Tag: janathon

In which I challenge Janathoners to give blood in January

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A couple of days ago on Twitter, Running Dan declared his intention to be brave and start donating blood. Twitter being Twitter, lots of people turned round and said “it’s not that scary, go on, you know want to”, and so Dan rang the nice blood people and signed up to donate in January. Yay!

And then Sue said, “Have you got any friends that you can take along?”. So Dan (being one of those inspirational type people – have a look at his blog for his amazing fundraising efforts) is now rallying friends, family and strangers on Twitter to join him donating. Yay!

And then I said, “I wonder how many Janathon (or Jantastic) people we could persuade to part with a pint?”, Sue declared this to be great challenge and JogBlog said yes we could hijack Janathon to encourage people to do a tiny but amazing thing by giving blood. Yay!

Why is giving blood important? Well, the bare fact is that hospitals need 8000 units of blood a day and while the Blood Service takes 2.1 million donations from about 1.6 million donors, that’s only 4% of the population, giving two or three times a year. Blood stocks are particularly low over the festive season (particularly for blood types O- and B-) and the Blood Service is predicting that 2012 will see an even higher demand for blood than normal. If you have a look at @GiveBloodNHS on Twitter or the amazing stories on the Blood Service website, you’ll get a much better idea of why people donate and why it’s so important.

I’m lucky enough not to have a story for why I donate – I donate because I can. I’m fit and healthy, it doesn’t take long, it really doesn’t hurt and I can (and do) eat three custard creams guilt-free after I donate.

Dan will be donating on January 2nd. I will be donating on January 31st. It would be amazing if other Janathoners (there’s going to be at least 150 more of you out there) could donate (or if you can’t donate, encourage someone you know to donate) sometime between Dan and me.

It’s dead easy – visit www.blood.co.uk or ring the nice blood people on 0300 123 23 23 to find your local session and book an appointment. If you’re not sure if you can give blood, give them a ring.

When you’ve got your date, leave a comment below so we know who’s given up an armful and I’ll even see if we can rustle up a prize as even more of a bonus than just the warm glow of doing something good.

In which I refuse to accept that it’s nearly Janathon time again.

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Today I was alarmed to see that Cathy had opened the scary door marked Janathon already.

Am I joining in this year? Of course I am. I’m too scared of Cathy to say no. No, it’s not just that; in a perverse way I do enjoy the Athons. I like the single-minded, focused determination that I apply to them (especially when it’s sadly lacking for the other ten months of the year), the feeling that if I can do this then I can do this I can do anything, but probably most of all, I adore the warm fuzzy camaraderie on the blogs and twitter (where the fine line of encouragement and nagging is trod daily).

Of course, I have a decision to mull over – how do I tackle Janathon this year? This will be my fourth Athon (see to your right >>> for the accounts of those) and three of them have been 100% running (and blogging) successes. At the moment my heart is saying, “go on, run every day – you know you can do it, you’ve done it before…”. In the opposite corner is my head saying “yes, you know you can do it, you have nothing to prove and you don’t want to aggravate your hip by running every day you idiot”.

The problem is, while I know my head is right, I mainly only like running and I don’t really want to do anything else. I especially don’t want to do anything else in the month that everyone has decided to do something else as well. I do have a bit of a plan though, it just needs a bit more working out on the logistical side.

PS Had 3 good runs last week – a better than expected pace early Tuesday, a not getting blown away in the gales reluctant (but ultimately enjoyable) after work on Thursday (it was cold, I wore my full length black tights, black jacket and black eGloves and enjoyed feeling like I was a sinister criminal mastermind off to do a diamond heist. And then I put my hi-vis on…) and an intended 6 miles that turned into 8 in the brief spell without rain on Sunday afternoon. Very pleased.

Janathon #3 – fighting the urge to use the same “canal desires” gag that I always use

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Back to work tomorrow, so today was my last run in the daylight until next Saturday. Rather than stick to routes round the village, I’ve decided that my daylight runs should be a bit more interesting, and so I took myself down to the canal for a planned 6 mile plod.

It was a lot colder and bleaker than the last time I went along that particular stretch (admittedly that was in June, on a boat) and I spent the first couple of miles with only a little bit of knuckle peeking out of the thumb holes on my long sleeve top. Unsurprisingly, it was fairly quiet except for a few dog walkers and a couple of anglers – I did spot another solitary runner, but she was just a hi-vis speck of pink in the distance during my return leg.

As I was running, I listened to the sublime Ladies of Letters off of Radio 4 and thought of witty and insightful things to blog about. Unfortunately, I’ve since had to venture into the realms of shopping and the experience has wiped all traces of them from my memory, so you’ll have to make do with photos.

Bleak. But daylight, so yay!

The above photo was only taken because I got busted taking this photo:

Things on the ice - #1 in a series of 3. I'm intrigued by what possible series of events led to this. Intrigued and a little scared.

Next thing to be out in the ice was this:

Things on the ice - #2 in a series of 3. Best seat in the house

And of course, the classic:

Things on the ice - #3 in a series of 3

I got home to find that my old faithful running tights have rubbed another hole in my leg. I really don’t want to pension them off, partly because they’re comfy (apart from making my leg bleed occasionally), they fit my camera in the bum-pocket and I really, really don’t want to go shopping. The only reason I risked retail today was that a particularly jiggly bit of hill has prompted me to invest in some new, ahem, foundation garments. I can only apologise to the woman in the changing room next to me who must have thought that an earthquake was starting as I jumped up and down to give it a test bounce. I’m pleased to say that I am now more structurally sound than I was this morning.

Day 3/31 – 6 miles
Ferrero rochers burned*

*I actually looked at the stats on my Garmin, saw the calories burned and thought “ooh, 10 ferrero rocher” – it’s only day 3, I fear for the next 28.

Janathon #2 – Hungry ducks

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During Juneathon, I enjoyed quite a few early morning runs in one of our local nature reserves. It makes a nice 3ish mile loop, it’s very calming (I stomped there on a spectacularly but pointlessly angry run once. It worked.) and it’s good to get off the main road. I usually take out my earphones to try to focus on the sights and sounds around me, there’s usually a low murmur of quacking to accompany me around the lodge. It turns out that it’s less quiet on a Sunday lunchtime on a bank holiday weekend.  After leaping off the path for one too many duck feeders, I opted for looping back along a quieter path away from the water.

 

Many many ducks

The ducks are coralled in a tiny bit of the lodge. They do have a bit more water available to them this week, but you still get mobbed for bread by a quacking mass of feathers.

Having woken up a touch achy this morning, my quads grumbled about any part of the route that wasn’t on the flat. It’s unfortunate (or a wonderful opportunity, depending on how much of a positive spin you want to put on this) that the return part of my loop is either via a short sharp hill or a long steady hill, neither of which seemed terribly appealing.  Long steady hill won and slowed me down (by a minute/mile), but I made it to the top and home in time for dinner.

Day 1/31 – 3 miles
Ferrero rochers burned*