My Running History

• 12 years old, first year at secondary school, cross-country for the school team in the West Kent league.
• 1st race, 2nd place in year group,
• 2nd race, 3rd place in year group,
• 3rd race, 4th place in year group,
• 4th race, 5th place in year group, have you spotted the trend yet?
• 5th race, 6th place in year group,
• 6th race, 7th place in year group.
• I continued to run for the school cross-country team for two or three more years, but never as well as that first year.
• I then had a few years (about 15 years) off running as I concentrated on my football, winning the Kent Cup at school, a couple of British University championships at Loughborough University and playing semi-pro for about 8 or 9 seasons. The highlight of my semi-pro career being a goal in the 3rd qualifying round of the FA Cup.
• 2004 Great North Run. After giving up 11-a-side football in April 2004 I trained for a couple of months for the Great North Run. I'll explain how I got on at that run in a blog post at some stage, but it wasn't a pretty sight! After that disastrous Great North Run I took a couple more years away from regular running.
• 2007 Great Manchester Run (10km). I did a fair amount of training for this, aiming for sub 40 minutes and actually finishing in 39:58 just outside the top 250 if I remember rightly.
• 2009 Coventry half marathon. I finally got over the half marathon jinx of 2004 and finished in 118th position in a time of 1:33:37.
• Since April 2010 my running life has revolved entirely around parkrun in War Memorial Park in Coventry.