CENTRAL LINE: Shepherds Bush to Bank

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 9^th 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 23^rd 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 6^th: 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