On Sunday July 11th 2010, I’m taking part in a 10,000 metre run in central London. It’s my first proper race and I’m doing it for charity – so all donations are welcome!

To donate, please visit my JustGiving page and follow the instructions. It won’t take more than a few minutes.

The charity I’m running for is the Haller Foundation who work for economic and ecological development in Kenya. To find out more about why I’m running for them, click here.

The Race

The race I’m running is the ASICS British 10K London Run. Its official website can be found here but be warned, it is absolutely atrocious! So to spare you from having to experience its full horror, here’s what you need to know.

It all kicks off at 9.35am on Sunday 11th July 2010. The starting point is Hyde Park Corner (Google Maps link).

The route goes down to the river via Trafalgar Square and then eastwards to Tower Bridge, where we turn around and come back along Embankment. We’ll go west as far as Westminster Bridge before heading up to the Houses of Parliament, then finally along Whitehall to the finish line at Horse Guards (Google Maps link).

My plan is to run the race in 50 minutes, so if there are no complications I should be finishing at approximately 10.30am. I’ll then most likely be on the lookout for a local pub to visit (although obviously not The Greencoat Boy!).

The Haller Foundation

The charity I’m running for is the Haller Foundation. You’d be forgiven for not having heard of them – I hadn’t until a month ago, when I visited their stall at the Camley Street Natural Park Festival and got talking to their representatives.

The Haller Foundation works in support of economic and ecological development in Kenya. They rightly view economic and ecological issues as completely interlinked, and this is reflected in the way they work.

They focus on providing small farming communities with techniques and tools that can be sustainably managed, without need for ongoing outside support. They encourage farmers to work smaller plots of land far more effectively, which in turn delivers ecological improvement at the regional scale. And they recognise that human communities, economies and ecosystems are all emergent and highly interlinked systems, which respond best to change coming from the “bottom-up” instead of from the “top-down”.

Please sponsor me in this 10K run and help the Haller Foundation continue to improve the lives of communities, economies and ecosystems in east Africa.