A great week's training and some words of encouragement from Ben Fogle!

Having thought London was cold, I was slightly taken aback when I set out for my first run in Berlin on Tuesday. It was freezing and must have been below 0, but it was great to back in Berlin and although we were busy working for the majority of the time I did manage to get out for a couple of lovely runs and we visited some nice German pubs and restaurants in the evenings (it was extremely tough sticking to my non-drinking plan at the beer exchange!!). We also stayed at the Hotel Adlon which was an absolutely stunning hotel! I got back to London on Thursday and after an early 5:30am wake up on Friday morning went for a great run with my mate Ed Morgan, we did 8 miles around Hyde Park and Green Park and I was suitably tired all day after what had been an extremely busy week! After a long overdue lie in on Saturday morning, I headed over to Olympia to visit the Adventure Travel show and to see Ben Fogle give a talk on a number of his adventures included the MDS. The show was excellent and Ben’s talk was inspirational – I managed to catch him afterwards and have a quick chat about the MDS, he wished my luck and his strongest piece of advice was to make sure my Gaiters are fully functioning if I want to keep all my toes – sounds like a solid piece of advice to me! I am planning on going on a 20 mile run in the Chantries woods in Guildford tomorrow morning as I really need to get some running time on different types of terrain. The rest of the weekend will be spent fundraising and organising my training for the next couple of weeks. I have booked a training day with Rory Coleman, who incidentally has completed the MDS a staggering 8 times and has run well over 700 marathons – a true hero! He will be taking me on a 26.2 mile run through the woods on the 11th Feb and I will have the chance to buy a lot of the more obscure pieces of kit that I will need for the desert! Yorkshire Cancer Research have also organised a meal up in Leeds so that the MDS team can meet and get to know each other a little, before flying out to Morocco. I am heading up to Leeds on the 17th Feb and I am hoping to combine the trip with a couple of fundraising initiatives while I am up there. On another note, I am really excited that Research Magazine is set to publish an article on my attempt to run the MDS and the magazine should be hitting stores in a week’s time; I will let you all know when it’s out. I have a tight fundraising target to hit before the end of January and I would be extremely grateful if people could spread the word about my race and visit my Just-giving site: http://www.justgiving.com/JohnGunny.