After watching The Strangers on the Bridge presentation in the Imperial in May whilst also being inspired by Mark Chellum’s effort in April of running three marathons within a month for charity, I decided to embark on my own challenge to do my bit for a charity that I care a lot about, specifically Mind.
Rather than participating in the traditional Oktoberthon and binge drinking my way through October as I often like to do, I set myself a challenge which I referred to as “Scott’s Oktober-thon”.
Oktober-thon involved running The London Royal Parks half Marathon, The Amsterdam Marathon & The Bilbao Marathon across three consecutive weekends, a total distance of 105 kilometres. I did refrain from publicising my challenge too much due to injury niggles which made me fear I may not be able to complete the challenge.
During each run I endured the mental battle, telling myself that “there’s no way I’m going to finish today’s run, let alone do it next weekend”, but I managed to pull myself together and stay motivated and in the early hours of Sunday morning, 12:50 a.m. to be precise, I crossed the final finish line in Bilbao. My times were a bit slower than I had hoped (London Half Marathon – 2:01:35 / Amsterdam Marathon – 4:41:41 / Bilbao Marathon 4:23:45) but I’m just happy to have finished as my lack of training and preparation was far from ideal! If anything it’s motivated me to want to do it again and beat my personal best time from two years ago of 3:35.
So I look forward to embarking on another charity challenge next year.
You can support Scott in his efforts to raise funds for Mind – The Mental Health Charity by visiting his Just Giving page here.
Words by Scott Taylforth
