Apologies for missing TTT last week, but I was in the Lake District having surprisingly sunny fun walking up mountains and biking down them. So good was my trip that I feel absolutely no guilt in not having posted.

1 – Write This Run

Running doesn’t begin and end when I have my trainers on.  If I’m not actually covering miles there’s a good chance I’m thinking about it, planning routes, scheduling runs with friends, researching events or reading other people’s thoughts on this ridiculous pastime of ours. Then there’s writing this blog, trying to marshall the ideas that come 5 miles from home on a wet training run in to something coherent and hopefully interesting enough to share with you.

So I was particularly excited about attending Write This Run on Sunday, a gathering of like-minded folk to discuss running and writing organised by the fabulous @liz_goodchild (responsible for one of my favourite blogs Runnerstood). I met so many incredible people and left so inspired to take my running and blogging on to new heights, the future is looking very exciting!

There was so much crammed in to the day that to talk through it would take an age and I’m not sure I could convey how amazing the experience was. Others have written up the event better than I could and if you want to know more then Chris has done a brilliant job at Any Idiot Can Run. Rather than bombard you with names and blogs to follow which will get lost in the ether I’ll do you a favour. I’m going to follow the adventures of an ultra-marathon running grandmother, the man who promoted mental health matters by running 52 marathons in 52 weeks and the woman who only took up triathlon when her illness made getting up stairs tricky. Over the coming months I will share each one with you in a bit more detail as I have had a chance to learn more about them.

In the meantime, I’m going to do some more research in to how to give good blog (I obviously haven’t learnt that yet!) and how to make this as much fun for you to read as I have writing it. Firstly though I’m going to work my way through the ridiculously full goody bag we received!

Amazing swag! Socks, smellies, treats and eats.

2 – Juneathon

One of the most exciting ideas I heard on Sunday was Juneathon. 30 days of consistent activity and blogging…the more I think about it the tougher it sounds! Although the original premise is that you should run each day as this coincides with a couple of events already in the diary, not least being the start of marathon training, I’m going to mix it up a bit. I have friends that instruct various classes or work as personal trainers, so I shall offer myself up as a willing test case/guinea pig and use Juneathon as an opportunity to try out some new activities, as well as being consistent with my running. The harder part will be finding something engaging to blog about every day…you can expect much shorter posts!…but I hope you’ll stick with me and by reading be a part of my Juneathon challenge.

If you’re doing Juneathon yourself then let me know and we can face this challenge together!