Here is a little info about me. I am an inline skater from London, UK. I have been racing recreationally for some years and competed in about 50 marathons, mostly in continental Europe but also in the UK. I generally finish in about an hour and a half these days, which is respectable considering I was never a top level speed skater.
Most of my skating these days is spent around marshalling the free London street skates on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. I have been marshalling regularly since August 2001 and have become an accomplished street skater able to cope easily with many surface varieties and gradients while mingling with traffic.
In 2006 I started to lose my interest in competitive marathon skating when I had a hypo in one race. The fourth in four consecutive weekends. I had another seven marathons booked to race that year and I did the next few "socially" and found out that the difference between killing yourself to get a good time and just enjoying it is about three minutes over the average ninety minutes. Well I was never good enough to win anything and that made me decide to start taking things more easily and concentrating purely on technique to be faster rather than getting myself fitter and risking injuries in the process.
In 2007 I picked up an interest in endurance skating after a friend of mine was looking for a partner to skate a duo in the Le Mans 24 hours inline skating race. My focus on efficiency paid off. We entered the 2008 edition of the event and between us skated 556km (340miles) in 24 hours with a fairly equal split. This was enough to come sixth and only 15 minutes behind 4th, but neither of us was an amazingly fast speedskater so it was an incredible achievement. I didn't get that tired in the muscles and maintained a lap time average way faster than I was expecting but found out afterwards I had lost my sprint...it turns out it is pretty much gone for good. Two years later, a little bit has returned but it is nothing like it was before so now I classify myself as an endurance skater and marathons are just training sessions where I catch up with friends from all over that I have met through skating.
So I had been going around looking for simple endurance challenges and one night a drunken handshake with another skater friend saw us agreeing to participate in Le Mans 24 as soloists in 2011. This is the ultimate one day endurance challenge for a skater but it is nothing like what I had been thinking about since 2009. Back then, yet another skater friend (there seems to be a common theme here but I do know a few people that don't skate, honestly) asked me if I would like to accompany him on a trans-USA skate. He pulled out but the seed had been planted in my mind and now, things are starting to come together. Hopefully this will take place the back end of 2011 and maybe finishing in early 2012 but it might have to wait another year depending on work and money but it is almost definately going to happen and I am now looking at planning it the best I can to give it the maximum chance of succeeding and hopefully raising a lot of money for Diabetes research and care.
If you haven't guessed by now I have a family history of Diabetes and although I haven't got the full condition myself, only symptoms (prediabetes) the rest of my family all have Diabetes. I have been employed by the charity Diabetes UK since early 2007 and it is primarily this organisation that I will be raising money for through this Herculean task I am setting myself. I might also raise money for a partner US Diabetes organisation for anything I raise while doing the event.
