Snowfall

12 weeks to go (27 January 2013)

Back to London and the snow continues, providing a gorgeous backdrop to an already pretty special commute.  The Italian Gardens in Hyde Park are rapidly becoming one of my favourite parts of the city and the thin layer of ice over the fountain pool adds to its charms no end.  Credit where credit’s due, you can’t get that in Queensland.

This week contains a couple of events that we use to mark time (birthday, anniversary) and it gets me thinking about aging and fitness.  Talking with friends at the weekend a lot of the chat is about cutting down drinking, stopping smoking, hitting the gym.  Lycra truly is the new rock and roll; and this from a group that used to drink Bailey’s and gin in the morning before getting a taxi to school to avoid the fifteen-minute walk.

When were you at your physical peak?  It’s a funny thing to gauge because you’re never really comparing like for like.  When I was in Italy in my early 20s I played ultra-competitive football six times a week; and also got through a bottle of wine and 20 cigarettes a day.  And in Australia regular football and yoga was supplemented by 40km cycles twice a week, surfing, rock climbing and every other half-sport the Ozzies could wave at you.

I don’t really feel as fit today as I did during either of those periods: Having said that, I can now jog to Watford.

In quite a short period of time my perception of distance has changed completely.  On Saturday morning I get up early to return furniture to Ikea and think nothing about jogging the 12 miles home (in fact, I tag a quick trip to Putney and back on the end of it to get to my week’s target of 15 miles).  I’m going back to Sheffield in one month’s time and have already checked the train times back from Chesterfield on a Sunday morning, as it’s always easier to keep jogging if you’ve got a fixed destination in mind than just looping round parks endlessly.  Even if that destination is Chesterfield, whose only significant achievement is having famously shoddy masonry.

Drawing inspiration from the unlikeliest of sources, Duane Turner, I’m not worried as much about the running side of the marathon now.  He did it in six hours, for charity and after a night on the town the day before, and I’m confident of beating that at my current level of fitness.  It sounds like it might be quite fun, too, with all the landmarks and the atmosphere, and as I’m not at the sort of ability to finish it in a competitive time anyway I may as well enjoy myself along the way.  So my attention for the next few weeks is turning to the fundraising.

I’ve launched my charity page now [uk.virginmoneygiving.com/JimmyTheWizard] and have received a massive donation from Kate and Franck Houssaye.  This has given me a huge boost – that’s already only £1,932 I need to raise, which is a ludicrous sentence to write but feels much more achievable in real terms.  If everyone I know donated the price of a Starbucks...  The old charity maxim, “You only need 200 people to give a tenner” starts to sound less tongue-in-cheek and more like a credible fundraising strategy.  Though to add to my challenge, it looks like I’ll need to acquire 200 friends.

I’ve been collecting for Diabetes UK because I know what work they do as an organisation, in terms of lobbying the Department of Health and supporting the NHS to deliver high quality care; but it’s occurred to me this week that I don’t know how they help people with diabetes specifically.  Everyone knows that £1 buys a child a goat or something from Oxfam, and £100 sponsors a lion at London Zoo; and 55p buys a packet of Smarties, which allows Nestle to entrap another African woman into a lifetime of lactose dependency.  But what does a fiver buy someone with diabetes?  If I’m going to donate £2k I feel like I should be more personally involved in what that support will bring, so I vow to spend some time with the organisation and its members over the next month so that I can be a genuine advocate for the charity.  Rather than just shrugging and saying, “You know, diabetes stuff” when people ask me what the organisation does.  “Sugar free chocolate, maybe?”

Whilst I set this up I’ll leave you with this week’s photo offering and a topical question (courtesy of Duane himself): When was the first Battle of Marathon?  The winner gets a Snickers, which will be generously donated by Davide Curtis owing to confusion over the original question.