Is anyone else (apart from SSQ) running their 12 for charity? When initially I set out to do this - it was mainly about the personal challenge, but in the back of my mind I knew that the driving motivation was to run it in memory of my brother. Once I’d decided to do it, I lost my mother to cancer. This threw me off track a bit, but made me even more determined to succeed. It’s taken me most of the year, but I’ve finally sorted out my fund-raising page. It’s at www.12in12in12.com and it would mean a lot to me to raise a heap of money for these good causes. But I’m hopeless at the sponsorship side of marathons, and have to admit that trying to get people to donate is harder to do that to run the marathons themselves. I don’t like doing it, and I get easily demotivated when the donations seem hard to come by. How does everyone else feel? Given that I’m doing what (to me, and to most people I know) is a mammoth challenge, you’d like to think it’s easy to raise money. All I ask is that my friends just donate a few pounds each. Not a lot. You’d think this would be simple, but most of my pleas fall on deaf ears. I’m not even asking for the price of a pint of beer, or a glass of wine in the pub! Having done fund-raising for 3 of my first 4 marathons (and raised over £3300 in total), I decided not to go down the charity route again. But this year is special. It’s special to me. It’s special to my family. So I want to do it, but I don’t want to do it. I was pretty demoralised today – I asked a friend to post a message for me on his work email server. I used to work there too – for 21 years, until they made me redundant last year. I would have thought it was pretty much guaranteed that some of my friends and colleagues there would remember me, like me, and spare a couple of quid for me. Especially since it’s pay day today! However one of the employees there posted a message shortly afterwards explaining how he’d run a half marathon recently – but as part of fund-raising that someone else is doing by running 3,563 miles in 35 days. Which makes my 314 miles in 365 days seem pretty bloody pathetic. So this isn’t a begging letter to you guys – I know how hard the sponsorship is – and if we’re not careful we end up all just sponsoring each other (as happened to me when I ran London in 2009). I may have saved myself the bother and just donated £100 to myself! No, this is just about letting off a bit of steam, as that email at my friend’s workplace really felt like a kick in the teeth… | 
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