I then needed a goal to motivate myself – I decided to run a half marathon and in talking with a colleague discovered there was a half marathon in March being run in my home town of Milton Keynes on March 7th.

To further motivate myself I decided to raise money for the hospice that looked after my father in law before he passed away from Cancer – Willen Hospice in Milton Keynes.

With all this decided I then had the hard part of actually training for it! At the time I was really unfit – despite playing American Football for so long I’d not really done any gym/aerobic work at all for some years!

I also weighed 264 lbs and needed to start the training slowly.

I discovered a great application for my iPhone called ‘Couch to 5k‘ which was designed to start you running by doing some very simple interval training to start with. A matter of running for a short period and then walking… it built it up until within 9 weeks you could run 5k without stopping.

As well as ‘Couch to 5k‘ I also started using the Nike + application on my iPhone to monitor my progress. I bought a good pair of Nike running shoes and installed the Nike + sensor in them. This meant I had a complete record of all my training.

Throughout the training I found I was losing weight pretty easily by also following a sensible diet – not starving myself like many diets but just choosing sensibly when eating.

I managed to find a good training program online which I followed religiously by entering each run in my diary and treating it like a business meeting (I mean I wouldn’t not turn up to a meeting would I)

So after 6 months of training I managed to complete my first half marathon this weekend!

The results are that I :

• Did 69 workouts
• Ran for a total of 48:42:20
• Ran 473.87 km in total
• Burnt 53,902 cal

Due to some very generous donations I managed to raise nearly £2,000 for Willen Hospice!

Personally – I also lost 50 pounds in weight! (22.7kg for the Europeans) and knocked 7 points of my BMI!

My time for the Half Marathon was 1hr 55 mins and 23 seconds – I was aiming for under 2hrs so I was really pleased!

I’ve now entered the Great North Run in September and plan to do the London Marathon in April 2011!

The pictures below were taken on Sunday during the half marathon!

A great visual representation of the mobile market. (Spotted on Steve’s blog and created by iStrategy)

This is an interesting take on mobile device charging!

The Powerstrap is a wearable rechargeable battery pack, providing quick and easy power for portable electronic devices. There are six Li-Ion polymer battery cells enclosed in a highly water resistant silica gel strap.

These six batteries provide a total of 1500mAH of power and the ten adaptors it is supplied with means the Powerstrap can provide battery life to many different kinds of portable devices, such as mp3/mp4 players, handheld game consoles, mobile phones and much more.

You can get more details HERE

Gartner just released the latest Mobile Phone Sales data to the end of 2009.

The winners are RIM, iPhone, and Android that grew 3.3%, 6.2% and 3.4% respectively.

Windows Mobile (3.1%), Linux (2.9%) and Symbian (5.5%) all lost market share.

You can read more HERE

In an interesting move RIM will give away for FREE their Blackberry Enterprise Server Software to customers.

The Blackberry Enterprise Server Express software is targeting Small and Medium size companies while the Blackberry Enterprise Server v5 software is still more focussed towards larger organisations requiring additional security policies and support for Blackberry MVS (Mobile Voice System) or integration with Microsoft OCS or Lotus Sametime.

RIM’s software revenue has been declining year on year as Microsoft and IBM/Lotus now have integrated support for mobile devices so it’s not surprising to see this move.

You can get more details HERE

Yesterday at Mobile World Congress Microsoft announced the latest version of their Windows Phone software. Windows Phone 7 Series was demonstrated to the attendees of the press conference and focussed predominantly on the UI.

Further details will be announced at Mix in March with devices available for Holiday 2010.

You can get lots more details HERE

I’m big Starbucks fan and love their coffee. Thankfully I live near one and work in the next street to one (well doesn’t everyone).

When I’m out and about though it’s always good to track one down when I fancy a coffee and thankfully Starbucks have just released the UK myStarbucks app for the iPhone.

As well as finding Starbucks you can also get details on the products on sale and their nutrition value.

You can download it from HERE

Quickoffice have just released an extension of their Mobile Suite which provides the ability to not only edit and create Word and Excel files but now get access to those documents stored on cloud services such as Apple MobileMe, Google Docs, Box.net and Dropbox.

You can read the press release HERE

You can download it from the iTunes App Store HERE