Happy Birthday Blog!

'I'm sure I blogged about this race last year' I mused to Coach Pete as we drove back from Preston to Manchester, having earned our latest medals in the Best Preston 5k. 'Hang on, I'll have a look and see...'.

tap... tap... tap onto the Iphone and within seconds minutes I had discovered that I had indeed blogged about the Best Preston 5k last year - 28th November: a very, very frozen -4 degree experience!! Thankfully, today had been a very balmy 13 degrees warmer! - But I made another, even more exciting, discovery: that the chilly Best Preston blog post had been only the second in my blogging history... and therefore today... the 27th November 2011 is the official birthday of The Magathon blog! And I nearly missed it!

The Magathon blog began when my training started for the London Marathon last year. With 20 weeks to go, I decided that the added motivation added by airing my successes and failures in public might just do something to spur me on in my training. Little did I know then that blogging would become such a wonderful world to live in! This time last year, if you'd suggested to me that I'd be meeting up with people I'd only ever met on the internet, I would have suggested that you were a complete nutter and that I, on the other hand, was not! 

However, nutter I am it seems as the experiences of the last year have taught me the errors of my ways.  My Magathon Marathon training offered many difficulties along the way, yet whenever I wrote about them on here, there was always someone, often many, offering advice, sympathy and encouragement to keep me going. When I thought about giving up, I also thought about the shame of having to admit it on here; the guilt associated with possible failure is enough to get anyone going again! In January, I discovered the joys of running and blogging with a group of like-minded crazy people around the world when I signed up to Janathon. In April, I shared the success of completing the London Marathon with all those who'd been mad kind enough to read my ramblings and motivate me along the way. In June I shared my new found love of car dancing and supermarket aerobics as I attempted, and failed, to complete Juneathon. When I found myself unable to run in August, I submersed myself in running by reading the blogs of my online friends, and just last week, I met with 'Abradypus' to take part in a local (for me) parkrun. All this in one year. All via the internet. Who'd have thought it?

And it's not over yet. Just today, I've arranged to join Fortnightflo and a whole other host of 'athoners' for the Regent's Park 10k in January; and in doing so, I seem to have inadvertently signed myself up for another month of poor excuses disguised as running every day! 

A year ago,  this blog started life as a record of my running. Today, The Magathon and I are a part of a community of people who love running, sharing experiences and motivating others. Now who could ask for a better birthday gift than that?