Even though I’ve run the distance several times over the last couple of months I was still very nervous on the start line, this died away once we got away. The first 3 miles were really difficult to get my pace right due to the large number of people running, at the start they had said there were 18,000 of us. No sooner had I got settled into my pace and suddenly I needed the loo, why is it you always need the toilet at the most inappropriate time and it  really doesn’t help when people start trying to hand you water. I ended up giving in at the 8 mile mark and queued up to use a portaloo, if I’d carried on running I’d of either had to of finished with crossed legs or very damp shorts.

I don’t know why but I’d always thought Reading was quite flat, not as in level flat. What I hadn’t expected was their to be two big hills, the first was about 200 foot climb over ¾ of a mile the second was worse at around 250 foot in less than ½ a mile. The second hill was a case of not looking at the summit but the road a couple of metres ahead of me dealing with it bit by bit.

When I eventually got to the 12 mile marker I felt my spirits lift, just 1.1 miles to go. I never really thought much about the effect a crowd at sporting event could have, but in that last mile the encouragement and cheering that was coming from the spectators for everyone running really did lift me. When I eventually ran into the football stadium I felt like my feet were floating as I heard the cheers for everyone running from about 6,000 spectators, the experience was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I owe a big thank you to Leanne my better half whose support over the last couple of months has really helped me ramp up the distances I’ve been running.

My finishing time was 1:58:59, which was just inside my target of 2 hours and I learnt lots of little lessons to take forward with me for the 26.2 miles I’ve got to do in May.  It seems awfully close now and 26.2 miles seems rather more daunting.

I’m running in aid of CLIC Sargent, if with your help I manage to raise £2,000 then I shall run in a nurse’s uniform. I’ve been told by Leanne that at the moment it looks like it will be a little number from Ann Summers, I’m not sure who this is going to be worse for me or the spectators. To make a donation and destroy what miniscule of dignity I have left then head to www.justgiving.com/Nicholas-Armitt

The marathon training is back on track after a disastrous December and January through illness. I ended up ith what seemed like the longest cold in the world, I'd almost got to the point that if it had gone on much longer I would of asked the vet to put me down. Turns out I'd also had a viral infection along with several colds. I never thought I'd hear myself say this but for those two months I was so frustrated as I wanted to get out and just run and I did a couple of times, which wasn't the best idea as each time I did I felt as sick as a dog.

Well I finally shifted the colds by the start of February and running was able to commence full pelt. I'm now back upto running 3 times a week with a least one run of over 13 miles in preparation for the Reading half marathon in two weeks time. I feel quite confident about this having run the distance several times already. The marathon is a slightly different matter, lets just say with it only being 10 weeks away I'm beginning to feel slightly nervous about distance. I'm just going to have to get lots of training in between now and then.

This month I’ve had to deal with shin splints and a cold one after the other, it’s meant I’ve not been able to run for 3 of the last 4 weeks. I’ve been climbing up the walls wanting to get out. I managed to get out 5 times, covered 36km’s, burned 3,356 calories with a total time duration 3hrs 9mins. Due to injury and illness I’ve mainly done short 4k runs, but on the positive side I finished the month with a 13.27km run the longest distance I’ve ever run.

December is all about kicking the distance up and no longer about getting fast times. I’m going to be running an average of 30kms a week, while focusing at running 5.30 per km as this is the pace I’m looking to run the marathon at. Hopefully it isn’t going to get to cold out there.

I got up early Thursday and headed upto central London with my camera gear feeling a little nervous. I found it strange that an event I'd volunteered to do and wasn't being paid for still made me feel as nervous as a paid event. I arrived on time and started working straight away photographing some of the rooms in the new home, the charity had bought 3 terrace houses near UCL Hospital and converted it into one house providing free accommodation for families of children receiving treatment for cancer and leukaemia in London. The next 3 hours seemed to fly away as I skirted around taking photographs of everyone there and the actual ribbon cutting.

I followed Marie Jordon as she was shown round some of the rooms and was found myself struck by the conversation between her and the lady showing her round. It was a genuine eye opener on how much hard work had been put in to achieve the success of the project. I later caught up with Marie's husband Eddie to grab some photographs of him, only to find him on the phone to The Times doing an interview for the charity, once he finished Ellana the Senior Press officer for the charity took him round the house to see all the hard work that had been done. It was interesting to see him noticing the small details and commenting on them.

The thing with being the person with the camera is after about the first half hour people stop noticing you and start being themselves. This is when you start seeing people as they really are and what struck me most about everyone there was they really cared about the people the charity was helping and had a genuine interest in what it was doing.

Thursday morning has helped to change my mind on something I was quite determined about. As many of you already know, mainly because I wont shut up about it I'm running the Edinburgh Marathon this coming May. I'd originally said I wasn't going to run it for a charity as I wanted it as a personal challenge. This disappointed some of my friends as they thought it was an opportunity missed, well I've changed my mind and decided that I shall run for CLIC Sargent. The work this charity does makes a big difference on many peoples lives, they don't just provide accommodation, they also employ and fund care professionals in hospitals across the UK. If you have a moment then goto their website to learn a little more about what they do. If you would like to sponsor my first ever marathon then just pop over to my Just Giving page and help me to raise money for a really good charity. 

Well it's time for my monthly progress report, I'm a day late with it as I was busy with photography commitments yesterday. September has been a bit of a watershed month for my running, at the same time as increasing the distance the times have come tumbling down.  The amount of time it takes me to recover has also decreased, it's quite incredible how quickly your fitness can turn round. I even got the pleasant surprise of seeing that I'd dropped a clothes size.

This month I’ve been out running 14 times, covered 85kms , burned 8,918 calories with a total time duration of 8hrs 16mins. I started the month running avarage km times of 5.08 over 4km, 5.20 over 8km and 6.10 over 12km. I've finished the month with average km times of 4.34 over 4km, 4.41 over 8km and 5.01 over 12km. I'm really pleased with how well the month has gone, but I 've still got a long way to go.

October is going to be roughly the same training plan as September, just a bit wetter. The next couple of months are going to be the hardest for motivation with the dark nights rolling in and the weather deteriorating, I really don't enjoy running in the rain. I've also got my first 10K run this Sunday, I'm feeling a bit daunted by it as it appears the race is slightly more serious than I'd realised. Mind you it isn't about time but getting used to running with others while keeping my own pace. Hopefully I wont come last.

Well it’s been a month since I got confirmation that my entry had been accepted for the Edinburgh Marathon and the realisation of what I’ve let myself in for has started to hit home. Initially I felt a nervous excitement, yes I know how can you feel excited about running 26 miles. I have to admit at being slightly puzzled by this reaction myself and ended up concluding that I’m mad. Then a week after that the realization of how much training I need to do hit me, I sat down one Sunday afternoon and put together a training plan for the 9 Months leading upto the event. My plan has me running over  800km, that’s a 160 more than running from London to Edinburgh.

This month I’ve been out running 10 times, covered 37kms , burned 4,014 calories with a total time duration of 3hrs 45mins. I’ve seen a real improvement in my fitness over the last 4 weeks and really goes to show how a little bit of exercise can help a lot. I’ve also changed my diet and moved away from eating takeaways while also not eating as much convenience food. I’ve started eating a lot more fresh fruit and vegetables, while at the same time ensuring I drink at least a litre of water a day and reduced my alcohol intake. I’ve even cut down on the amount of late nights I was having, the combined benefit of all this is I feel more alert and I’m no longer spending Saturday mornings in bed a sleep, anyone would of thought I was a teenager.

The plan for September is to start increasing the distance I’m running and to start swimming once a week. I also need to go out and buy some new running shoes, the ones I’m presently using are about four years old and have been worn out from gym use when I first got them. I expect that I’m going to have to buy at least another pair as well early next year.

If you want to keep up with my training I publishing my run information on Twitter and Facebook. I’ll also be writing a blog once a month about my progress and what I’ve got upto, so feel free to pop by again. Oh and no the picture at the top isn't me running in a blonde wig.



I regularly travel through Wimbledon on my way to Croydon. I get the train from Ewell West using my train season ticket, then switch across to the tram platform and touch in with my oyster card.

Now this is usually where the problems begin, because I don't use my oyster card a lot I'm not always sure how much I have on it. This occasionally means when I touch in my card is short of credit. This is never normally a issue as when I get to the gate or touch in point and it indicates that I'm out of credit I can just  head to a ticket machine and top up. But at Wimbledon they have no way to top up oyster cards, not even via the ticket machine. Now if Wimbledon was just a train station I could understand, but it isn't it's also a tube station. The only way to top up an Oyster card at Wimbledon is to exit the station and find a newsagents that do Oyster top ups. I have to ask how TFL can possibly think this is acceptable,  the idea behind Oyster was to make life easier, well that is except for Wimbledon where it appears that the Oyster card scheme is missing a pearl.

What is it I hear you ask that can bring out such a reaction, (at this point I’m assuming at least one person other than myself will be reading this and that your asking what is it) well it’s the use of onboard camera flash, firstly I must say I have nothing against the use of camera flash I use it myself on a regular basis. What I have the problem with is when people use the little flash on their compact camera or the onboard flash on a DSLR and they're sat in row z watching a sports event or a pop concert. How can they possibly think that a little tiny flash is ever going to illuminate their subject who is over 50 metres away. Its the equivalent  of driving down a dark country lane using the light from your mobile phones screen to illuminate your way, it just wont work. Even the large flash guns that I use struggle to work over this distance and they cost about £300 each.

The only effect that a small flash will have over this sort of distance will be to light up the back of the heads of the people in front of you and potentially make your subject look darker. Next time your at a concert or sporting event and you want to photograph something on the pitch or stage turn the onboard flash off!

 So what's the challenge? well over the last 8 months I’ve been jogging to get fit. I have to say though I’ve always had a dislike of running, partly from having asthma as a kid while at the same time having a minor balance problem. But over the last 8 months I’ve started getting a kick from running and I’ve even been gradually increasing the distances up to 10km. Based on this I've decided to run a marathon, yes I am mad but why not for once in my life set myself a real challenge.

 The simplest form of backup is to have an external hard drive and just copy across all your important files every so often, I wouldn’t leave it any longer than a month between backups though. Backing up in this way isn’t efficient but its better than nothing, there is still a danger you could miss files when copying across to the hard drive.

 The next option is to buy some backup software, the advantage with this is you can tell the software how often you want to backup and after the first backup you can get it to just backup new files or updated ones. if you’ve got a Mac then your already one step ahead of most Windows users as with upto date OSX software you’ve already got backup software built in called Time Machine. I would recommend everyone to have at least this level of backup.

 Having an external hard drive with your backup is very sensible, but what happens if someone breaks into your house and steals your computer and the external hard drive or if you house goes up in flames? Well you’ll loose everything, this is where having an off site copy of your data makes sense. There are several options for this, you can have a hard drive you keep somewhere else that you bring back to your computer every so often to backup and if your going to do this then you should do it about once a month. Another option is cloud based back-up, the real advantage of this is depending on how good the solution is you can potentially access your data anywhere on any computer. There are a couple of disadvantages with cloud based software, firstly most companies will only let you backup whats on your main hard drive and secondly your initial backup can take some time depending on how much you have to backup.

 A lot of ISP’s are starting to provide cloud based backup at very reasonable rates, you do need to check a couple of things before diving in head long to using them or any other cloud backup service. Firstly do they have a limit on how much you can backup with them. Next where do their servers sit, do they have a secure facility and what country. The what country part is important because if it’s outside the jurisdiction of your local data protection laws then their is a good chance your data will not be protected to the same level. In my case the company I use have their servers based in the European Union so I’m covered by the European Data Protection Act. You also need to check how easy it is to get all your data deleted if you ever move away from the provider and what guarantees they provide to ensure this is done. Finally you need to check what their process for backing up is, as you never know what could happen.

Presently I have the below four levels of back up:-

• Site Based Hard Drive - Time Machine 500Gb

• Cloud Based - Mobile Me 20Gb 

• Cloud Based - V Stuff Unlimited (500Gb)

• Portable - iPhone 8Gb

I don’t use all four levels for all my data as not all of them are suitable, the things I do backup across all four are E-mail, Contacts and Calendar. I only backup everything over two levels and thats site based and cloud based via V Stuff, this comes down to the fact I have 400GB of data stored on my main hard drive and the other two levels just don’t have the space.

The key thing is to have your data backed up somewhere, if it isn’t backed up then its as good as lost so remember backup, backup, backup.

Disclosure - I presently work for Virgin Media Business which is part of Virgin Media who provide the online backup and storage product V-Stuff.