Last week it was a great pleasure to welcome Ava Plowright of Shelter Cymru around to Mooneerams Head Office in Cardiff. The occasion was a chance to celebrate a remarkable feat successfully achieved by the oldest member of the Mooneerams team, our much-loved solicitor/ Head of Business Development, Carl Waring.
At the beginning of last year, sixty-two-year-old Carl, who walks around saying things like ‘age is just a number’, told me that he intended to run at least one continuous mile every day of 2021. To be more accurate, I think he confided this to me after he’d already run 125 miles by the end of January.
To say the least, I was impressed and thought his challenge deserved some support. So, I told him that if he managed to run every single day of the year, Mooneerams would donate £1000 to a charity of his choice. To his credit, Carl, who is English, nominated Shelter Cymru as his chosen charity.
Carl said that he finds his mood is generally at its lowest during the winter months of January through to the end of March. So, one of the reasons he chose to do the challenge was to get himself out and running, whatever the weather: a sort of face-off with winter, I suppose.
That he was doing what he said he would do was self-evident from his early morning posts on social media where Carl’s beaming face would be staring out at you day after day, with a comment along the lines of:
‘Day 245; 4 miles and 1000 miles for the year.’
Enough to make you switch off your phone and go back to sleep!
Anyway, Carl seemed to be romping home to the finish time when he one Saturday morning he messaged Angus Fergusson and I to tell us that he’d developed a really bad pain in his foot. He had developed something called plantar fasciitis, and as the days went on, the pain got worse.
Despite the discomfort, he was determined not to fall at the last hurdle and true to form, he managed to get out and run on every remaining day of the year
His last run was on the treadmill, and he duly posted his final ‘Run Streak’ picture on social media on December 31st, 2021.
Carl tells me that in the course of running every day of 2021, he completed 1400 miles in total. His earliest run was at 5.30 am and his latest at 11.30 pm.
Therefore, it was a real honour for me to formally acknowledge Carl’s achievement by handing over a cheque for £1000 to Ava, who gratefully accepted it on behalf of Shelter Cymru when she came in to see us last week.
Knowing Carl, this won’t be the last mad challenge he does. As he says, age is not a number, and I’m sure he’ll be pulling me aside before long to announce he’s walking to Cape Town. Just as long as he doesn’t ask me to join him and he takes his laptop with him, so he can keep writing his excellent personal injury articles that have helped to make the Mooneerams Solicitors website the magnificent font of legal knowledge that it is fast becoming.
