Explanation

For the benefit of those who aren't Toastmasters, or who don't understand what I'm planning, here's some background.

Firstly, a "Speedrun" is a term from gaming. A player who gets very experienced at a game will challenge themselves to play the entire game as fast as they possibly can.

Here are about a squillion examples:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Speedrun

Here is a guy explaining what speedruns are and "why they are awesome":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5auJOBC828

And here (for the moment anyway!) is the current top Google hit for the name of this blog, "Pathway Speedrun":

But I'm not speedrunning a computer game.

I am a Toastmaster, that is to say, a member of Toastmasters International:

https://www.toastmasters.org/

Toastmasters is a club for people who want to learn, or to improve at, public speaking. It is organised into over 16,000 clubs all around the world. (That statistic predates the pandemic so it may have changed.) 

I belong to Cardiff Toastmasters, in Cardiff, South Wales, United Kingdom. The flag of Wales looks like this (except I added a black border so you can see it more clearly):

Do not confuse Wales with England. Wales is a small country to the west of England, and is shown bright pink in this image:

.

Wales is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. It is lush and verdant. Mainly because of how much it rains. 

Cardiff is the capital of Wales, and is on the south coast.

Cardiff Toastmasters' page on Facebook is here:

https://www.facebook.com/CardiffToastmasters/

And their page on EasySpeak is here:

https://toastmasterclub.org/portal.php?c=383

I expect we'll be talking about EasySpeak a lot if you stick with this blog. 

[Andrew takes big deep breath.]

Now, the educational program followed by Toastmasters is called "Pathways". More detail can be found here:

https://www.toastmasters.org/pathways-overview

There are currently eleven pathways. Every Toastmaster chooses a pathway and pursues it through their Toastmasters career. It is quite common to start another pathway while still pursuing the first one.

The pathways all consist of five levels. Each level requires the completion of several projects, most, but not all, of which are speeches to be presented at a meeting of a Toastmasters club. Generally the projects become more difficult and time consuming as you work through the pathway.

One of those pathways is called "Dynamic Leadership". There is an overview here:

https://www.toastmasters.org/pathways-overview/pathways-dynamic-leadership-path

It's hard to be precise how many speeches are required to complete the entire Dynamic Leadership pathway (i.e. all five levels) because some of the projects are electives and some of those electives are not speeches. So it depends which electives you choose. 

There's no set amount of time a pathway can take. Here's what you get if you google the question:

Anyway, I'm setting myself the goal of doing it in two weeks. I will be posting much more here about the logistics as the project progresses.

I think it will be fun. Wish me luck!