Couch Potato To Ironman: Hectic few weeks 1: Belfast4Haiti 5K

I actually started out doing one LONG blog post.. but it was too long even for me so Im cutting it into two and will, in my usual style, be posting 2 blog posts in two days after nothing for a few weeks.

What a hectic couple of weeks!
This was mostly written the day after the Belfast 4 Haiti 5k on a flight en route to San Francisco for work.

Yesterday was a completely amazing day. It was an incredible success.
We had around 250 pre-registered for the event and right now I'm not 100% sure how many registered on the day.
I had printed 200 registeration forms
We ran out of these
We had 550 race numbers
we ran out of these too.
Not bad going for a couple of complete of people doing it in their spare time with no previous experience and pretty busy day jobs to do as well.

My colleauges Lisa and Lorraine did a phenomenal job and the list of volunteers who came to help out on the day were amazing.
Everyone invovled worked for free and with amazing enthusiasm.
We even had some local heroes come along... The picture above is me standing with Dame Mary Peters... A Northern Ireland athlete who won Olympic gold in the pentathalon in 1972. You gotta love my obnoxious orange/ yellow stylin combo.. and the fact that i seem to be scratching my nose...
I managed to do the run myself in a pretty decent time of 22:15.
We had a great day and in total the run raised over £7,000.
The total raised by the combination of the run and the two evening events is now over £40,000
Im unbelievably proud and happy to have been involved and to have been able to help in whatever small way I did.
Thanks to everyone who helped, took part and offered support.
For those of you who still want to donate, please feel free to do so, my donation page will remain open for another while.

Finally.. a bunch of nice photos... You can click on them for full size versions.

The first two pics below are me posing with the first lady across the line, Catriona McCorkell and a shot of the midpack, which gives a good perspective of the numbers if you look in the background. Thanks to Eddie for the photos

The next three come from Shereen The first is me being interviewed (which was weird) by the local news folks, the second are the two lads who came first (on the left) and second (on the right), the third shows people lining up and in the foreground, just behind those two random blokes are my co-organisers Lisa (left, in the Belfast4haiti t-shirt) and Lorraine (in the furry looking jacket).