Alice takes on the New York Marathon
The ARCHIE Foundation and Friends of the Special Nursery are taking a team of runners to take part in the New York City Marathon this November. We spoke to first time marathon runner Alice about taking on the route:
I joined Jog Scotland Kintore in March 2017 and set my sights on a couple of 10k and half marathon races (I was fairly optimistic regarding my running ability considering I couldn’t even run for a bus). A few tough races towards the end of the year led me to the decision that my 2018 goal would be to work on pace and time, as opposed to distance. With this in mind, I still find it very surreal that I am away to commence training for my first marathon, supporting Friends of the Special Nursery – New York City.
After a couple of convincing conversations, and a few late nights reading articles titled ‘How to Survive My First Marathon’, I decided to attend the NYC Marathon Information Night that Friends of the Special Nursery and the Archie Foundation had organised in March 2018. Two weeks later I had confirmed my place.
I have been able to see and hear about the great work that Friends of the Special Nursery do and it was a no brainer that this was a brilliant opportunity to raise money for such a special, local charity. Our fundraising plans so far include a dance in Kintore Public Hall on Saturday 21 July 2018, which is already looking like a promising start to our fundraising activities. The team at Friends of the Special Nursery have been supportive in providing us with fundraising ideas and kits to use and the events that the charity have organised have been very informative. It was fantastic to meet the other runners at the pizza night in June and we got the opportunity to speak with previous NYC marathon runners, a personal trainer, and Andrew from the Running Shop who provided us with great tips and advice.
I decided to implement a sixteen week training programme, which will commence on Monday 09 July 2018 – starting with a six mile run (I must remember to that I will have another 20.2 miles to add on to this 16 weeks later). Although my training has not officially commenced, I spent the majority of April and May working on my pace and distance, entering a few races and finishing May with the Edinburgh Half Marathon. With my University studies finished for the summer, I will have plenty of time in the evenings and weekends to dedicate to training for the marathon but unfortunately spent most of June in the gym as opposed to on the pavements due to injury. I am very excited, and extremely nervous, to commence the training and look forward to ticking off those long runs that I have heard so much about through my friends at Jog Scotland. The ultimate goal is to successfully make it through the 26.2 miles in New York on Sunday 04 November 2018 and run a race that I am proud of. I hope to raise a significant amount of money for the charity as the work they do helps so many local families and I look forward to meeting up with my fellow charity runners over the upcoming months (fingers crossed they have a big slice of pizza waiting for me at the end of the marathon).
If you happen to see me running through Kintore and Inverurie over the next couple of months, please feel free to throw words of encouragement, water and jelly babies at me to keep me going!
