Challenges for the rest of my life - what this is all about

So it starts like this. I'm 43, male, with a pretty good life all things considered, beautiful wife, two lovely daughters, a nice house, great friends, biggish but manageable mortgage, job that is not quite dull enough that I can't cope with it, etc etc. I figure that, barring the unexpected, I'm pretty much over half way through my existence. When I was 40 I made a list of things that I wanted to do in my forties. It's kind of working out OK, but something has changed. A conversation at work with a colleague led to both of us applying to do a marathon this September. He'd done London last year, and he convinced me that it was do-able, I'd always fancied having a go but had always thought it was maybe a bit out of reach. Anyway, I've paid up now and I'm pretty tight with the money so that's it, we're running it and that's that. I'll go into the running in a lot more detail over the next few months.

Anyway, that got me thinking some more, and to cut a pretty short story shorter still, I decided that, however many years I have left here, I should set myself some kind of challenge to focus on each year. Now I should point out straight away that I am not talking about stuff like crossing the Andes in a glider or breaking the land speed record, in fact if I manage to drag my aging limbs around 26 miles it may be the only actual physical challenge I get to, I'm talking about mundane stuff that I've either not done enough of or not done at all that I would like to do. So I'm warning you now that if you stick with me you may be reading about my cooking disasters, or me spending 12 months reading classics, or trying to write a symphony, or the perfect rock ballad or, well, that's the thing, I haven't really decided what I'm gonna do, just that this year I am attempting to run a marathon. Next year I'll do something else.

For the next few months I will be writing a blog / diary / random trail of thoughts around how someone who is at least a stone and a half over his ideal running weight and who has not pulled on his trainers since October is going to transform himself into a lean mean running machine who has pledged to run the Nottingham Marathon on September the 12th in 4 and a half hours. It might go all pear shaped, it might be a triumph, it may be vaguely entertaining, it might get picked up by faber & faber, who knows, maybe a future challenge will be to be a published author.

cheers
Andy