30th Anniversary

February 2011 is the 30th anniversary of my starting to run. As I have said elsewhere in this blog I started running in 1981, in order to complete the first Great North Run. The GNR that year was in June and I started my training in February, not sure of the date in February, but it was February.

Following the GNR I had no intentions of continuing running. However, Anita was still in Teacher Training at the time and one of her lecturers just happened to be a coach at Blaydon Harriers. Following some persuasion by him I decided to try out the Harriers in the August and have ran ever since.

I did not start keeping training logs until September 1981, but looking back over them I have managed to clock up a total of 79,105 miles since then. I have also competed in 916 races (every distance from 100m to the marathon) and won 54 of them.

So by way of celebration, last night was an 8 mile run around Newburn and Scotswood Bridges, with 5 mile at tempo.

Here's to the next 30 years!

Comments

Terry Lonergan said…
Congratulations Alan. You'll soon be at another milestone, reaching 80,000 miles, as long as you nurse those hamstrings!
Impressive number of races won as well.
Keep it up! Terry