I am a keen long-distance mountain runner, and I also have a young family and demanding professional career. This means I understand the challenges of balancing family, work, training and racing, and have experience thinking imaginatively about how to meet personal running ambitions without sacrificing the other areas.

Competent completion

I’m not an elite runner, but get a lot of satisfaction from the adventure of ultra-running, and the physical and psychological challenges it presents. I am keen to share my knowledge on how to approach tough races and challenges, which is why I trained as a coach. I have the Coach in Running Fitness qualification from England Athletics, so that I can support others in their training.

My personal running goal has been “competent completion” – to train appropriately, give them some thought and finish them in reasonable shape. It’s not all about the winning (fortunately), but if you get strong you can have some awesome adventures, and occasionally sneak in some cheeky achievements.

To illustrate what I mean, my Park Run 5k best time is currently about 19:10. That’s good, but not awesome, and the same pattern emerges in other flat distances, trail and fell races. I train mostly by having fun, with a few more structured sessions thrown in to sharpen up. Some of my ultra highlights have been:

• Bob Graham Round – winter, solo, unsupported – 5th completion in this style, December 2023.
• Dragon’s Back Race – 2019 (31st) and 2021 (10th)
• Ultra Tour de Snowdonia 100 miles – 2023 (34th)
• Lakeland 100 miles – 2022 (49th)
• Steve Parr Round (Lakeland 2,500′ summits, 113 miles and 40,000′ ascent) – 6th completion within 48 hour time limit, May 2022.

Outdoors back story

I became serious about running from 2018. I entered the 2019 Dragon’s Back Race (DBR), and was appropriately terrified. The DBR had been tempting for a few years, but the seriousness of the running and the price tag put me off.

Successfully completing the DBR was the catalyst that took me from being a reasonable fell runner into what I would call a competent endurance athlete. I’m not particularly fast by race standards, but can keep going a long time. I think that’s a level many people can get to if they approach it well, and there’s a lot of fun to be had by competently completing races and challenges.

As a kid, I went hillwalking with my dad, and we had climbed all the Wainwright summits (in the Lakes) by the time I was 13. Actually we hadn’t – we missed Burnbank Fell near Loweswater due to one of dad’s many navigational errors, so really it took until I was 34 to do them all.  My dad’s poor navigation skills occasionally led the family into danger, and it was this that led me to learn to map-read and become pretty good at it, and route planning, in my teens. I then loved the expedition element of the Duke of Edinburgh’s awards, and later travelled to places like Greenland and South America.

Rock climbing and mountaineering took over as my main interest through my late teens and twenties. Well, hillwalking just ain’t cool. Sorry guys (don’t worry, I have come back to it). I was never particularly good at the actual climbing part but had good hill skills and was drawn towards longer, more remote climbs. Scottish winter and Alpine mountaineering were my thing, and while I could flail about like a numpty on a short gritstone crack in the Peak District, I could handle a long snow and ice route in the Alps pretty well. This would turn out to be a good indicator of my running performances!

Most of my climbing friends starting spreading out into either mountain biking or fell-running, as less time-consuming, weather-dependent and stressful hobbies. I went for the latter, running a few mountain marathons (two day events carrying overnight gear and navigating between checkpoints) and some fell races. There were a few road marathons in the mix, London twice and Berlin once. In 2009 there was a glut of successful Bob Graham Rounds amongst my friends, and having supported one in June, I ran my own in July. It was fairly harrowing, I was fit from Alpine mountaineering but hadn’t done that much running. I thought I’d bail embarrassingly early, but hung in there for a 23:28 completion, with a very sore knee and some chafing that doesn’t need a full description.

It’s time to get serious

So, the Dragon’s Back Race. I had one big advantage which was knowledge of the mountains, and the skills for navigation and camping, but needed to up my game on the running front. But I had about a year from entering to get ready, and this coincided with having a midweek day off for training.  I set myself a goal of running approximately 50 miles per week with 10,000 feet of ascent, with a few longer challenges thrown in along the way. I started thinking of days out in terms of the percentage of a DBR day (see Nerdology section). The plan broadly worked, I completed the race in a decent time, but again with a sore and swollen knee.

That was the springboard for most of the ultra distance running I have done. After a bit of rest and recovery, I didn’t want to let the fitness I’d built up drain away, and took a more structured approach to training, building in some strength and conditioning exercises to avoid future injuries (I haven’t had any significant knee trouble since, despite upping the training). 

Since then, I’ve taken on a mix of hard races, established ultra-distance challenges, and home-made routes dreamt up as training exercises and fabulous days out. Recent highlights have been the Steve Parr Round, a 114-mile circuit of all the Lake District summits over 2,500 feet, and a return to the Dragon’s Back Race in 2021, where I finished 10th. I have sneaked a few race wins, mainly because stronger runners either didn’t turn up or went the wrong way. I have been leading runs for local groups, either to encourage people into off-road running or to take more experienced runners on new routes.

Coaching

As my running experience grew, I found myself supporting others with their running. This has been across a broad spectrum, whether people trying off-road running for the first time, or progressing to ultra, or taking on the really big mountain challenges. I have really enjoyed all aspects of this, leading sessions for my local club, passing on knowledge, or developing training plans. This led to me becoming a qualified coach, setting up this website, contributing some articles to Fellrunner magazine, and starting writing for a Substack – Out and Back.