London Take 3 & My Christening!

Hi.  First of all, apologies for the gap between blogs.  I make it 4 weeks!  That wasn’t the intention.  But I liken this gap to me and marathons in my early days.  Fully committed to begin with, lost a bit of focus and then back on it.

Hopefully there won’t be such a long gap between blogs again.  I’m going to carry on with the My Journey to 100m this week.  Traditionally this is London marathon week. This year it is in October again, but my Facebook memories have been filled with memories from past London marathons.  Mainly all those from 2012 onwards. 

So, a very quick recap.  My last blog was about 2010 and my new approach to running at that time.  No fulls, just 1 half a year, maybe 2.  2010 was my 2^nd GNR and 3^rd Birmingham half in a row.  2011 should have been the same again.

Before I dive into the London marathon 2011 which saw me come out of marathon retirement (!!) after 18 months I need to go back a bit to explain how I came to run for a charity called Neuroblastoma Society (now called Neuroblastoma UK).

At the back end of 2009, a few friends from the Northeast were sharing details about a young girl called Sophie Atay who had an aggressive form of cancer call Neuroblastoma.  In order to get treatment that could have saved her life, her family needed to raise £500k to travel to New York for said treatment.

Her cause gained a lot of support when the singer Alexander Burke told Simon Cowell about her, and he made a considerable donation to the funding for Sophie.  The family and friends raise almost £1m in the end but tragically, Sophie was too ill to make the journey and passed away in March 2010.  The money raised was then used to support other families affected by Neuroblastoma – https://www.neuroblastoma.org.uk/.

I’m not clear on the exact details but charity had a couple of places available for the 2011 London marathon and through my friends in the north I managed to get one of the places available.  Like many I was touched by Sophie and her family’s story, and I was keen to run in her memory.

So, the 2 half marathons in 2010 were the start of the prep for my 3^rd London marathon and 5^th overall.  This time, after dipping under 6 hours at New York in 2009 I was confident of dipping under 6 hours at London.

I’d love to say that I started the hard training at the end of 2010, but the truth is I can’t remember!  The 2011 London marathon is the one I have very little memory of.  I have the one picture of me below in the training top for the charity, but that’s it. I chose not to run any half marathons before hand and as it turned out I didn’t do any in 2011 at all.

I know that unlike my first 2 London marathon I decided not to stay at the Holiday Inn by Heathrow Airport this time.  The journey back there had been tough on both occasions, so I booked my own hotel near to Victoria Station.  There were 2 really good reasons to do this.  I could catch a train from there on marathon morning (for free, one of the perks of being a London marathon runner on raceday) and more importantly, it was a 10-minute walk from the finish line.  Make that almost 20 when you’ve just ran a marathon!

It’s the one race I have very little memory of, particularly from the marathons I have done.  I normally have some very clear memories of races but my finishing time of 6:23:59 which was similar to Edinburgh 2009 makes me think there must have been pain involved again!  I didn’t do another race again until London 2012. 

So, London marathon number 3 is just blank! No idea of how it went, what the weather was like, was it even paced (which I doubt); but it was a 5^th marathon medal and that was the important thing.  I did whatever I had to do to get round and I ran in the memory of a young girl who was taken far too young.

Keeping this week’s blog short.  I was going to cover London 2012 in this one but I’m going to save it all for next week. Before I finish though there was something that happened later in 2011 that has to be mentioned.  I knew that I would be running London 2012 as soon as I entered the ballot in the week after the 2011 version. How?  It was my 5^th entry in the ballot under the old scheme where entries were only open for 1 day, so at your 5^th attempt you were guaranteed a place.  So, 2012 was a given for me.  I entered the ballot knowing it was going to happen for me.

It’s possible looking back that the only reason I ran 2012 was because I knew I was going to get a sport.  From 2013, the rule changed, and ballot entries were accepted for a week, so the 5^th entry rule was understandably canned.

Knowing I was running 2012 I had 2 options.  Just run it with no need to run for a charity.  Or pick a charity I wanted to run for and have no pressure of hitting a certain target as it was my own spot.  I went for the latter.  Running for a cause meant a lot to me.  Anything to do something to help those less fortunate than me.  I decided to run for Children with Cancer UK.  After contacting them in early summer 2011, they sent a race vest to train in and I posed with it on in the photo below.

I received a couple of likes and 1 comment from my cousin, Minda Singh.  His 8 words made me chuckle and then saw me spend about 30 minutes scouring the web to see if anyone had already used the name he mentioned.  After a lengthy search and only finding multiple hits for Usain Bolt and using bolt, I was christened with a running name!  His comment?  “Who do you think you are? Usingh Bolt?”

My twitter handle, which I had only just created was swiftly changed to this new name and I remember adding it in to my Facebook name.  So that was it.  Usingh Bolt became my running name, and the plan was that I would use it for London marathon 2012 and that would definitely be the last marathon for me!  Only the 5^th time I had decided that!

I mentioned Facebook memories at the beginning.  The 22^{nd of} April was the 10^th year since I made my race debut as Usingh Bolt and also the 15^th year since my first marathon.  I got lucky when I ran the marathon in 2012, but we’ll come to that next week. 

So, 2011, the completely forgotten marathon, bit like John Hurt’s Doctor Who.  I know I ran it.  I have the medal. I’m in the official results with the splits over each 10K.  But I just can’t remember a darn thing about it.  2012 was a lot more memorable and subsequent races I do remember things about. 

Next week will all be about the freshly monikered me!  Usingh Bolt!  I’m also running the Birmingham half on 1^st May for Children’s Cancer North.  A link to my donation page is here, https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/usinghccn2022 and on the Intro page of my website.