Ant ODonnell

In all honesty the 28 mile in 28 days was a walking challenge and not a running one but this time I’m going to attempt running 10k a week to build up to the 40k in October which I think is manageable.

I’m doing this in honour of my two sons who both have autism. My daughter has adhd and one of my lads has that AS WELL as autism so the next challenge after this I will do for adhd, whatever that may be. 

It is my belief that autism can be a super power. While I do know that everybody’s situations are different it’s a mantra that we’ve always stuck to and it’s worked out very well for us over the years. Both lads are extremely intelligent albeit in slightly different ways and topics. One (Alfie) seems to be a young genius according to his teachers, he's doing really well with school and has a major passion for astrophysics after taking it for his elective lesson. We’ve just bought him a telescope for his birthday yesterday but we’ve not set it up yet! My other lad can struggle quite a bit with his mental health from time to time but out of respect for his privacy I won’t go into much more detail but he’s one of the coolest people I’m proud to have in my life. He specialises in his dinosaur knowledge, he plays super hard videogames and tends to smash them in as little as one weekend sometimes and has discovered a love for going to watch live bands. I’m very proud of both of them (as I am my daughter of course), it’s a privilege and a pleasure to be their dad & I love them, hopefully I can do them proud with this run, I’m certainly going to give it my best shot, go at a nice pace and hopefully not throw my back out! I’ll be adopting a “little but often” approach. No big 10k runs in a day, just 2k per day minimum for 5 days a week, at least to start with. There’s nothing to say I can’t step it up a little after I’ve gotten used to that and I feel like I can up my game a bit.

I’ll post more blogs and I will share to my personal Facebook and also my music & mental health Facebook page & group, I may elaborate a bit more on the music and mental health page/project in the next blog 👌

Thank you for reading and sticking with this first blog, let’s get this done!