Crossing the Line

Heeeey, heeeey, what's the matter with your faaace, faaaace?!

It's contorted. My face that is. Lips curled into a brazen smile. Twenty-six-year-old wrinkles formed at the corners of my mouth. Cracked, chapped lips. Panting. Red ears. A few beads of what feels like lava sweats down my forehead onto my eyebrows. I'm knackered, elated, relieved, satisfied, ego-recharged, uninhibited. That was me at 9.58am on Sunday, March 21. The Bradford 10k Run completed, my arms were aloft in some kind of ridiculous victory salute as I posed for a quick snap taken by one of the Epilepsy Action bods for my first-person report that would appear in the paper the next day. I felt, and looked like in the photo, as though I'd embraced delirium at the end of some hugely historical and life-changing experience. All I'd done was run a little over six miles continuously. Small victories.

Changes in your mind, changes in your life, changes in the times...

I'd urge any couch potato like me to give a run ago. They're totally addictive. I don 't know how much to apportion it to my own OCD-obsessiveness but you get sucked into overtaking one runner after another based on their physical appearance. Repetitive, unrelenting, vanity...I can't, no won't, finish behind them you say to yourself, eyes on the senior/hefty runner in front of you. In my last three kilometres I took great pleasure in upping my pace to slip passed a less than slight young female, packed into her very, short navy shorts like a whale stuffed into a shoebox or an elephant squeezed into a telephone box or Johnny Vegas in a Smart car - you get the point.

It's all about the dum, dum, dubba, dum, dum

Wonga wise I'm well chuffed. Including Gift Aid, that's a tadge over £200 my kind sponsorers have raised for Ep. Action. Thanks every one who backed me, both donation wise and general encouragement. The plan is to do a 10-mile race happening in Bradford again in October and hopefully, if I can get a place, the London Marathon next year.