Given today’s tube strike I’m sure many of you are now
familiar with getting around London by alternative means! I thought this new
found interest in alternatives to the Underground provided a convenient excuse to
update you on our tube map training for our marathons (now 14 weeks and 16
weeks away!).
You’ll notice from our progress map that since the last blog
post it has got a lot more colourful. Prior to Christmas, Anna and I decided to
tackle the Circle Line. All in one go. The idea being that we wanted to end the
year having run more than half of the marathon distance. Back in November when
we ran the District line, we got very frustrated having to stop every half mile
to take a selfie, so to prevent this same frustration on the Circle, Anna came
up with the inspired idea of filming us on the GoPro. We hope you might have
seen the resulting video documenting our efforts.
So we did the same for our latest instalment of the Central
Line- Shepherds Bush to Bank. We met in Caffe Nero where Anna attached the
GoPro to her new chest strap, looking like some sort of intrepid explorer ready
to tackle a journey she could in fact have made in 18 minutes on the tube.
Assuming the tubes were running of course....too soon?!
As Anna was designated camerawoman for the day she isn’t
visible in most of the footage but just pops up at the beginning and end,
instead you are treated to me prancing around in front of the stations we pass.
I hope you enjoy our latest film, which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/eCW6MUxSqaY
But I wanted to take a quick minute to just remind you all
why we are doing this. On the 9th of April Anna will be taking on
the Brighton marathon to raise money for four charities that mean a great deal
to her (Bloodwise, The Children’s Heart Foundation, OCD-UK and Prostate Cancer
UK). You can read more on her fundraising page (www.virginmoneygiving.com/annashields).
And on the 23rd April I will be running the
London Marathon to raise money for the RNIB and there’s more on my fundraising
page too (www.virginmoneygiving.com/jessford).
Whilst the marathons themselves will no doubt be challenging, we
really wanted to give you guys a bit more of an inkling on just how much we’re
running to train for this and that concept of distance inspired our tube map
training. So here’s a little run down of where we’ve got to since we began this
tube map endeavour back in November and for those who like more regular forms
of distance measurement (metres, miles, furlongs…) I’ve included a few of those
too!
LINE SUMMARY
Circle: 100%
complete
Northern Line: 30%
complete
Central Line: 66%
complete
District Line: 55%
complete
Jubilee Line: 40%
complete
Victoria Line: 50% complete
Metropolitan Line: 75%
complete (by stations...not distance!)
Piccadilly Line: 0%
complete
Bakerloo Line: 0%
complete
Total Underground
Distance Run: 62.9 miles
Total All Training
Miles since Nov 6th: 158.5 miles
Tube Map Training as
% of Running: 39.6%
If you're suitably impressed, then please head on down to our fundraising pages (above) and give whatever you can to support some incredible causes. If you're waiting until there's a few more 100%s in the list above, then that is completely fine too! Just keep reading and keep supporting us...our training is really going to hot up over the next few weeks and having you all behind us means a lot.
Jess x
