:-) A recap for any new readers and a new 10k pb - not a bad day:-D

The GUCH Walking Club - as far as I know the worlds only walking club inspired by, created by, run by, walked by people with congenital heart defects... And now in the pages of Country Walking 'Britain's best-selling walking magazine'.

What started as 6 people up Mam Tor has mutated and grown into a mailing list of almost 40, with people regularly travelling hundreds of miles to go for a walk... We've raised the best part of £10,000 for GUCH PA, some have had more blisters than others and I apologise to all and everyone of them that I've bored with a talk about gear...

http://www.guchwalkingclub.org.uk/ has the details of our walks; the wet ones, the long ones; the awareness raising ones and so on... Please feel free to get in touch!



I also apologise for the cheesiness of the photo, but it felt right at the time!



I hope that some of you are new readers of the blog, so a bit of a recap... I'm a walker who runs a bit and climbs a bit. As you can see in the photo I'm not a natural athletic build and fight a constant battle against my love of pies! The heart condition I was born with is complex, and known as tetralogy of fallot - the full gory details can be read here

http://walkingforheartkids.blogspot.com/2010/01/missing-post-my-congenital-heart-defect.html

I'm also type II diabetic, which can make the running fun as I try and balance the glucose levels... Too much and I get told off by my diabetic nurse, too low and I'm a grumpy bugger!

The challenge i set myself was to run or walk 1000km in a year, doing as many events as I could and raising as much cash for the Children's Heart Federation as possible. Why the CHF? Well as well as being a trustee of the CHF, I also do a fair few presentations to groups of parents and teenagers with heart conditions - what strikes me is how often parents, and their kids and teens are told that we as a group can't exercise - CHF is working with people to correct that image, but needs your help (that means cash!) to do so!

As you'll see from the ticker above I'm on the brink of completing 900km with 125 days to go - so to keep it interesting I'm upping the challenge to 1500km... To get this far I've walked in Yorkshire, the Peak District, the Lake District, Snowdonia and run the Great North Run, Liverpool's 10k and Santa Dash... in the next 3 months I'll be running in the LIverpool Half Marathon, doing the Shine Walking Marathon and the ultimate challenge for many runners a full marathon - the Edinburgh on 23rd May..

So that's the recap - and to round the day off, a knocked 2 min off my 10k PB... Not a bad day at all:-)

TTFN

Paul

Comments

  1. Penny Green2 March 2010 at 11:54

    Hey Paul, are you busy on March 21st?

    If not you could come knock off another 10km on a nice steady walk with about 50 of us as we walk the old Severn Bridge from Wales to england and back to celebrate World Down Syndrome Day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PaulWillgoss2 March 2010 at 21:42

    Penny,

    you've picked the wrong day - I'm already double booked... A short "fun" run with a bunch from work and then my marathon training long run!

    You still up for the GNR?

    Paul

    ReplyDelete

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