So lucky, lucky, lucky!
The London Marathon is one of the top 5 Marathons in the world and you can imagine how high the demand is to get a place. As soon
as the marathon finished, they had opened
the registration for the ballot. You basically have to apply a year in
advance. Half a year later I got my reply in the post. You either receive a
magazine telling you that you are in or out. Mine was unsuccessful.
I knew it would be a massive challenge to train
for and sometimes I was not sure if I
really should win a ballot place as it’s a lot for your body. But when I
received the magazine that my application was unsuccessful, I felt sad. Friends
got in, some didn’t and now I wished for a place. Found racing for a charity was
never an option for me for two reasons.
First of all the minimum target you have to raise in a certain time period are
around £1.500 and higher. That is too much especially for a foreigner.
It would be more of a challenge to raise all that
money than actually run the Marathon.
I was approached by a few charities and it all felt
a bit of "money making" to me. Don’t get me wrong, raising money for a good
cause is great but not if you only do it to get a Marathon place. With all this
charity culture here in the UK, you receive every other week a colleagues/friends request to sponsor them. I feel a bit squeezed by now. Yes for fund-raising but choose your charity and support them not only for one race event!
Back to my happy story about getting a place in the race. I simply took part in a Twitter competition: "Upload your picture with the rejection magazine," and add a note why I still wanted to run the London Marathon.
This was my winning picture:
"I would like to run my first ever Marathon in the city I live in with this happy face on."
A selection of other winners. 20 pics in total
Unbelievable how lucky I was. Social Media is great fun just give it a chance.
My training schedule, pics from outdoors, challenges and progress will be posted here in a 2 weeks pattern.
Good luck for your training. I'm so excited for my biggest event in 2015.
