So you're planning to get fit in 2014 but looking for an incentive — and a fairly long lead time? Well, you may have come to the right place. A number of opportunities to get fit and do good at the same time are coming up around Ireland this year and we’ll be highlighting quite a few of them in the coming weeks. The first appears in this blog. However, if you’re keen to raise funds for Friends of Londiani but you’re not able to get to Dublin and you're not female, we’ll have some more suggestions for you in our blogs very soon. Not female? Well yes, because, by definition, the Flora Women’s Mini Marathon (www.florawomensminimarathon.ie) is not just about walking, jogging or running 10K on Bank Holiday Monday, 2nd June. It’s also a women-only event — the biggest all-women's event of its kind in the world. And Friends of Londiani is aiming to get a team together to take part in this year’s Flora Women’s Mini Marathon and raise funds for our work in Kenya. A women’s event is a very appropriate one for us of course because, as regular readers of this blog will know, we do a lot in aid of women’s health. In fact, that will be what the funds raised will be used for: maternal health, the Girls for Girls project (http://www.friendsoflondiani.com/projects.php?id=297), immunizations protecting the health of under 5s and more. In fact our work is expanding. We’re about to start supporting cervical cancer screening throughout the district we cover. There are many more examples of specific projects that support women’s health on the Friends of Londiani site; we hope they inspire you to contribute. Which leads us to the inevitable question…. Would you or any of your friends or family be interested in taking part in this year’s Flora Women’s Mini Marathon and running as part of an Friends of Londiani team? Give us a call or email if you want to help advance the cause of women’s health while also getting a bit fitter yourself. We can give you a hand with t-shirts, sponsor cards, publicity via social media and more. Registration for the event opens on February 20th and closes on April 24th. So you have more than enough time to start jogging (or walking briskly) on your local roads and tracks before the event itself. And you’ll know, if the training gets tough, that by doing this for Friends of Londiani you’re making a difference — that, as the UN’s Stephen Sobhani, puts it, “Healthy and educated women lead to healthy families — children live longer and people are more productive.” And as we said earlier there will also be quite a few fundraising and health-improving opportunities outside Dublin this year — for both sexes. Watch this space.