On Tuesday morning at 7am,
Nicky Spinks, Clare Oliffe, myself and a bunch of others much more likely than
me to make it all the way will be setting off from Conwy Castle to retrace the
route of the original 1992 Dragon’s Back race (give or take the odd road
checkpoint). The plan is to run 200
miles down the length of Wales over 5 days to raise money for Odyssey, a small
charity that organises adventure courses for cancer patients. So far, with the help of Tim
Rippon and others, we’ve raised a little over £1800. It costs £6000 to fund a
course for 10 people and we’d dearly love to get close to that figure as a
team, so if you can make a small donation, it’d be hugely appreciated.
In return, in those quiet moments
at work this week, you can have a laugh at our navigational incompetence by visiting
the tracking website http://maps.opentracking.co.uk/belly13.cfm and by keeping
an eye on the news story here which the webmaster has kindly agreed to keep
updated.
If however you want your news
straight from the dragon’s mouth, then you can get the full McCoy on our facebook page, find out what’s
happening at the front of the field from Nicky who’ll be posting various
snippets via Racekit, and get
a view from the rear on twitter @dragonsbelly13 (where @dpcalendar will be
taking his busman’s holiday).
This really is a very good cause,
so please do visit our team page at http://www.justgiving.com/teams/dragonsbelly
and give what you can. You can donate to
one, more or all of us … and to make it that little bit easier, we’ve even set
up a collective runners’ page to take donations if you just can’t decide which
of us you want to sponsor most.
Nor are we above a little bit of
bribery in the pursuit of sponsorship. We
will be putting the names of everyone that makes a donation (no matter how
large or small) into a hat at the end of the week, and the two winners drawn
will each receive a copy of the Dragon’s Back 2012 DVD, which has been kindly
donated by its producer, Richard Heap, of Slackjaw Film.
See y’all in a week or two.
Willy