'The Three Arc-eteers' are training for the wettest, muddiest fun run of their lives

At the beginning of May, Sara, Michelle and I started training for the X-Runner event which is taking place on Saturday 8th July. We, alongside other colleagues from SCAPE, will be tackling all sorts of obstacles, through water and mud - all in the name of charity.

Our first tracked run in May took us just over 53 minutes to complete at an average pace of 08:21 per kilometre, and to ease us into the training, we chose Colwick Country Park, which is flat terrain. This gave us a benchmark to measure our progress and we were all excited to see how we could improve on these figures as the training continued.

In between our twice-weekly running sessions, Sara and Michelle have been playing badminton once a week and I have been attending spinning classes twice a week. We've even set up a group chat on WhatsApp, so that we can keep each other motivated, share photos etc. Completing this together has been great motivation for all of us, and this challenge is something that we're proud to be doing as part of our charity fundraising.

One of our latest tracked runs, around Bestwood Country Park which is notably hilly terrain, showed us how much progress we have made and we were delighted to see the improvements in just under two months. As you can see, our pace per kilometre has greatly improved, especially considering the difference in elevation.

We’ve had lots of support from our colleagues, especially from David Smith who kindly gave us a free pass to Virgin Active gym and took us for an hour and a half upper body strength training session.

David set up grid training, where we carried out various circuits of four different exercises for 30 seconds with a 30 second rest before repeating again! This included battle ropes, tyre flipping, burpees, kettle bell squats, weighted sledge pushing and balancing planks. As you can imagine we found this extremely challenging but fun at the same time, and a great way to prepare ourselves for tackling the obstacles on the run.

We have been overwhelmed by the generosity of our colleagues, contractors, family and friends in terms of donations, which are going towards such a worthy cause.

We're starting to get excited and a little nervous about the event, but know that it will be fun once we get stuck in. We are hoping that we've put in enough training to get us round the course on Saturday, but we will find out on the day!

There's still time to make a donation and show your support on our JustGiving page and we would welcome any support on the day to cheer us on as we complete what X-Runner promises to be the wettest and muddiest, physically and mentally challenging fun run of our lives.