Great North Run (Update)

I won't make this any longer or more detailed than it needs to be, but I've been suffering with a stomach bug all week, and have made the decision to pull out of the Great North Run this weekend.

It was a hard decision. The organisers make it very clear that if you don't feel 100%, you shouldn't run, and not having eaten properly all week, combined with a fair amount of, ahem, fluid loss, has made me reluctantly see sense and bail out.

I will be registering for another half marathon in the next few days. Birmingham Half Marathon is another BUPA-organised run, in mid-October, and seems the most likely candidate at this point. If you've sponsored me, thanks very much, it really means a lot to me. I'll still be honouring your pledge with 13.1 miles, just in a different city.

Onwards and upwards.

SPONSOR ME! Great North Run 2012

Those of you who follow me on t'Witter may have noted that I've been engaging in a slightly unnatural activity of late - to whit, running. And those of you with an attention span longer than 140 characters may remember this post about Ant Hayes, who sadly took his own life last year, leaving a wife and two children.

Long story short, on Sunday 16th September, I'll be running the 2012 Great North Run to raise money for Child Bereavement Charity. CBC is a national organisation that coordinates a network of workers who offer support to people in times of bereavement - parents who lose a child, or children who lose a parent.

It's hard to put a positive spin on this, but I just think that when the worst happens, the best we can hope for is that there are people around to help those left behind make sense of a terrible situation. I think that Child Bereavement Charity offers that, so please dig deep and donate.

That's all a bit sombre, I'm afraid, so on a lighter note, the picture above is of me in the running vest.  I'll be wearing while I plough through the 13+ miles of the half marathon that is the Great North Run. It's yellow and so tight it makes me look like a banana with nipples. I should have got a larger size. Oh well.

You can donate at my Just Giving page here. Thanks for reading this far.