Once in a lifetime is a saying that gets easily used. When my wife and I travelled America we lauded how it was once in a lifetime. In reality we will no doubt repeat that trip in a decades time. We often use the saying when the task in actuality is easily repeated.

For once though I believe I have a once in a lifetime opportunity. I have been giving a condition place to be a London 2012 Olympic Torchbearer. The condition being I pass the security and background checks, pretty sure I will pass this easy enough!

So I am truly honoured to have been chosen. It is without a doubt the greatest reward for the past year of hard training and running. I would even rank it higher than my TV commercial!

Like most things in life there was a long string of interwoven events that led to me being nominated.

Disregarding all the training for a while, the timeline went a little like this:

I wrote a blog post about my experiences with RunKeeper and how it enabled me to train solo outdoors. This was quickly picked up by the RunKeeper team and appeared on their blog.

The Daily in New York found the story and ran an article on me.

This was quickly followed by Wired and CNN. Resulting in me filming a short for CNN that aired earlier this year. The Wired featured blog ran for a number of months and brought in lots more attention.

During the time I was writing for Wired I lost my pacing team. So I began a search for a new pacing team and perhaps the most instrumental people in the timeline were introduced.

I contacted UP & Running in the hopes they could help me piece together a pacing team. They went above and beyond and ran a small in store campaign and mentioned it on Twitter. This brought in the initial point of contact James Clay, along with James came Matt Puddy and Charlie Baxter.

Matt and Charlie took up the reigns and began to put together a team. Matt ran all the logistics, planning and organising. He was incredibly instrumental in allowing me to run my first ultra run.

With the run complete the next event was the ASICS call. They wanted a blind runner for a TV commercial and I didn’t really fit the bill. I had a quick chat and mentioned what I was doing alone and with my pacers was a better story than the one they were on the look out for. They agreed and the TV commercial was created.

These interwoven events created my running journey of the past year and were the basis of my nomination. I was kindle nominated by Charlie and Matt and was chosen. But without all those other people my story wouldn’t have got out there and the opportunity would never have presented itself.

So to all those people Thank you.

There is however one last mention. For my wife, she was there through all the difficulties of training, the time I was passed out on the bathroom floor, when my legs failed during training, when my water was stolen and most importantly she had the faith that when I said I could run alone she believed it.