Hello all you lovely runners out there on a yucky Saturday in London.
11/12s of the way through my Alzheimer’s Challenge to raise £2018, in 2018 by running 2018kms. How am I doing? - on the fund raising front not as good as I’d like but, thanks to many people on here, far, far better than I’d imagined.
On the kms front, I have run 1918.41kms - please don’t giggle at the 0.41, every bit of a metre is important to me!!! And that means a measly 99.59kms to go. Of course I don’t mean measly because two years ago doing that kind of kilometrage in one month would have been unthinkable, but thanks to Mr Smooth, our mentors, and all my lovely friends on here, 99.59kms seems an easy target now.
It feels even better now that all those myths about running being bad for you have been de-bunked well and truly.
The other great thing I did in November was to get an invite from Alzheimers Research to see how they are doing with research into Alzheimers and Dementia. It was fascinating, interesting and encouraging, whilst also being utterly depressing at the same time. I never realised that Alzheimer’s was discovered over 100 years ago, but of course it has only been relatively recently that we’ve had the technology and capability to even look into cures.
Here is the spoiler alert - the gold standard is to get a cure and reverse the symptoms, the realistic aim is to slow down the progression, so much so that people die naturally of other causes and not their dementia. It sounds wonderful to me, but as ever there’s a sting in the tail, the Head of Research said realistically even with gene therapy and stem cell capabilities, he and his team believe that type of ‘cure’ is 50 years away. That means his researchers - typically in their 30s, may not even be able to benefit from the research they do. They are committed to the research, as the numbers of drugs being developed in clinical trials have dropped by almost a third recently and some companies such as Pfizer are pulling out of the field altogether.
That was an eye opener to me, and so with my eyes firmly open, this month I aim to do my final 99.59kms, taking in the suggestions to do a Royal Park run as my final run on Christmas Eve.
And this month to keep my running fresh, I’ve been searching for Mummycav ’s mojo, so far she has been damned difficult to find, but I have 99.59kms to find her before the year is out. I tried using the Mummycav mix on Spotify yesterday, but it didn’t seem to work - but it was a shortish run, in not the most interesting parts of town..
jancanrun.com/2018/12/01/30...
Out again tomorrow, maybe the bright lights of London will help the mojo make her way back to Yorkshire
The funny bit is that the health unlocked app - tagged this post as gastro something or other... maybe it was the word yucky that did it.
The Last Leg of the Alzheimer’s Challenge
Wishing Jancanrun All the Best for her final 2018km
