Just a quick update on the past week (Week 7) for those of you interested.

After my birthday week off, normal service was resumed this week and unfortunately the gap was somewhat of a set back.  Sunday was a good run with Lisa who seems to be coming on a fair bit, but Tuesday brought with it a struggle on the treadmill and I was close to collapsing after only 1km.  That's what i get for taking time off to indulge in chocolate and the like.

With only 41 days to go now, we are almost in the home stretch.  This week will see me return to studying practically 24/7 for my exams in August, the ones I missed in January.  Since I'll have to get up early-ish to study I should have no problem sticking to a running schedule - I hope.

Finally I'd like to say a huge thanks to everyone who has already donated to the cause, your help is very much appreciated.  We still have a fair bit to go though so please dig as deep as you can!

Stay free,
Joe x

We've finally had word from all the charities with regards to the donation site.  Unfortunately Macmillan aren't registered with the one we were hoping to use so it looks like we'll be going with JustGiving.com after all. 

The bad news is that JustGiving doesn't allow you to split sponsorship between multiple charities so we've had to make three separate pages.  The good news is that they're all pulled together on our Donate page.  If you are going to contribute to our cause please use the page that needs most help reaching its target so we can try and keep things even.

In training news, I've had a cracking week off on account of my birthday and I should be ready to go full tilt next week!

Stay free,
Joe.

So sang Matt Bellamy, and he was right but maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, still three months to go.  But with the past two week's performances I'm getting worried that I won't be able to keep up a good level of training.  You might have noticed that I'm a run short for each of the past two weeks.  Last week's I've already explained but this week's is a combination of things.

Firstly I was at a party on Saturday that left me worse for wear (to say the least) on Sunday and so I was catching up on the weekend's sleep on Monday morning.  Miss one run.  Making up for this on Tuesday was good but I was disappointed with the outcome. [For details check out The Log which is now annotated]  I did however achieve my first Goal!

The plan was to then head out on Wednesday as per usual but I realised that knowing I'm getting up to run in the morning makes it harder to sleep.  So Wednesday at 07:00 I'd had barely any rest and stayed in bed determined to find some.  Miss two runs.  Same thing Thursday and again on Friday.  On Friday I tried to make up for this by hitting the treadmill which knackered me out more than ever.  Then Saturday provided my weekly run with Lisa which was fine.  I can only hope that I'm more focussed next week, although with a party tonight who knows what will happen?

On the charity side, both Accord and the Beatson have set up accounts with CharityGiving and we're only waiting on word from Macmillan which shouldn't be long now.  We're not expecting any problems but if any should arise we'll sort something out.

Over in The Tunes we've got a new feature: Top Track.  We'll be giving some space to the tune that has given us the best push this week, so head over now and see what done it for Week 4.

Stay free,
Joe.