Running for a toilet Part 1
Hi there. I am a teacher at EC London and aside from running around looking after the needs of my students I am running the Brighton marathon. That means twenty six miles or forty two kilometres once or twice around the Brighton Hove area. If all goes well, this will involve me running for about four hours without stopping.
You might be wondering why am I doing this? Well, it’s not just for the physical challenge, it’s also for charity. By getting people to sponsor me (i.e. send me money which I give to a charity), I hope to help improve the lives of people less fortunate than us. My charity is called Wateraid. They aim to save lives and give poor people a chance to help themselves by providing safe access to water and proper toilet and washing facilities. It took me ages to find a charity I really like and these guys really impressed me. They cut down on administration costs by working with local experts from already existing projects in places like Bangladesh, Nepal and India. Their reports are also often quoted in academic business and environmental journals. Anyway, you can check them out for yourself at http://www.wateraid.org/uk/.
I was actually getting quite worried about raising enough money as not everyone has so much to give. When EC London agreed to help me out by donating a very generous amount of money I was therefore very thankful. I’ll therefore be posting various updates about my training and my experience in the marathon itself.
Of course if YOU want to help me make a difference you can sponsor me yourself. Just click on this link http://original.justgiving.com/christang and you’ll arrive at my charity website where you can donate however much (or little) you wish. The money will go straight to Wateraid.
Thanks and keep reading my blog.
Chris
Running for a Toilet Part 2
Marathon Training
Unfortunately, you can’t just wake up one day and say, “what the hell, I’ll run a marathon”. You actually have to spend months of your life, normally in the cold and wet seasons (in England that’s pretty much all the time), training your legs to do things they have never done before.
My routine:
Get up early, do some exercises, go to work and teach seven and a half hours, change, run six to thirteen miles home, collapse, eat enough food to feed a country, collapse. It’s not just running either. Occasionally I might run a fartlek, which involves a mixture of jogging and sprinting over ten kilometres, or do some hill runs, whereby I find the steepest hill around and sprint up it ten times. When my legs and feet are causing me too much pain to run, I swim two or three kilometres instead.
On Friday, instead of running home, I generally go to the pub after work, drink, collapse. My Saturday run is therefore very slow and painful, but that’s alright because Sunday’s time for my twenty miler.
Probably the best thing about this schedule is that you can eat as much food as you like whenever you want.
Again if you feel in any way sympathetic to my suffering and my charity (Wateraid), you can sponsor me by clicking on the following link http://original.justgiving.com/christang and you’ll arrive at my charity website where you can donate however much (or little) you wish. The money will go straight to Wateraid.
Running for a Toilet Part 3
Student Blog
I gave a presentation recently on Wateraid as part of EC’s academic programme. Students were asked to write a summary as a homework task. One student went so far as to do her own research on the charity and the result is a brilliant account of what “running for Wateraid” actually involves:
There are 884 million of people in the world that don’t have access to safe water. 2.5 billion people in the world that don’t have access to adequate sanitation and 1.4 million children that die every year because of unclean water and poor sanitation(one child every twenty seconds dies). The solution is give to them sanitation and fresh water. But the problem is, how can we save lives and not spend a lot of money ? Because we’re not rich!
Well, Wateraid has the solution! It is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1981. They try to improve access to safe water, hygiene and sanitation in the world’s poorest communities. Each year you will find a WaterAid ‘Running Water’ team at the running events. The Marathon is 26 miles in length and four hours fourty
five minutes running. To do it, you must training approximately forty miles a week for about a minimum of five or six months. However, the Marathon can be dangerous. If you aren’t prepared you can suffer from bloody nipple syndrome, black toenail or car crash syndrome…
To help to save the world you only need 15 pounds. With this money you can run in the marathon and you will give water to people that need it to live. Because, Wateraid is a clever organization and their project managers work with locals, businesses, schools, universities and people to improve the life of the poorest people.
If you are interested in helping out, you can sponsor me by clicking on the following link http://original.justgiving.com/christang and you’ll arrive at my charity website where you can donate however much (or little) you wish. The money will go straight to Wateraid.
Running for a Toilet Part 4
PHOTO FINISH
So that’s it. Twenty six miles later I staggered over the line in a personal time of three hours and forty eight minutes. The sun was out that day as I was joined by 8 thousand other runners in the first ever Brighton Marathon.
I was quite happy with my time considering it was my first ever go. Looking at my split times for halfway I managed to run the second thirteen miles twice as quickly as the first. It certainly didn’t seem that way, especially during the last four miles. When I saw the 22 mile marker I decided to eat my last energy sweet. You gobble these up during the race to make sure your body doesn’t collapse after 20 miles when all the protein in your body has been consumed. The problem was my stomach simply couldn’t handle it and I started getting stomach cramps. If that wasn’t bad enough I started feeling like projectile vomiting. The only thing that stopped me was the thought of the hundreds of clapping onlookers being sprayed with chunks of my sick.
Two miles to go and I got a cramp in my left calf muscle. I stopped for a second to stretch only to find that my legs were no longer capable of bending. So I just had to continue. 800 metres to go and my calf muscle cramped up completely so I was almost screaming in pain. The video of me finishing shows me half running half hopping over the line.
Was it worth it? Actually it was one of the best experiences of my life. The feeling of elation at the finish completely helped me forget about the fact that my legs were no longer under my control. Also so far I have managed to raised almost eight hundred pounds for Wateraid with the help of EC students and teachers. What’s more a big thank you has to go out to Bernard Dodds and EC London who have donated two hundred pounds.
A lot of students ask me what running the marathon has to do with raising money for charity. The answer is simple, most of you would never have heard about Wateraid if I hadn’t run this marathon and some of the world’s poorest people would have 800 pounds less!
If you are interested in helping out, you can sponsor me by clicking on the following link http://original.justgiving.com/christang and you’ll arrive at my charity website where you can donate however much (or little) you wish. The money will go straight to Wateraid.
