Catherine Jenkin’s Great South Run

When the gun goes off at the start of this year’s Great South Run on 24 October, CIA’s sister company Southern Monitoring’s Catherine Jenkins will be there, sporting the yellow tee shirt of the Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research Banana Army.

Catherine freely admits that she’s never really liked running but she wants to raise at least £200 for the charity and thought that if she expected people to sponsor her, the least she could do was demonstrate to them that she was prepared to put something in as well.  As she said, “Running is much more of challenge for me than doing something I know I can do.   It’s  something I really have to train for, to put a lot of time into, so I thought this might help persuade people to sponsor me.”

Catherine mostly trains on her own, running in the evenings straight after work around North End and sometimes along the seafront.   On the days when she doesn’t run, she cross trains, including exercising on the Wii.

When she started, she wasn’t very fit but already she’s managing 2 miles in 25 minutes.  To improve her speed, she jogs for a certain distance and then ups her pace and runs for a certain distance.  Her natural inclination is to jog so she finds this quite challenging.  Another incentive to go faster are the neighbourhood dog walkers – she doesn’t like dogs so sprints to get past them!

Sometimes, motivation can be a problem; it’s hard to get going if the weather is bad or if she doesn’t feel like it, and even when she’s running, it can be daunting to get half way and know she still has as much to go as she’s just done.  But a group of friends, including her boyfriend and her sister, are also doing the Great South Run for various charities so they meet once a month to check out how they’re all getting on and she enjoys that – it makes her work harder when she trains with the group, she says.  They plan to run together on the day.

Catherine says she feels a lot healthier since she started training and can definitely see that she’s getting fitter.  She’s absolutely determined to complete the course in October and raise money for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research.

Every year in the UK alone, around 28,500 people of all ages, from newborns to pensioners, are diagnosed with various forms of blood cancer.

Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research need to raise £120M over the next five years to continue their life-saving research into better diagnosis, treatments and cures for people with blood cancers.  The charity relies entirely on voluntary support and receives no Government funding for their work.

So give generously – it’s for a good cause!