Pre-July jitters

It's the eve of the 500km challenge and I am feeling more than slightly nervous, but at the same time very eager indeed to get going and start chipping away at that daunting target.

I've spent the last week weighing up the relative benefits of Strava and Nike+ and, being fundamentally technologically illiterate, I have not been able to reach any kind of decision so I'm gonna use both (yeah, dumb, but forgive me my option paralysis, it's been a stressful few weeks). I've signed up to the July distance and climb challenges on Strava so if you are going to join me (please do!!) then if you join the distance challenge too I can see how many kilometers everyone has done in aggregate, which I hope should be fun! So far I have friends here in Singapore, in Oxford, in Germany, and even my lovely mum in Somerset pitching in, so it is a global effort!

I'm also going to wear a pedometer, more than anything really just to see whether I can hit a million steps in a month - kind of a scary prospect when you think how damn hard it is to hit even the 10k recommended daily target, let alone more than three times that target (*panics*).

The idea is going to be to run about 16km a day, probably to and from work, on weekdays, and longer distances at the weekend. I'm going to split those longer distances up into an early morning (7am-ish) and a late afternoon (5pm-ish) run on each day of the weekend, both around the 10km distance. I will post on my Facebook page (D4D: 500/31 - please like it!) every Friday where and when I will be starting each of those weekend runs, so anyone who wants to join me can come along. Hopefully this will also have the side benefit of forcing me out of bed on weekend mornings, which I anticipate will be problematic even in the absence of standard overenthusiastic Friday night wine consumption. Those who know me will be (in some cases painfully) aware that I am not a morning person. In fact, as my alarm went off today and it dawned on me that it will be 6am starts every single day for the next 31 days, I could have cried. I think in fact the early mornings are going to be more of a challenge than the distance!

That said, a lot of people have asked me how I have trained for this. My answer to them has always been "well, I only decided to do it last week, so I've not really had a chance to train, but it will be fine, I run a lot". It only very recently (i.e. yesterday) occurred to me that this is not actually currently true. It is not true at all. In fact, according to my running app, I ran 27.5km in the whole of June, and - gulp - 8.52km in May. So, this should be... um... interesting.

Bearing in mind my fundamental lack of preparedness I guess the best I can do for myself is an early bed, rather than spending five hours making an explorer costume for a six year old who will in no way appreciate it. Sadly that ship has already sailed, but at least before I set off tomorrow morning I will get to see Small Child in a pith helmet covered in butterflies, which should hopefully keep me giggling to at least the halfway point.

0 down, 500 to go...

Dollars for Dave: a new challenge

Recently I posted an update on my Generosity page about Dave's long road to recovery from his osteosarcoma. I imagine everyone reading this will know that in January of this year I shaved my head to raise funds to help pay for state-of-the-art medical treatment for Dave, involving removing the cancerous bone in his leg and replacing it with an electromagnetic telescopic implant that will grow with him as he gets older, both enabling him to walk and removing the need for any further invasive surgeries.

But as with all surgeries, state-of-the-art or not, there is risk, and following a minor corrective procedure to realign the implant, Dave contracted an infection in his leg. That infection proved to be resistant to most antibiotics, and so Dave has spent the last week in hospital on IV antibiotics in order to save his leg from this infection. He will need to take these drugs for at least six weeks. Those antibiotics cost $200 a day. Two hundred dollars, every single day, for another five weeks, is a lot of money, even before you factor in the doctors' bills, the hospital stay...

We were hugely blessed to have been able to raise a very substantial amount of money through the enormous generosity shown by people during the original fundraiser. Those funds covered the cost of the implant, the surgery, Dave's second series of chemotherapy, and part of the cost of the corrective procedure. But that cash is long gone, and we are struggling to be able to meet the financial demands of Dave's treatment regime.

Which brings me to the new challenge.

Originally when I realised I was going to need to try and raise money somehow, I had contemplated the idea of seeking sponsorship to do a run - specifically, the Angkor Wat half marathon last December, which I had registered for a couple of months previously. But when I thought about it, this seemed rather like asking people to sponsor me to go on holiday - nobody was going to pony up to see me run a distance that I could do on a Sunday before brunch. I needed something more, something shocking, something challenging, so I wrote off the idea of running, and I shaved my head instead.

But I can't shave my head again (or at least it wouldn't have the same impact second time around!), and the more I thought about it the more I realised that I had approached the problem in the wrong way. The problem was not running per se - the problem was that me running a half marathon was not a challenge. So I needed to find a running target that was actually difficult.

Which is why I will be running 500km over the month of July. Yep, five hundred kilometers in 31 days. Does that sound like enough of a challenge? It's nearly 12 marathons, 23.5 half marathons, almost 17 kilometers a day for 31 days, and I will be doing it while also doing a full time job. I will have to give up red wine, seriously compromise the servicing of my West Wing addiction, and get up at 6am every day. It will be horrible. But if it enables me to help pay for Dave to get better, it will be worth it - as going bald was worth it, five months ago.

So, how can you help? Well, there is an obvious way: please sponsor me! Lump sum, an amount per kilometer completed, whatever - everything helps, however small the amount may be. You can do this through the Generosity site or if you'd like to send money by another method just drop me a message through Google+ and we can figure it out. One thing I would say though is that if you do want to donate, then the sooner the better - we are facing an urgent cash crunch as the medicine is needed right now and we can't allow a gap in treatment.

I am aware, though, that I am asking the same people who were so generous the first time round to sponsor me again. So if you can't give cash, there is another way you can help: lace up your own running shoes, think about what distance YOU can do in July, and ask your friends to sponsor you. Not a runner? Even better! Everyone has to start somewhere, so commit to 10k, or 20. If you can't run, jog, and if you can't jog, walk. Can you get a team together, from your work, from your gym, from your kid's school, from anywhere? Join up, get off the sofa, and run with me, wherever you are in the world: let's create a global community of people running together to help this kid beat the crappy hand he has been dealt. And if you're in Singapore, come keep me company and run with me - it's gonna be pretty boring spending fifty hours over next month pounding the streets on my own. Every Friday I will post on here and on the page I will be setting up on Facebook where and when I will be running over the weekend, so please come along and cheer me up!

If there's one thing I learned from January's experience, it's the amazing power of human beings acting collectively for a cause. One person contributing ten dollars may not seem like a lot; a hundred people doing that begins to become a big deal, a game-changing deal; for Dave (and, to be completely honest, for me), a life-changing deal. So, can you give me ten dollars? Can you give me ten kilometers? Can you get your friends to sponsor you a hundred, two hundred dollars, for those ten kilometers, for twenty? Whatever you can give, and whatever you can get people to give, will make a difference to our effort to help Dave recover and to rebuild his life. And the more people we can involve in this effort, the bigger the difference we will make.

With heartfelt thanks from all of us for your generosity to date, and hopefully to come.

Isabelle xx