Last weekend, my good friend Lukeh ran his first marathon, completing the incredible 26 miles in the first event held in Newport city centre. He was raising money for a mental health charity and was aiming to complete the marathon in about 4 and a half hours. I’d been watching his progress as he shared training updates on Twitter, and reading along as the nerves kicked in once the marathon was only just around the corner.

And so, I’m done. If you’ve been following along, you might remember that May was a bumper month for running activities, including an epic 10k. Unfortunately, that 10k was the pinnacle, and the eventual downfall of my running career. Gradually, things got worse and worse, and at the end of my May monthly update, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it. I completed four runs in June.

Starting with the good news, I reached the halfway point of the “500 kilometres in one year” challenge. It’s quite a big achievement for me to have reached the middle mark, especially considering the slow start to the year I had! The gap between actual and target is also very heartening. The bad news is that running at the moment is a complete nightmare. There’s a big leap in that chart where I completed a 10k.

Hoorah! At last I have managed to not only keep up with the target, but overtake it and get a bit of a healthy lead. Another achievement this month is to have no gap longer than three days. That is something I am looking at working on reducing even further but I am slightly torn. This 5k route I have found myself is becoming routine but I think I would have to do less to run more days, at least to start with anyway.

I finally found a really good course layout that I am happy running along, and it is exactly 5km taking me from almost door to almost door. It’s perfect, and I started to get in a really good routine, into the groove. I crossed the 100 kilometre mark, moving past 20% of the total. I even managed to get ahead of the target even if it was only by 0.02 of a kilometre.

January ended with a disappointing 14km deficit from the target, thanks to some days inside due to snow and illness. I was determined to catch up a bit in February (there’s nothing like a target on a graph to be motivational!) and started off with an ill-advised 9k. I was aiming for 10 and had to give up before I got there, and then felt like I’d overdone it for a while.

This year, I set myself a Runkeeper goal of completing 500 kilometres in twelve months. It’s a crazy goal, but in 2012, I managed almost 450km, so it should only take a bit more of a push to be able to achieve this. It’s one of those that is within my sights but is still going to be a bit tricky. Of course, if January is anything to go by, it’s going to be impossible.

The final few weeks of the year haven’t really gone as I had planned. I didn’t manage to complete a 10k in December, which is disappointing but not surprising. The weather has been terrible, either freezing cold or torrential rain. I’m not a completely fair-weather runner, but it’s hard to get the motivation when it is both dark AND raining. I had planned to make the most of my holiday over Christmas to go out several times, but of course, I have got this stupid cold.

It’s been a tricky couple of weeks, particularly this last weekend. I’m getting to the point where most of my running is going to be done on a weekend now, because of the lack of daylight hours. I had a four day weekend but spent most of it tucked up inside with an extraordinarily painful sore throat. No running for me. However, before that occurred, I had managed to complete a 10k, probably the only one for November, and it was, I suppose you would say, a personal best!

How has it been four weeks since I last wrote an update? Very odd. I managed to complete October’s 10k. If you’ll remember, I was hoping to improve on this: Jun – 1:34:31 Jul – 1:36:03 Aug – 1:30:55 Sep – 1:34:31 And I managed this: So, not a personal best, but close enough. In other personal best news, my thirty minute runs have topped out at 3.63km, which I managed twice this month.