The drive to Inverness for the Loch Ness Marathon was a good indicator of what was to come; it was staggeringly beautiful and it was a very long way! Rather than stay in Inverness itself, I chose to stay about 45 minutes away in Aviemore where the hotels were plentiful and guaranteed family friendly. However, as the kids headed off to the pool and I started my 90 minute journey just to register I began to think the Aviemore plan may have been a mistake. I suppose mandatory registration the day before an event is intended to create a buzz around the event village, but I could happily live without it.

Having picked up my race number I headed back to Aviemore where I ate as much pasta as I could stomach before heading to bed for an early night. Morning came far too soon. Maximum effort on fuelling and hydration coupled with some pre-race nerves meant a queasy start to the day, and judging by the queues for the portaloos at the bus park I was not alone in enduring an upset stomach!

It is a cruel ‘feature’ of the Loch Ness Marathon that all runners are bussed from the centre of Inverness to the start line high in the hills on the south side of the loch. Nothing quite emphasises the huge distance about to be run like being driven the entire length of the course before the start. The sense of collective foreboding added to the camaraderie onboard the rickety old double decker though, and throughout the journey runners made new acquaintances whilst swapping wine gums and war stories from training .

The start of the race is almost comically remote; a sense only amplified by seeing the empty buses drive off back to Inverness. At this point there is literally no going back. As Bryan Burnett rather too gleefully says in the promotional video filmed on the start line, ‘the only way back to Inverness is 26 miles that way’. Even though the weather was relatively mild, the start is high and exposed. I had a space blanket that I was extremely thankful for. There were plenty of people not so well equipped, and by the time the gun went some of them had taken on a quite unnatural blue hue.

By the time we started everyone was thankful just to be running at long last. The first section is sharply downhill, which was quite painful on cold muscles and joints. However, spirits were high and the banter good. The positive vibe certainly lasted for the first 10 miles, all of which are downhill with a total descent of over 300m. Those first 10 miles are disarming. It is very hard to judge how things are going when you aren’t being made to work for the miles. A marathon is a long way though, and it transpired there would be plenty of opportunity to work hard!

The section between 10 and 17 miles is flat along the loch side. My focus in this section was simply to hold a reasonable pace to tick the miles off one by one and break the back of the race. This proved to be a very sociable stretch and I fell into conversations ranging from post race meals to Scottish Independence, and all without a cross word being said!

At my level, a marathon is always going to go wrong. It is just a matter of when. A quick glance at the profile of the race makes it abundantly clear where the ‘having fun/not having fun’ transition is most likely. At 17 miles there is a long, relentless hill that just keeps giving as the route begins to track inland. Cruelly, the hill arrives at just the point most amateur marathon runners are beginning to feel a bit wobbly. Suddenly the reassuring constant pound of a running stride broke into a punctuated run/walk as literally everyone was broken by the hill. I found this section very difficult. I never fully recovered my lost rhythm with the result that the last 8 or 9 miles became a survival wobble. As I came into Inverness itself over the last mile or so, the wobble became more determined, but all style had gone and this was now a run powered by grimace.

I’ve never known a finish straight to feel shorter than it is, and the finish on the banks of the River Ness was no exception. I finally finished in a ‘tunnel vision trot’ 4 hours and 35 minutes after I started, cheered over the line by my wife and girls. I was very happy to finish, but I probably felt more relieved than elated.

After any endurance event I always find myself asking 2 questions:

• Would I do it again?
• Could I have done it faster?

Never say never, but I can’t imagine doing the training for a marathon again unless it was for a very specific target, such as a four hour time. And that wouldn’t be easy. I trained relatively hard for this marathon and I was nowhere near prepared enough to run it well. I ran the first half in 2 hours, which was exactly what I expected. In the second half I imploded and lost 35 minutes, which again is exactly what I expected. The easiest way to go faster would be to not implode in the second half, but that would require so much more training at the 3 hour plus mark that it would take over my life. In short, I could go faster, but it would require a lifestyle change and a dedication to the cause that I’m not sure I’m ready to give.

But that is a debate for another day. For now all that matters is on the bucket list it says – marathon: tick!

Running a marathon has always been one of those life “must do’s”. I always assumed that it was inevitable that one day I would run one; surely these things just ‘happen’. However, by the time of my 46th birthday it hadn’t happened and, given my fitness at that time had achieved an all time low (thanks Garmin for the brutal truth), it seemed a marathon was becoming increasingly unlikely.

That was the trigger. That night I entered the Loch Ness Marathon, and just to make sure I didn’t chicken out, I told Facebook and Instagram. There’s no going back after that!

I did consider a few other events before settling on Loch Ness. Initially I had planned to run a city marathon, but the London ballot is too unpredictable and marathons abroad became expensive very quickly. I figured that if I couldn’t have cheering crowds to motivate me then the next best option was to do something where the setting was beautiful and spectacular. Loch Ness certainly fitted that bill, and after I’d read the reviews from previous years I was sure that it would be a well organised and memorable race. The date was set: M day was 2nd October 2022.

One of the advantages of being more massive and less fit than ever before is that improvements come very quickly. I started in the January dark, doing an awkward run/walk shuffle around for about 4 kms at a time. My plan at this stage was to pre-train; to get good enough to start a ‘proper’ training plan in the Spring. Fairly quickly I fell into a routine of doing two shortish runs during the week and a longer run at the weekends, although at this stage 7 kms counted as a long run! On Monday nights I ran around the very dark running track while my daughter was at hockey training. Track running really helped with building confidence, pacing and avoiding injury, even if I did have an irrational fear that I was about to run into something (or someone) in the pitch dark!

I had intended to follow a more prescriptive training scheduled as my fitness improved. I had been given Chris Evans’ book ‘119 Days to Go’, which as the title suggests provides a day by day training programme lasting 17 weeks. Sadly my ability to follow a daily training plan was limited by my inflexible (and sometimes unpredictable) work/life routine, but reading the book was still helpful. Not least it gave me the confidence to not run too much. It also reassured me that being able to run 7 miles at steady pace with 5 months to go is comfortably ahead of the training curve.

Then the injuries started. Perhaps it is age, but I seemed particularly badly afflicted by niggling injuries for the majority of my training. If I am being honest with myself, I suspect the real underlying cause was being too heavy. I had planned to lose 10Kg before starting training, but that never happened. I therefore ran 1000km over a year putting far more strain on my body than I should have done. I lost around 7 weeks of training to injuries including, patella tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, a calf strain and odd back spasms. I learnt that compression socks and patella bands work well, and I also re-learned that when something hurts it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to stop. By the end of my training I’d say I was at a constant 3/10 on the pain scale across my various ailments. But I found that was sustainable.

My biggest worry throughout my training year was that I might not even make it to the start, and even with weeks to go that was in doubt. I gave up all hope of being ‘ready’ and was ultimately just happy to be there at all. Over the 10 months of training I ran just under 1000kms. I did around 8 runs that were longer than a half marathon and my longest run was about 35kms. A few years ago I cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats. After training for that I realised I trained far more than I needed to. The reward for that was the event itself was relatively straightforward and pain free. For the marathon the opposite was true. I was underprepared and I certainly didn’t have enough long runs in my legs. I knew it was going to hurt, but at least I made it to the start!

Ten years ago I started a project. I decided to take a photograph every day to document my life. I started on 5^th May 2009, for no other reason than that was the day the idea popped into my head. As it happens, it was a great time to start, only a few weeks later Katy and I got married and so the Photo A Day project has become an invaluable record of the journey of the Orr family.

Every May, I assemble the pictures into a slideshow. Nothing too fancy, just enough to show I have a passing knowledge of how to use iMovie! Each image gets two seconds of glory before moving on to the next day, which means it is possible to watch a year zip by in around 12 minutes. Further showcasing my iMovie skills, I set the whole thing to music released in that year, something that really helps with invoking memories.

At the ten year anniversary of doing this I have taken the opportunity to have a look through all the slideshows, which is no mean feat as even at only two seconds per day it takes over two hours to watch ten years unfold. In watching it was the mundane photographs that stood out. I deliberately don’t try to capture quality, well composed images. Originally this was for practical reasons – it would be too all consuming to try to produce a decent image every day so I started by literally just snapping anything and more or less stuck with that approach. I’m really glad I did too. The more formal, staged pictures we take tend to be of events we remember clearly anyway. My pictures record what I wouldn’t otherwise remember, the kitchen table after breakfast or the view from a train seat on an otherwise forgettable commute. These are the moments that bring back the memories that nearly got away.

The bigger the archive I create, the more precious this project becomes, so I can’t imagine I’ll stop any time soon, irrespective of the daily fear of forgetting to take a photo! So let’s see what the next ten years has in store!

Music copyright means I can’t upload the slideshows, although I suspect they would very quickly become dull to a casual observer so that is probably for the best! I have, however, included an image from each year below to give a 1/365^th sample!

My great grandfather was a professional footballer. In the first few decades of last century he played club football in Glasgow and represented Scotland in a number of internationals, including on an exhibition tour to South America back in the days when we could legitimately claim we were teaching the world the game. Bobby Orr is something of a legend in our family; we have all been brought up with the stories of him playing at Cathkin Park and at Hampden in front of thousands of people. He must have been something of a celebrity in an age when that term was just beginning to mean something.

Of all the stories that I have heard, the one that has always captured my imagination was his choosing to play the last few seasons of his career at Crystal Palace. In the 1920s, London must have seemed an incredible adventure for someone from a small village outside Glasgow. I have no idea how he came to sign for Palace, nor what he would have made of living and playing in London, but I suspect it was both lucrative and glamourous. There are accounts of my great grandmother, bedecked in the finest furs (different times!), travelling by first class rail from Glasgow to watch him play on match days.

Sadly I never met my great grandfather, and even more sadly my dad didn’t meet him either. He died in the 1940s, and despite the fact my grandmother was pregnant at the time, he died without ever knowing he would have a grandson. Recently that grandson turned 70, and to mark the occasion we made a pilgrimage to Selhurst Park to watch Crystal Palace play in the Premiership. It was quite something to sit in the stands where my great grandmother sat 90 years ago cheering her husband on the very same pitch where we watched the current team beat Huddersfield. It isn’t often that these connections to the past are possible, but when they are they are worth savouring.

It’s pleasing when a good habit becomes a tradition. Last weekend I completed my third Great Scottish Run half marathon in a row, and once again I thoroughly enjoyed it. Of all the running events I’ve done, the Great Scottish Run stands out as the best organised, most friendly and most fun. Importantly too it isn’t just a single event, rather it is a whole weekend of different running distances suitable for all ages and abilities. For the first time all my family took part. My daughters (aged 7 and twins aged 3) ran in the family mile and I’m proud to say they kept up a good pace running the whole distance, which is quite an achievement for two girls who last year watched from a pram. I’m equally proud of my wife, who ran her first 10k finishing 7 minutes ahead of her target despite having to run an extra 3k just to get to the start in time for the gun after traffic chaos on the M8.

So we all got a medal to go with the sore legs and sense of achievement. If the running bug sticks, and I’m sure it will, the new family tradition of pounding the streets of Glasgow in the last weekend of September has many years left to run.

After nearly 20 years of regular Army service I have decided it is time to end this chapter of my career and explore opportunities beyond the Armed Forces. The reason is simple – having decided as a family to settle in North Yorkshire I face a career of weekly commuting if I stay in the Army. Having experienced this for the last 18 months it is clear to me that living apart from my family 5 nights out of every 7 is untenable, especially as there is always the possibility of additional separation of 6, 9 or even 12 months on an operational employment that could happen at any time. After 20 years I simply need to spend more time with my young family.

Even though the decision was the right one and somewhat inevitable, pressing ‘the button’ still felt odd and disloyal. With the click of a mouse I surrendered my job, my career (which was guaranteed to age 55), my vocation and, in part, my identity (I still get introduced as ‘David, the Army officer’). I am fortunate though; I was never one of the ‘Army Barmy’ crowd who couldn’t imagine doing anything else, helped in part by joining a little older than the average and by working in ‘Civvy Street’ before going to Sandhurst. I was fortunate too to join the Royal Signals, a capbadge that gave me a career wonderfully balanced between traditional Army officer leadership and more technical appointments. Indeed, the skill to effectively lead technical teams is probably the most valuable I learnt over the years.

I will always be eternally grateful to the Army for my career, the highlights of which read like a clichéd advert to ‘Be the Best’. I was invested in hugely; approximately 4 years of my time in the Army was spent in training or education, including an invaluable MSc in Information Systems Management. I had a daunting but character building amount of responsibility from the very beginning of my career – aged just 24 I was leading 36 soldiers. I served in British Forces Germany at a time when the sense of community and, quite frankly, fun pervaded everything we did. I learnt to ski, mountaineer and SCUBA dive, and have since instructed others in the latter two. Most importantly I deployed on operations, commanding 150 fantastic Gurkhas in Afghanistan, without doubt the career highlight. The same Gurkha connection took me to Nepal where I was able to spend time in the remote east of the country helping to ensure the money raised by the Gurkha Welfare Trust is spent effectively. There is no question I would tell my 20 year old self to do the same again.

I might be naïve but I’m excited at the prospect of finding a new opportunity that is the right fit for me. It feels like the market is ripe with possibility and there is no question I am lucky to be in the Cyber specialism at a particularly exciting time. Old habits die hard so I have written a ‘Leaving the Army Campaign Plan’ (I’m not kidding – it has 6 Lines of Operation that subdivide into 59 Lines of Effort). Hopefully the same tried and tested methodology that planned countless operations over my Army career will be just as effective at finding the right opportunity for me. It is certainly going to be fun finding out!

This time last year the excesses of the festive season had taken their toll. I was overweight and I had done no significant physical exercise for weeks. With my New Year’s glass of Champagne in hand I made a commitment that the same wouldn’t happen next year. Of course I’ve made resolutions before, but they’ve always been too vague. Promising to ‘get fitter’ is destined to fail as it isn’t definable or measurable. So this year I decided to focus on 5 very specific goals, chosen rather arbitrarily as you might expect when under the influence of Champagne:

• Complete the Coast to Coast in a Day Cycle event (150 miles) – Completed on 24^th June. A great experience cycling across the country from Seascale to Whitby through 3 beautiful National Parks and including the hardest climb in the UK.
• Cycle 1000 miles in 2017 – Completed in June. Lots of early morning training for the Coast to Coast added up to just over 1000 miles.
• Achieve a Personal Best in a Half Marathon – Completed on 1^st October in the Great Scottish Run in Glasgow. I managed a time of 1:45 improving my PB by 7 minutes. This is the first time I actually trained for a running event and (unsurprisingly) it makes a big difference!
• Run 500 miles in 2017 – Completed in December. I thought this would be easily achieved by training for the half marathon, but in reality I had to keep regular running going through the year to hit the target.
• Run at least 3 miles every day in December – Completed on 31^st December. This was the challenge that was specifically intended to curb the festive excess, and it worked, although there were a few days when the 3 miles was a bit of a slog!

By doing these things I re-learned two valuable lessons. Firstly, having clear goals is invaluable. It focused me on what I wanted to achieve and gave me a real sense of satisfaction when I was able to tick each one of the list. Secondly, maintaining a consistently high level of fitness throughout the year makes a huge and positive difference to mental and physical health. I have been happier, more motivated and more productive as a result of my five challenges.

So this Hogmanay I will again take a glass of Champagne in hand and look forward to 2018 by setting a fresh set of challenges that will keep me active all year. One thing is for certain though, after running 3 miles every day in December there is no way that any of my 2018 challenges will involve running on New Year’s Day!