Bradford or Bust

Wowsers - a quarter of the way through the year and a quarter of the way through the challenges! Hope everyone is having an excellent year so far - time flies when you are training, planning events and travelling to undertake them.

But what a brilliant time we had in Leeds and Bradford. Challenge 3 was the Bradford 10k on Sunday 25 March, with over 1,000 runners taking part. Well done to all 1,000+ I say, though we were principally concerned with the Fight CF Team of Roz, Sarah, Andy, Rob and myself. You can support everyone's efforts @ http://www.justgiving.com/teams/FCF and you can also donate by text. Simply text YFCF99 followed by the amount in pounds (e.g. YFCF99 £1) to 70070.

Roz was taking part in her first 2012 challenge after beating sciatica into submission and training really hard to be able to compete - going from hardly being able to walk around to doing a 10k in a littler over a few weeks! Sarah and Andy (my sisted and her husband) were joining us for this event along with good friend and all round top bloke, Rob Warden, doing his first ever organised run, all for the CF Trust.

As you can see from this picture just before the start, we got the weather for it! Incredibly foggy and incredibly humid - plus a 9am start time the day the clocks went forward. Did I mention it was Sunday? At least we had Andy's paella of the night before to power us round!

The course had a couple of hills, friendly marshalls and a rythmic drum band. We had curious warm  up music at the start where we all crowded together for the gun and set off, staggered then flowing onto the streets of Bradford as the fog lifted and the sun began to shine.

The run went really well with Andy, Rob and myself cracking the 50min barrier, Sarah storming round in 55mins and Roz trouncing expectations by completing the race non-stop in 1hr and 5mins. Sarah, Andy and Roz managed to pose after our endevours - check out the clear blue sky!
  
We needed sustenance - so we beat a hasty strategic retreat to a Leeds pub for some of Sundays' finest.

So we raised a glass and enjoyed a roast, you can see Rob on the right with his wonderful wife Mary - who aside from saving me with a cream egg at the end of the race but is also joining the 12-in-12 challenge by creating 12 artworks over the next 12 months, which will then become a calendar and greetings cards to be sold to raise money for CF Trust. You can follow her talent and progress at her blog: http://marywarden.wordpress.com/

Another challenge successfully dispatched and on to April, 18km, a canoe and Lake Windermere. A massive thank you again for all the ongoing support.

Bri.