Ad | Join in with the Mancunian Miles project, get fitter and stay active!

This year I'm working with Manchester Marathon to promote their Mancunian Miles project. The aim is simple, get people to bump up their physical activity and see if together we can walk enough extra miles for one lap all the way around the Earth before race day on Sunday 5th April.

Best of it is, ANYONE can join in, and you add as many or as few miles as you manage, but if you manage to complete a whole marathon distance then you can earn a certificate or even prizes to celebrate your achievement.

My partner and I are notoriously inactive. Since he had Meningitis and I had lots of exciting abdominal surgery, we've really been very lazy and got used to not being able to participate. That has to change now. We're both as well as we'll ever be and really should be building our health back up. And everyone can do with being a bit stronger and smoothing out the tummy cushion a bit.

My youngest is quite sporty, but our 11 year old doesn't get a lot of enjoyment from playing football or most other sports, except trampolining and dodgeball, so walking together is going to be an excellent way for us all to increase activity without literally 'trying to run before we can walk'.

It's easy to join in on the Mancunian Miles Challenge website. We are a week late joining in with the full marathon distance, and want to be realistic, so in total we are going to aim for the half marathon which officially starts in a week's time - Thursday 19th March. We'll be walking or running an extra mile a day up until the 31st. Most of the running is likely to be our 9 year old.

The Mancunian Miles Challenge is building on the success of the Active Soles campaign and Greater Manchester Moving, which wants to reduce inactivity and increase participation in physical activity and sport, and get 75% of people active of fairly active by 2025. If we can walk or run a combined 24,901 additional miles during March, we'll have run the distance around the entire world.

Prizes and rewards will be available to each person who completes the Mancunian Miles challenge, with certificates available to collect at the Marathon Eve event at the Great Northern Railway building on Saturday 4th April – the day before the marathon. If you can't make it to the event, certificates can also be posted for a small fee, or downloaded to print at home.

You can find out more, download the wallchart to track your progress and register your details to join in free of charge on the Mancunian Miles Challenge website, and if you want to find out more about the marathon itself, take a look at the main Manchester Marathon website.

I'm working together with Mancunian Miles in a paid capacity.