Brad Brown

It has been a month since I have taken over the Run Walk for Life branch at the Bryanston High School. Things have settled quite nicely and it is now time to start making things happen. One thing I have learnt on my journey over the last couple of years is there is no time like the present to get started with something. I always had to wait for a Monday/a new month/a new year to start with an exercise regime or a diet. You know what it is like I’m sure. I always used to start a week off with a bang and then fizzle out by Wednesday or Thursday. I then used to say “it’s to close to the weekend, I’ll start again on Monday” and that pattern got repeated around the 20^th of every month and then again in about October. I’ll start again in the new year. Sound familiar?

Let me share with you what I have learnt. There is no better time to start than now. If you fall off the wagon today that is fine but tomorrow it starts again. The same applies to eating healthily. If you have a bad meal at lunch time there is no reason why your evening meal can’t be healthy. Do it now. Don’t wait until Monday, next month or next year. Do it NOW!!!

With that in mind I’m running an awesome promotion for December at my Run Walk for Life Branch in Bryanston. If you join as a full paying member between 1 and 31 Dec you will receive a FREE pair of New Balance running shoes*. Free, nada, mahala! Why wait for Monday, next month or next year? Do it now! We have three training sessions three times a week at 16:30, 17:00 and 17:30 on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon at the Bryanston High School. If you want to find out more pop me a mail rwfl@bradbrown.co.za

Don’t forget you can also follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook

The December Run Walk for Life Promotion

*Terms and Conditions Apply

I love simple but innovative ideas that make a difference in other people’s lives. You may or may not know about my involvement with the PinkDrive and my passion for raising money for their education and early detection programs through endurance events that I am taking part in like Ironman and the Comrades Marathon but I often feel like I am always begging my mates to open their wallets and support the next wacky event that I am taking part in. I came across an initiative this morning that I absolutely love and hence this post.

Roxy Burger

I follow Roxy Burger (Currently of Survivor Maldives fame) on Twitter and saw a couple of her tweets this morning with a hash tag that read #40daysofzams and it kind of aligned itself into the way I was thinking the last or two any way. Not being that religious I have never been one to get give up things for lent. Although at my dik former self it might have been said that I had given up my neck for a long long time. Listening to the radio yesterday afternoon in the car with my 8 year old son Ethan there was a conversation about lent and what people were going to give up. Ethan was asking a few questions about it and asked if he could give something up. I told him it had to be something he really liked, he thought about it for a while and then asked if he could give up school for 40 days. I nearly crashed my car. He definitely takes after his dad. I said to him we would find something we could do. Then I saw Roxy’s tweet this morning.

Ham & Cheese Zarmie

Forty days of zarmies. What a cool idea. The basic idea is this: Make a sandwich every day for 40 days, find someone who needs it and give it to them. It doesn’t have to be a gourmet zarmie, it can be as simple as a jam sandwich. It’s as easy as that! Honestly, such a simple concept but if we can get a thousand people to do it, we’ll be able to feed a thousand people a day. That is 40 000 sandwiches handed out in just over a month! Small idea, massive results! There are thousands of people roaming the streets of this beautiful country of ours that are hungry and I love that an idea this small can make such a big difference. By taking part you don’t need to fork out hundreds of bucks, you don’t need to spend hours of your time all you need to do is make one sarmie a day for forty days.

It is so easy to do. You might make yourself a lunch every day for work, just make an extra sandwich, whack it in a sandwich bag and on your way to work give it to the mother who is begging at the traffic light just around the corner from home. If you’re a mom who makes school lunches, make an extra one and get the kids involved. This is my challenge to you. Get involved. For forty days let’s see how many people we can feed. Post a comment at the end of this post to let me know if you’re in. If you’re on Twitter you can also drop Roxy or myself a tweet to let us know you’re in and how the #40daysofzams is going (don’t forget to use the hashtag in your tweets!). Share this post and challenge your mates to do the same!

I was tweeting away tonight as I tend to do and all of a sudden I start getting forbidden messages. I thought for a moment I may have been blocked. After digging a bit, it turns out Twitter has suspended Ubertwitter for privacy violations. This was the statement issued by the Twitter help centre tonight:

Regardless of how you access Twitter, we are dedicated to making Twitter better, faster and more reliable for you. As part of this effort, we ask applications that work with Twitter to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules.

We have suspended UberTwitter and twidroyd for violating our policies.

Every day, we suspend hundreds of applications that are in violation of our policies. Generally, these apps are used by a small number of users. We are taking the unusual step of sharing this with you because today’s suspension may affect a larger number of users.

We are committed to helping you continue to use Twitter during the disruption of these applications. You can download Twitter for Blackberry, Twitter for Android and other official Twitter apps here. You can also try our mobile web site or apps from other third-party developers.

Another count down to another big race commences. This time in two weeks I will be at the 2011 Ironman 70.3 dinner in East London as a 70.3 finisher. Training this week has gone well. I managed to get a few really good sessions in and I’m feeling quite confident. This was my last big intense week before race day, this coming week will be a bit more chilled (although I’m still following the sub 11 Comrades programme) and then the week after is taper week.

This weeks training consisted of 5km of swimming, 213km on the bike and running 49km

If anything its my running distances that are concerning me the most. Not for 70.3 but I have decided to give a marathon a bash the week after at Johnson Crane. I have been looking at different marathons to try and qualify for Comrades and Johnson is it.

As far as kit goes for 70.3 I’m quite excited that I’m going to be rocking it for the PinkDrive again. So I’ll be kitted out in all pink, including my pink Oakley Radars that will be making their debut at 70.3. There are still two small kit issues I need to sort out. Ok they’re not so small. I need to have my KTM Strada 3000 serviced after the front derailer cable came loose on yesterdays ride and I need to get my hands on a wetsuit.

I’m also trying to figure out a way that I can have a map with live tracking on here on race day so that if you want to follow my progress you can, although I will be tweeting and facebooking throughout the day (except on the swim – haven’t figured out how to tweet underwater yet). So if you are a bit techie and know of a live tracking mapping solution I can use please comment on this post.

Another long one in the bag. It wasn’t pretty but I was reminded yesterday on twitter some days you’re the kicker and some days you’re the ass. A marathon is tough even if you have a great run. I’ve only done three but I learnt the most out of this weekends Wally Hayward marathon. I had a serious lesson in vasbyt.

The race was a two lapper and according to the nedbank 2010 race guide its one of the easiest marathons you can hope to run. I think they must have been talking about a different race to the one I ran on Saturday.

The blister that I picked up at the Loskop Marathon 2 weeks earlier had kept me off Read more…

My preparation for the 2010 Loskop Marathon was not ideal. A constantly niggly left foot after the Vaal Marathon 6 weeks earlier never allowed me to do the sort of mileage in the build up that I would have liked to have done. I also decided to change the shoes I was running literally one week before the race. This in hindsight probably wasn’t the wisest decision either. In the week prior to the race with the new shoes my tendonitis cleared up so I decided to risk running the 50kms in the new shoes.

We decided not to sleep over in either Middelburg or at the Loskop Dam the night before as I was on air until 7pm on the Friday evening. We woke up at 2am and were on the road to Middelburg by 2:30am. An early start to what was going to be a long day.

The Start of the 2010 Loskop Marathon

By the time we reached the start I was a bundle of nerves. As it started to get light the 4000 runners began the trek to the loskop dam. Earlier on in the week I had spoken to my good mate Dave Walters from MPower FM in Nelspruit and it turned out MPower FM was the media partner for the race. We were going to try and do a couple of live crossings from the road and the first one was as the gun went.

My goal was to go out until halfway at just under 7 minutes per kilometre until halfway and then take the rest of the race as it comes. It all went according to plan. About 5 km in I got swallowed up by Vlam’s sub 6 hour bus and decided to stick with them for as long as I could. I actually finished the Vaal Marathon in the bus and that’s how I qualified for Comrades 2010. That’s why it wasn’t vital that I finished under 6 hours in this one but the goal was to spend as much time as I could on the road to get a decent long one in the legs.
Read more…

2010 Comrades Marathon - The Ultimate Human Race

The 2010 Comrades Marathon is happening on Sun 30 May 2010. Just writing that makes me nervous. But the truth of it is that as a novice I don’t think you think you will ever be ready. You may or may not know the reasons why I am running this year’s race. My mom is losing the battle to breast cancer as I write this and I wanted to do something to make a difference to people fighting this horrible disease and also for the families of those who have lost a loved one to it. Breast cancer does not have to be terminal and if it is picked up early it is in most cases curable. I have decided to support the Pink Drive and to raise money for breast cancer awareness. I think they do a fabulous job. I’m not going to go into to much detail as to what they do but if you want to check them out go to http://www.pinkdrive.co.za

Running Comrades as part of the Comrades Marathon Associations celebrity challenge provides a great platform to raise money for the Pink Drive. We have set up an sms line that if you sms the word ‘run’ to 4 222 0 you will donate R30 to the Pink Drive. The other fundraising initiative we are running is the 89 Memories – One race initiative.  The Comrades Marathon is 89km and run between Pietermaritzburg and Durban and this year I will be running each kilometre for someone that is either fighting the battle against breast cancer or in memory of someone who has lost the battle to breast cancer.

That is where I need you come in. I need your help. Read more…

I’m starting to realise the power of social networking site like Twitter and Facebook. Its amazing how you can be in touch in real time with friends and family but also with people who traditionally were unreachable for the masses. I love the fact that I can use these sites to communicate with people who listen to my radio show and also people who are following what I am doing on the road in the lead up to Comrades 2010. I spent a bit of time this week end redesigning the background of my Twitter profile that is more inline with who I am and what I do. If you would like to follow me on Twitter you can find me at www.twitter.com/bradbrown947

Brad Brown on Twitter

What a great start to the new year. My training has been going really well and I feeling fit and fab (although the foot is still a bit niggly). I think one of the benefits of running through December is that by the time January is in full swing you have hit the ground running and there is no need to try and play catch up. I noticed yesterday on Twitter ( You can follow me here)  a few people had mentioned that there were 140 days left to go until Comrades 2010. Someone else mentioned that Read more…

I’m finally getting with the times! I have just set up my Facebook profile; you can find me here http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brad-Brown/158393978752?v=wall and also don’t forget if you are on Twitter you follow me at http://www.twitter.com/bradbrown947. I know it took me long enough but better late than never!