Sob Story
As soon as you see those words you just know whats coming. Someone is going to try and get money out of you and to make it easier to get you to take action they are going to tug at your heart strings. Everyone does it Live aid shows videos of starving children, xfactor contestants tell you about being bullied at school, then their mum was run over by a bus but survived only to be eaten by a crocodile 4 years later. Well something like that :-) but you get the picture.
Anyway so now you know the mechanics, here's my attempt.
Back in 2003 I started having problems with my knees. Every time I got out the car it felt like something slipped out and it would take like 30 Min's before it went back.
To cut a long story short to cure it I decided to run a Marathon :-) Yup I know what your thinking, all I'm going to say is I did the VLM in 2005 and I haven't had any problems with knee's since. So make of it what you will. In case anyone's interested here's the blog of
my marathon, sorry but a lot of the links no longer work. I didn't do to bad at raising money for shooting stars either
https://www.justgiving.com/garyrudley
During 2004 when I was training for the marathon I had a Motorbike accident and tore a tendon in my left shoulder. That took about a year to fix and messed with my training but was OK for the actual marathon day.
After taking 5h 47m to do the marathon I decided to train more and try to run sub 4. I was getting there with a Half at 2h 3mins, then did a massive PB at Maidenhead 10, taking 24mins of my previous time but my right ankle also gave up. After many visits to doctor, physio and eventually xrays I was informed that I had Arthritis in my ankle and shouldn't run again if I still wanted to be able to walk later in life. I have to admit I did try but the pain in my ankle was clearly of the type where your doing damage. So that was the end of running in 2009 really.
Fast forward to 2014/2015 and I sneezed which re-tore the tendon in my left shoulder. Ill cut this short but many visits to specialists and visits for xrays, ultrasound scans and MRI scans and they have discovered I have signs of arthritis in both shoulders a torn tendon in left shoulder and a full thickness rupture of the supraspinatus tendon (Rupture means detached basically). So I don't know how, but I have whats left of a muscle floating around in my shoulder and one end is not attached to anything.
So back to Arnie and Me walking 65k. Arnie has arthritis, I have arthritis, my Mum had arthritis, my Brother has arthritis and I know many other people who suffer with variants. I also know that whatever issues I have they are not life threatening and we all know people that have their own personal battles with the big C.
In my instance pain is a good indicator as it lets you know your still alive.
So I have decided to try and raise a little money for
Arthritis Research
We are going to walk 65k along south coast path from Bournmouth to
Weymouth without stopping in B&Bs just using a small tent. Its not going to be easy due to both mine and Arnie's body limitations but we'll get there.
I have 465 friends on Facebook so I figure if I can get under half of those to donate to me a half pint of beer or if your generous a pint of beer and that money goes to the charity then they'll make a few quid and we all get good karma :-)
So that's all I'm asking don't go breaking the bank just buy me a Pint or a Half.
Pint of beer = £3.10
Half of beer = £1.60
So head here and buy me a beer :-)
https://www.justgiving.com/ArnieandGarys67kTrek
