No.

The world has not turned upside down.

I have not gone mad.

You are indeed seeing this correctly.

I am RUNNING a HALF MARATHON.

I know, I don’t even believe it and I’m the one who signed my soul and my soles away to the Edinburgh Marathon Festival.

I have decided to document this experience for all of the doubters that are and are yet to come. So I’ll be posting every few weeks to update you on all things to do with my training experience. Yikes.

So how did the girl who hasn’t run more than a mile in years end up here?

I decided to sign up for the half-marathon over the summer when I was living with and working for my aunt and uncle in California. I don’t know if it was the legal marijuana being grown in the backyard behind their house that was in the air or a genuine miracle, but I started running every morning.

I know. This sounds intense.

But I was running somewhere between 1k and 2k, so please don’t be impressed.

I had friends who had done the half marathon before and survived, and I decided that if I just kept slowly running further distances, surely it wouldn’t be that hard. Famous last words.

So as you probably guessed, first semester started and I gave up on training. Every week I said I’d start again, but there’s always an excuse for a student.

What on earth could motivate me to start training for May again? Well, if you don’t know me that well, I organise campaigns for a community of students at university called Just Love. One of those campaigns was a fast to raise money for IJM, which is an incredible charity working to end slavery. They sent over a representative to talk at an event we were having to launch the fast and we went for coffee afterwards. As we were getting to know each other, we came to the topic of my poor decision to register for the half marathon. Her eyes lit up when I said that I hadn’t picked a charity to run for yet; I honestly hadn’t thought about it, as I was avoiding thinking about the race in its entirety. And there and then we hatched the plan to get a group of students involved with Just Love and any of their friends to form a group to run together and raise money for the life-saving work of IJM. There are very few things I would run a half marathon for (anything short of a million dollars is questionable) but I am truly passionate about the work that IJM does.

We figured out that with the amount of wonderful people who signed up that if each of us raised around £315 that we could raise £5,000. This is enough to fund ONE ENTIRE RESCUE MISSION!

I know. Chills.

So for the past few weeks, I have been getting my ass out of bed 3 days a week and running (less than a 5k but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?). It is not fun. It is very much the opposite of fun. But I know that through this process, I will be raising money for an incredible charity and changing the lives of those who are rescued from forms of slavery such as human trafficking and forced labour.

Anyhow, I wanted to start off my blog posts about my running journey with the “why” – the reason I’m doing this crazy thing. I’ll link my justgiving page if you want to donate, as well as the link to IJM’s website where you can learn all about the work they do and see for yourself if you wish to donate.

I will be posting soon about the more personal reasons for running a half-marathon and all the struggles that come along with it – so stay tuned for all that jazz.

Mackenzie x

My JustGiving: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/mackenzie-e-pinkin

IJM UK: https://www.ijmuk.org/

PS: Featured image is the closest thing I have to a picture of me running (rip) and was taken by the marvellous Eilidh Harbison