To Children With Love - My MdS Charity

This episode will be introducing my chosen charity for the 2018 MdS.

The founder and managing director is a lady called Debbie Deegan. Debbie is a personal friend, I met her through my wife, Liz Hoefsmit (was Cusack). Liz and Debbie met when they were 10/11 and have been friends ever since.

Debbie has been working tirelessly in Russia since 1998 with the orphaned and abandoned children of the Bryansk Region and more recently with children in Kaluga, Tula and Moscow Region. Debbie is also the Chairperson of the Russian registered charity To Children With Love in Russia. This is the sister charity of To Russia With Love that strives to raise funds in Russia itself.

More details here:

The Team

ToChildrenWithLove

Mission Statement

Our goal is to support young people to achieve their full potential in education, employment and life.

Social exclusion and educational inequality negatively impacts the lives of young people reducing their self belief, dignity and well being. Our targeted programmes enhance young people’s self esteem, life skills and qualifications helping them to forge fulfilled lives within their communities and beyond. Our programmes have been developed over a 20 year period working with young people nationally and internationally.

This episode will be introducing my chosen charity for the 2018 MdS.

Donations via this link

Helping Children to Reach Their Full Potential

Seven Overseas (not Republic of Ireland) Programmes

International

• Social Integration Programme
• The New Start Programme
• Playroom Programme
• Finale Step Programme
• Mother & Baby Programme
• Sports Programme
• Life Skills Programme

Republic of Ireland - The Rising Tide Project

• Business Bootcamp
• Gardening Programme
• Coder Dojo Coding Club
• Discover Ireland Programme
• Scholarship Programme

Training is going reasonable. It'll be a slow edition this year. But that is fine with me, as I want to enjoy the Sahara even more than the previous two editions.

2017-10-17 Nothing like an MdS expo to "most likely" getting your training mojo back

Target - be MdS ready by Mid March 2018
Roadmap
1) Ditch about 8kg of weight (that's a stone and a bit for those who don't do kilo's)
2) Heat acclimatisation
3) Up weekly running distance starting to about 25 km per week going to 60-70 km three weeks per month.
4) Update the 2015 spreadsheet for food
5) More walking time on feet.

Today, for the third time running, I worked/helped at the MdS Expo organised by Steve Diederich. This year I was joined by my wife Liz, who, not surprisingly, was totally in her social butterfly element.

The expo is organised to give the UK (and other) participants to get insight into the MdS from previous runners and other guests. It also brings together a number of vendors specialised in ultra/multi-day running gear and equipment. Which is rare, as most of them are based fairly far from London. I would say Essex (myracekit) and Wales (likeys). It also has running training and nutritional experts. This year the first time they had a sweat test as well.

I guess I needed this to get into the swing of things, as my recent running hasn't been that great.

I most likely will support a charity as it's been a while since I asked people for money. More on that later.

My lovely wife set me a challenge to get my first 20 mile (32 km) run in as soon as possible. So there is the motivation.

More next time.

M