While I’m populating the list, it will probably be fairly random as I’m putting stuff on whenever I think of them. Also, some of them may require a little explanation – I’ll do that when I can. I’ve left stuff off the list that I can’t influence myself. For example, I’d love to see Jesus return or aliens arrive on Earth (perhaps those are linked?!) but I have no influence over those sorts of things. I will also, generally speaking, leave off things that are too vague – we all want to be a great parent/spouse/parent but it’s a never-ending task.

Anyway, here’s the list:

1. See the Earth from space
2. Become a politician or otherwise influence government – ideally I’d like to PM. Or King…
3. Live off the land for a week
4. Make my own full set of clothes – Shoes, socks, trousers, pants, shirt and jumper.
5. Make my own furniture – something big like a kitchen.
6. Give blood
7. Meet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
8. Meet Prince Charles
9. Meet the Queen
10. Meet the current Prime Minister
11. Run 50 miles in one go
12. Be directly involved in getting at least one person off the streets and back into society
13. Create a web-app that has paying subscribers
14. Be directly involved in the whole lifecycle of a large animal that I currently eat. Present at birth, raise and kill the animal.
15. Be able to speak another language
16. Weigh less than 12 stone – that’s the ‘optimal’ BMI for my height (6″1′)
17. Be totally debt-free, financially speaking
18. Play or sing in a band that performs at least one gig
19. Be energy self-sufficient or as close to it as possible in my home
20. Learn to sword-fight
21. Invent something that changes the world – in a good way!

I’ve thought about whether or not this sort of thing should be public or not, after all I’m not overly keen when people post every part of their life online, but I’ve decided that mine will be public for the following reasons:

1) Perhaps someone will see something they can help with, and probably more importantly,
2) I like looking at other people’s lists and thought it would be almost hypercritical of me to keep this private

I’ve also spent a lot (too much) time wondering how many items to place on the list and what sort of thing to put on it. If the list is to be a useful aid to doing things, it can’t be too long or nothing will get done. Also it’s a big world out there and there’s millions of things I’d like to do. How do I know whether or not to put it on “the list”.

In the end I thought that the list should be capped at 50 items. Once the list is full, the only way on is via dead man’s boots – it has to knock another one off the list.

I’m also going to try and keep the list ordered, at least roughly. Anyway, as Mr T would say, time to “quit your gibber-jabber” and onto the list…

I’ve tried to stop sitting like it but I can’t so, after reading a lot about them, I decided to try a standing desk.

Rather than buy something, or hack up an existing piece of furniture I’ve gone the Blue Peter route and customised my desk with cardboard boxes and sticky-back plastic. . Admittedly it’s not the prettiest thing and I’m loath to place my 27″ iMac on top of a box and carpet tiles but in the experimental stages, that’s what I’ve done.

The plan is, if all goes well, to make a custom desk myself. Something in oak would be nice but we’ll see.

So far (day 3), so good. My feet ache but don’t hurt and I’ve had no pain in my legs as previously so standing is doing what I wanted it to.

I’ve noticed that I’m much more fidgety though and I’ve not worked through a stressful day to check whether or not my productivity has changed. Only time will tell…

With that in mind, I’m reviving the blog and starting to post about my life in general. I’m sure there will be fun, tears, serious debate and more than the occasional rant.

After all, doing the run was amazing but I’m still fed up with ordinary…

What started as a crazy idea back in September 2009 has finally become reality. And it’s been quite a journey… I’ve gone from not being able to run more than 2 minutes to the shops to completing 141 miles of hard, cross country terrain in 6 days.

Technically, I’ve become an ultra runner. A couple of my runs have been over 28 miles and one even reached 30 miles.

There have been injuries and set backs. I’ve experienced exhilarating highs and depressive lows. My body has been in the most pain I’ve ever known but it has been amazing – something I’ll never forget.

Rich Atkinson, Steven “Smack” McMurray and John-Paul Walker, you are all legends. It’s been an absolute privilege to go on this journey with you and I hope to do something crazy with you again.

I’m currently writing up some of my thoughts from the run itself as I tried to journal throughout the event. I’ll post that up to this blog as soon as can and add photos and videos too.

In the mean time, here’s the triumphant finish into the sea at Whitley Bay

Anyway, I’m feeling grotty with a cold, and I can cope with that. Running with a cold isn’t great but I can deal with it. However, I’ve also got (if you’re squeamish look away now) pretty bad diarrhoea. This is more worrying as it’s not something I can run with at all really. And I have to try even harder to remain hydrated.

Lemsip for the cold and prunes and dates to “bulk up” my, you know, movements. Let’s see if that does the trick.

To say that I’m nervous is an understatement, but not really because of the running. Well, partly because of the running… more like 50-50… let me start again.

I’m not only nervous about the running. Organising the entire thing has been / is being very difficult and it’s starting to take it’s toll. The last couple of days I’ve been having mini panic attacks when I think about something else I’ve forgotten or look at the still large to-do list. It’s been affecting my sleep and my moods. I’ve been more grumpy than usual.

I don’t mind doing the organisation, but getting the balance between being organised and being like people’s mum is hard. I think I’ve failed on various counts and in parts it feels like I’m organising a school trip. It seems nobody else knows where we’re staying, the route we’re taking or even what time we’re leaving on Wednesday.

A lot of the tasks can’t easily be split: the route dictates where we stay, accommodation availability affects the route. It’s not that I need help doing stuff, just that I feel I need to offload frequently so that the others know what I’m doing and so we feel a sense of shared responsibility. I guess that’s it. At present I feel the burden of responsibility. If the route’s wrong, it’s my fault. If the accommodation isn’t booked correctly, it’s my fault. That burden is weighing down heavily at present and I’m not sure what I can do about it.

Meetings of the group have been really hard to arrange. People are very busy. We’ve been limited to an hour, that practically becomes 40 minutes, every few weeks. I’ve struggled with that. Those who know me, will know that, although I’m quite a verbal thinker. Or perhaps you’re more likely to call me gobby! Whatever you call it, I need to talk frequently. But even in this last week, I’ve not been able to get people together for a final briefing. I’m not sure how they’ll find out what time and where we’re leaving from, but at least I’ll be there!

I’m trying very hard to remain calm at the moment but it’s not really working. There’s still so much to do and so little time. If any of you have relaxation tips, I’d love to hear them!

It was many things: tiring, lots of fun, hot, the most physically tough thing I’ve ever done, a good test of the amount of food we need to carry, and so on. It’s really hard to describe the full range of emotions and feelings that accompany such a mammoth event.

We had planned to do 26 miles but in reality we ended up doing 28.7 miles as we took some wrong turnings here and there. Reading this now you may think that extra 2.7 miles to be insignificant. We’ll, you would be VERY wrong!

All told we were our for about 7 and a half hours, but the last 5 miles took an hour and half, largely due to the pain I was having in my right foot. Obviously, we weren’t breaking any speed records but this wasn’t a marathon (which is primarily flat and on roads), this was a 28.7 mile fell run. We covered some really tough terrain; hills we had to walk up (and down), scrambling over rocky outcrops and plenty of woodland routes littered with badly placed tree roots.

Previously, the most I’d run was about 14 miles so I’m well chuffed with yesterdays run. Rich had run slightly less than me previously, so his effort was even greater.

The run was painful and increasingly hard to push on after about 18 miles. A couple of weeks ago I bruised my right foot by standing on a sharp rock, that injury obviously hadn’t healed fully and after about 20 miles it started to hurt a lot. The last 5 miles were really tough and any downhill took me close to agony.

I’ve got one blister just below my big toe on my right foot, probably due to that fact that I was wearing new shoes. I’d got my Vibram fivefingers KSO Trek the day before and couldn’t leave them at home! They performed really well. The only downside was running so much on roads, but we didn’t plan to do that and they aren’t designed for that so I can’t hold that against them!

Physical hardship apart, I learnt a lot about our run:

• We need more water than we can carry – the route needs to include plenty of places where we can fill up
• We need lots of food when we stop – in our rucksacks we had enough food I feel but when we stop, we need lot’s to carry us over until we can find a suitable evening meal. We finish each day around 5pm but many places don’t serve food until 7pm.
• Sun cream doesn’t work when running – I’d covered myself in factor 30 as I burn easily. When we started running, my face instantly became a horrid mix of sun cream and sweat. Not pleasant. I need to get a buff head covering instead.
• We need to know the route well – we made a couple of errors yesterday and that add extra miles that we don’t need. Also, psychologically, knowing where you are and how far you have left to go makes a huge difference.
• We need more time to do our run – we’d imagined 6 hours would be a good time for 26 miles. Assuming the terrain is similar, we’re going to need more like 7 hours.

Lots to think about really. The run has given us all a massive amount to think about. At this point though I’m not sure if I feel better or worse now I’ve done that distance. On the plus side, I know I can do it. On the minus side, it was rock hard… and we need to do that 6 times in a row!

Okay, I’ve decided, I feel worse. Much worse!

We’re running 26 (ish) miles from Sheffield to Baslow and back again. You can see our rough route here.

I have to thank the volcanic ash cloud for blocking UK airspace as otherwise RIch would be unable to make it due to being in Norway. But now we’ve a full contingent of runners.

As well as being a test of our fitness (or lack thereof) it’s a chance to work out other things such as how much food do we need? Will we have enough water? Is 6 hours a good pace to aim for? And so on and so forth.

I’d love to say I’m confident that I can do it but the reality is that I’m pooing myself! 26 miles is almost double the furthest I’ve ever run before and I’ve not been running long since my blisters and I’m not sleeping brilliantly and… There are a million and one reasons why this will be hard but I need to keep telling myself that I can do it and if it takes longer than 6 hours, it takes longer. If Eddie Izzard can do it, so can I!

On the plus side, I should be running in my new Vibram FiveFingers KSO Treks! They’ve finally arrived in the UK and I placed my order for next day delivery today. I’m far too excited really, they’re only shoes after all…

There is still so much to arrange, so much to agree on, so much training still to be done, but time is short. Oh I wish I had a TARDIS!

I am finding myself flipping between absolute conviction that we’ll all do it without issue and utter disbelief that it is possible even to run one cross-country marathon distance in a day let alone six!

We’re all going out to try our first 26 mile run on Sunday. A route to Baslow and back is about right so I’ll finalise a route later in the week. We’re going to leave six hours to do it in and try running with our full packs and have the day as close to the real thing as possible.

I’m scared. Very scared.

26 miles seems such a ludicrous distance. At the moment 16 miles seems doable but even 20 is too far. I need to get out of that mindset, and quickly!