The Virtual Manchester Marathon - a personal challenge

This year's Manchester Marathon was cancelled and the organisers made a great decision.

That was to open the doors to a virtual marathon, with the proviso that the 20,000 permitted entrants had the complete month of October to complete the distance and qualify for the finisher's medal and t-shirt (these things are important to runners).

They made the event accessible to even complete beginners, including my son Alex, who has never done distance running before and is chunking his way through 5k at a time, along with a Sobertober, to detox and get a little fitter.

I'm not marathon fit at this time, even though I'm a steady 10 km runner or 30 km Wattbiker, but have decided to at least stretch myself so that I'll feel as if the medal will be deserved - relative effort and all that jazz.

So I've committed to completing the full marathon distance in just one day - that's this coming Saturday 24th.

Before I go any further - this isn't a fundraising post - I'm not supporting any cause.

I just feel like setting the challenge as a means to lighten up the monotony of groundhog days.

I've spoken a lot recently about the importance of SNEF:

Sleep

Nutrition

Exercise

Fun

Maybe I should add to that list a C for Challenge, in that, whether it's personal or professional, we need challenges to add some spice to our lives.

Both our home and work lives in the Covid landscape have become very repetitive and it's good for the mind, body and spirit to mix things up a bit.

So keep an eye out for me this weekend - I'll be posting each run to Strava and my Facebook profile as it's completed and an encouraging "like" or comment wouldn't go amiss. I'm also hoping to socially distance a shared run with Alex Barrow at some stage.

I'm in not bad shape but it will still be a long way.