Like Butter On a Cat's Paws: More butter, please

Four weeks to go (24 March)

It is going to be hard to get through this week’s blog without using the phrases “bloody weather”, “crushing depression” and “how the fuck do people live in this stupid shitty country when it’s so fucking bleak all the time and everything conspires against you, all the time, relentlessly dragging you lower and lower until you struggle to get out of bed in the morning because you know from the sound of the rain on the windows from the moment you wake up that it’s going to be impossible to salvage any kind of enjoyment from the day?”

I’m starting to think I should be running for a mental health charity, rather than Diabetes UK.

With four weeks to go until the marathon I’m feeling reasonably confident, physically. I’ve followed my training plan closely and have managed to tick off every day’s run as instructed, and now with 18- and 19-mile outings under my belt I’m confident that I can cross the line come race day. I’ll be slow, mind, and I’m sure that I’ll be reduced to walking at some stage, but that’s not the point for me. This was always about the daily distraction, not the event: The butter on the cat’s paws to stop it noticing its new surroundings.

So with one week to go before my training starts to wind down in anticipation of the day of the race, my thoughts are turning a little prematurely to the post-marathon era. Will I cope, am I ready for England? My plan was to emerge from marathon training blinking into the onset of summer but as Bing Crosby races to the recording studios to cash in on the increasingly likely white Easter, I’m starting to feel a little naive. Of course May won’t be heralded by the onset of cloudless skies and the smell of barbecues, the last recorded summer’s day in this country was July 27^th, 2011. It’ll piss it down non-stop until I go on holiday to Croatia at the end of August, whereupon there’ll be a four-day heatwave in the UK before the clouds hunker down anew in preparation for winter.

The marathon has been an undeniable distraction and whilst I’m looking forward to relaxing a bit, having a pint and a pack of Haribo whenever I want one, I’m worried about needing something to take its place. Seb Coe is offering to reimburse flights and hotels to anyone running the New York marathon who raises over £2k and I’m thinking, yep, that’s not a bad deal, maybe I could do that? I want to see the city and as long as Seb Coe promises not to engage me in any conversation at any stage of the journey I’d only have to raise a few hundred quid to make back the money I’d have spent anyway. But then is that really who I want to become? The sort of person who fills their life with marathons and triathalons and iron mans (iron men?) and other pointless endeavours to distract themselves from the fact that, well, they’re not actually very happy? I think I’d rather be happy and stationary, but that’s going to be a struggle whilst England resembles a monochrome paddy field.

Anyway, to the training. Via the fundraising.

I’m up to £1,200 which is a fantastic amount, and I’m incredibly grateful for the generosity of a huge number of people. I’m slightly surprised, too, by who has donated – the majority of donors aren’t my closest friends or family, but either people who are familiar with the trials of fundraising or have been affected by diabetes in some way. The stories that people send in about their experiences with long-term conditions are personal, moving, inspiring; and what amazes me most is how people just seem to get on with life, in spite of the hardships and challenges. I hear time and again how Diabetes UK and other health charities have helped people get back on their feet, often just in small ways, and often just by their very presence in the background reminding people that there’s always someone they can turn to who understands.

So £1,200 to help that. Very good, but my target is £2,000. I’ve stalled and am struggling for ideas for the final push. My girlfriend is keen that I hold a pub quiz but I rule that out on the grounds that I’ve not got enough friends nearby. My idea to hold a breakfast club at work gets put on ice when I announce a restructure and am assaulted with enough personal abuse to suggest that my team are less than predisposed to give me a quid or two at the moment, even for charity. And the corporate football tournament receives its final kiss of death when the cheapest quote I receive for pitch hire in central London is £2,900. The London Soccerdome (http://thelondonsoccerdome.com/) at least puts a smile on my face when it informs me that the charity rate for hiring pitches for 4 hours is £10,000, plus VAT and overheads.

I was planning on doing a lot of overheads.

I’m back to the drawing board and time is running out, but the nearer I get to the marathon the more useless my fundraising ideas seem. Katie Melua plays a gig where I work and casually raises a little shy of £200,000 for a two-hour set, and here’s me struggling to get people to cough up a tenner. I’m not great with money and my ideas for fundraising schemes usually involve viral marketing online, with no thought to the practicalities of collecting donations. Two people with diabetes, one cup is a great concept, but how to cash in...?

And so to jogging.

It’s pretty crap this week, not the distance or the motivation but the absence of pretty things to look at. This driving rain is the backdrop to my Saturday run.

This snow the backdrop on Sunday.

And this swamp is formerly the Thames Path, now flooded.

I’m not overjoyed to find myself in England again as I think you might be able to tell, but I do love London and like living in Wandsworth. It’s a few minutes’ walk to the river, Clapham, Putney, Richmond Park, Earlsfield, Fulham. You never have to complain about public transport letting you down because there isn’t any. And obviously it’s got the cheapest Council Tax in the country: The subsequent system of using rats to clean up rubbish works quite well, as do the pothole channels you can follow on the roads to avoid ever having to wear the tarmac surface. Wandsworth's my sort of place.

But when I step out of the house on Sunday morning, and start jogging, and travel six metres, with another 30,517 to go, and step onto a broken paving slab, that gives way, so my foot sinks through, into a puddle a few inches deep; and when I lift my foot out, soaked to the bone, sodden shoe, drenched sock; it’s hard to feel too smug about my neighbourhood.

There’s not any point in stopping - short of drying my shoe out with a hairdryer I can’t see the situation getting any better, it is raining heavily after all. So I slog on, mildly worried about trenchfoot. It’s all fairly tedious and when I reach my destination, the National Trust’s Osterly Park and House, it hardly seems worth it. It’s just grey, bleak, a far cry from the website. Horses in the sun are glossy things, magnificent, impressive. Here they’re just silly wet beasts. There’s a sea of cagoules. The park is boggy and the house is mundane. In the rain it’s not exactly the Helen of Troy of architecture, is it? Probably not worth the three-hour round trip.