Shut Up, Sit Down

My dad emailed me last week. He was thinking of running the ten-mile Great South Run in October and wanted to know whether I could think of a worthy charity for whom he could raise money by running it. My gut reaction was “Rape Crisis, Rape Crisis, oh god they need the funds right now!” and he agreed that they were indeed a worthy cause. Then all sanity flew out of the window and before I knew it, I was signing up to run it with him.

Let me give you a little background on my running history: I have none. I’m 5’8″ and 17st 3lb (and counting), which puts me squarely in the ‘Obese’ category according to my BMI (which as we all know is a crock of shite, but there it is). I haven’t run further than twenty yards for the bus since I was fourteen years old. My exercise level is zero and my diet, though vegetarian, atrocious. I am not what you might call an ideal candidate for the Great South Run. But here I am, and I’ve paid the thirty-four quid entry fee so I’m bloody well going to run it, damn it.

My best friend decided he wanted to run it with us too, and though considerably fitter than I am, he still doesn’t have much running experience. So this evening (oh god is it really this evening already?) he and I will be undertaking week one, day one of the Couch-to-5K running plan. This is apparently a way of getting your arse off the couch and running five kilometres within nine weeks.

After that, we’ll just keep going and going until we reach our target – ten miles is 16.1km. Take To The Streets, in conjunction with the Great Run website, has a training plan which allegedly gets you all the way to ten miles, so we’ll probably use a combination of the two.

As yet we don’t have a fundraising page as I am still waiting to hear whether Rape Crisis will register with JustGiving so that we can raise money online. As soon as I hear from them, I will either stick a link to the JustGiving page up here, or open a separate email account to use with PayPal so people can donate there and once it’s all done, we can transfer the money in one big lovely lot to Rape Crisis’s PayPal.

Obviously JustGiving is preferable as it’s safer for donors and it can reclaim Gift Aid, which I as an individual can’t. Plus you get the snazzy page with the meter to show how close you are to your target. However Rape Crisis seem a little reluctant on this for some reason, so we’ll see what they do.

So watch this space – if only for the hilariousness of watching a fat girl try to run ten miles.

Edit: I just remembered I’ve been using EveryClick to help raise m0ney for Rape Crisis for some time through their web search (oh yes, you should go and do that too) and have found that they make sponsorship pages there too. So for now you can sponsor us or pledge to sponsor us at Everyclick. Thanks!