The National Running Show Part 1

 

Hi everyone and thanks again for visiting my blog.

I’m really sorry that I haven’t posted anything in a while but things have been pretty hectic recently.

On Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd January 2018 I attended the National Running Show held at the NEC in Birmingham. For those of you who have read my blog before you will know that I am a running enthusiast and I was offered a free ticket for this event so I was really excited to go.

In the lead up to this event I was so excited as I knew a lot of people from the Twitter group @ukrunchat would be going and I was really looking forward to meeting people face to face for the first time, especially as I am planning to do the Limasol marathon with some of them in just over 2 months time. I managed to meet quite a lot of them.

Myself and my friend Ben got the train early on the Saturday morning and set off for Birmingham. Whilst on the train, I met Carmen, John and Caroline all of who were members of the @ukrunchat Twitter group.

The NEC was packed with runners and the one thing that always stood out throughout the full weekend was that it was our love for running the bought us all together. People were here from all walks of life from all over the UK and it was wonderful to see. On Saturday morning the place was heaving and the queue was incredibly busy.

The schedule was jam packed for both days. Saturday included speeches from Dame Kelly Holmes, Jo Pavey, Jenny Meadows, Anita Bean, Steve Edwards, Luke Tyburski, Susie Chan, a panel with a speech on mindset and a panel who talked about the Towpeth Challenge where they talked about running to the NEC from London in 5 days.

The first speech on Saturday was by Dame Kelly Holmes and this was the speech that I was really excited for. I mean it’s not everyday you get the opportunity to listen to the words of a double Olympic gold medal winner and double world champion. The stage was set and the hall was full. The thing that I like about this speech is that Dame Kelly spoke about issues in her life which affected her such as mental health and her mothers death and this made me connect to the speech more. She also showed the video of when she won the gold medal at the Olympics and this sent goosebumps through me and I think it would have done to the majority of other people. A wonderful achievment for her. One thing that stands out from Dame Kelly is that she always interacts with fans and this was apparant once the speech was over.

I visited the stands for a few hours and missed a few of the speeches. I did however manage to catch the final few minutes of the speech by Steve Edwards. Steve has ran over 800 marathons since he started running at the age of 18 and he runs his marathons in around 3 hours 15 mins or under. It’s an incredible achievement and he wants to get to 1,000 marathons. Steve’s talk was about achieving potential and he has consistently shown that potential can be achieved if you work hard and believe in yourself. He is a shining example of this and it was a pleasure to listen to him.

I couldn’t wait to listen to Susie Chan by now as her speech was only ultra running and this is something that I am seriously considering. I think Susie gave me one fo the biggest lessons I had learnt all weekend in her speech. Susie started running in her early thirties and she has achieved a lot including running the marathon de sables a number of times (which is a 156 miles race over 6 days in the Sahara dessert). After this speech I really wanted to do ultra running and Susie even encouraged me to try and do a 50 miles run whilst speaking to her after the event. Fat chance of that at the moment but it’s a goal to aim towards.

After the positive mindset panel discussion, the members of the Towpeth Challenge came to speak about their experiences. It was a pretty incredible achievement and  it was interesting to learn about each others experiences. One thing that the majority of them said is how together the team was despite having only just met one another. From my own experience, I see this in the running community on a weekly basis and lots of runners feel the running community is brilliant for this and I think the event as a whole completely epitomised that.

That was the end of day 1 and please keep an eye on the blog as I hope to post an update on Part 2 in the next couple of days.

Thanks for reading.

Faisal