Happy London Marathon Shouldabeen Day! It’s lovely out there again - blue skies, a light breeze... gosh imagine if we’d been able to run!

To mark the occasion I decided to run a “metric marathon” instead of the full distance. Basically, it was worrying my wife and I that sure, I could run it, but what if I hurt myself or pushed myself so hard that it left me more susceptible to getting ill.

I didn’t really know where I’d end up today, just headed for the river, but stayed away from the route landmarks in case it was busy with other folks doing their own replacement run.

It was mostly quiet when I started out, but as the morning went on it got more and more busy. Wish I’d gone out earlier!

Along the way I discovered a few new places - including Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill Ecological Park. I’ll definitely be back - it’s a beautiful slice of nature I didn’t even know existed.

So this marks the end of me talking about the London Marathon for a bit. I’m not convinced it’ll happen for the public in October, so I’m drawing a line here. I’ll mull over what my new challenge for myself will be. Open to suggestions! I’m thinking perhaps continuing my half marathon a week and seeing if I can do fifty in a year, or something like that.

Thanks for all your support and thumbs up along the way everyone. It means a lot to have a little group of folks I can share the ups and downs with.

As Emily said at the start of all this, the aim isn’t to run the marathon, it’s to become the kind of person who runs marathons. Maybe not yet, but I’m definitely going in the right direction!

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A bunch of us are doing this -> The Milestone Pursuit Metric Marathon 26.2km

I was expecting to feel quite disappointed this weekend, because tomorrow was supposed to be the London Marathon. But actually, I’m not too bothered by it not happening and actually feeling pretty happy. I’ve put in lots of effort for this. Running in storms, rain, some dark, frosty mornings. But it’s not really been just about running on the day. I’m feeling stronger and more together than I have in years, so I’ll be going out tomorrow nonetheless, as I have been every Sunday for months.

Instead of going for the full marathon distance, I’m planning on running a “metric marathon”, 26km.

Today, a little 5km warm up around the now opened-up green space that a local private school has.

My Block board components arrived and I’ve started setting it up next to my laptop. Nice to hang up the stuff I use every day and have them on display instead of in a drawer or left on the side!

Quick 8k whilst also having a call about work. It was definitely possible and with the Aeropex I didn’t feel like I was being dangerous. Might try that again!

Last week I was introduced to a friend of a friend who was working on what sounded like a wild project and needed some help. It turned out that it indeed was a wild project and they did!

Basically, over the weekend I helped launch an online teaching website for all the kids who are going back to school this week and don’t have video based curriculum-aligned lessons. All last week a team of teachers shot 180 x 1 hour videos and made learning resources. A small team of us shipped a website over the weekend.

And on Monday morning it went live. 300,000 people hit the site on the first day!

It’s up at www.thenational.academy (search for Oak national academy to find it).

So it’s been a bit wild. On Sunday I still did my half marathon as planned and phew. Tiring at another level.

Anyway. Tried a quick 5k to see if I could get near my past best speed. Not really, the weekend has tired me out a bit, and plus it was busy at the park at that time. So I’ll stick to my road routes at my normal pace I think!

I started the day with an early start for half marathon #14. Wow, it was quiet! Hardly anyone around at that time in the morning. Even when I briefly cut through the park.

This weekend I’m doing a bit of a wild side project - helping a group of teachers get a website up to help deliver a curriculum of video content to the nation’s children. Basically I’m responsible for making the website go live with good settings for privacy, security and good documentation for how it all works so that the dev team can get some permanent folks to help out.

It’s inspiring to work on this but a couple of long days making it all work. You might have seen it just got announced on the BBC!

I took two of the kids out for a bit of exercise - for the first time in five weeks!