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News: Richard signs up to Amsterdam Marathon 2010

As part of his preparation for training for the Marathon Des Sables, I have signed up for the Amsterdam Marathon on 17th October 2010. This will be my third Amsterdam Marathon and my sixth Marathon.

You can check out all the details for the Marathon here
In the next couple of week’s I will be posting details of my training programme for the marathon and some of the races I plan to do in the run up to it.
Amsterdam Marathon, as I mentioned in my blog, is a great city marathon. It is generally flat, not too busy and has plenty of support along the route and particularly in the city.
This will be a great start to my MDS training and I hope to build on my 85-100 mile training weeks from earlier this year and use that endurance to get even quicker over 26.2 miles than I have gone before.
If you’re interested in joining a group of Edinburgh Athletic Club (EAC) runners on their mission to conquer the marathon then please get in touch! richard.meade@running-hot.co.uk


News: Richard Enters 2011 Marathon Des Sables

Hi, I am Richard Meade and on the 1st April 2011 I will be running the 26th Marathon Des Sables.

This website is going to be my way of telling you about how I am going to train and run in this race, as well as let you know about my fundraising activity (see below).

This is going to be my toughest challenge yet and my biggest adventure and I can’t wait to get started! Most of us everyday dream about having adventures and I can’t believe I am going to get the chance to live one of mine.

So, why the Marathon Des Sables? Honestly, I saw it on TV as part of a documentary and I couldn’t sleep with the excitement of thinking about doing it myself. I love testing myself physically and mentally and I want to push the limit as much as I can.

I secured my place in this race by agreeing to raise money for a charity, so I need to find £5,000 for the charity. The money I raise all goes to the charity. The cost of the race and everything else that goes with that I am paying myself. It wouldn’t be fair to get you lot to pay for my adventure of a life time! Although if anyone reading this is super rich and fancies paying for my adventure, I wouldn’t say no!

The charity I have chosen is Facing Africa (www.facingafrica.org). Why Facing Africa – well if you’ve head of the charity you’ll know why. If not, then Facing Africa provides funds for the visits of teams of voluntary surgeons from the UK, Germany and Holland to Nigeria and Ethiopia to perform facial reconstruction surgery on the victims of the disease noma, and the acquisition of related equipment for hospitals in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Sokoto (Nigeria).

Noma is a horrendous condition affecting the most vulnerable children at such a young age. What makes it worse is that this is both preventable and treatable and neither happens anywhere nearly enough.

By choosing to challenge myself in Africa I want to help be part of something that leaves more than just footprints in the sand of that continent.

I am going to try to update this website daily with information on my training and preparation for this challenge, as well as some of my wonderful insight on the world of running. I will also be updating you on the events and activity I am going to be doing in order to raise the funds I need for Facing Africa.

I hope you like the site and stay interested. Please feel free to pass it on to anyone you think would be interested in reading it.

Bye for now

Richard