@tourofengland #running #runtok #runningcommunity #outdoors #tourofengland #journey #tourism ♬ funky house – Close-Wu Journey journal A Day that was supposed to start between 2 flags and with a quiet handshake with Brathay’s head of fundraising was magnificently gatecrashed by Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Newcastle, who stopped for filming and who later in the morning gave…
Journey journal A whistle stop to Bletchley to update me after a previous visit there and made possible by Jill Hawkin’s arch negotiation skills – in which she swapped music a live performance notes with most charming gate porter of the year, Barney Jain. He was a must for the blog, in what turned out…
Journey journal Last minute packing – yesterday consumed with media appointments. I’m officially ‘on the road’ driven this week by my step daughter Charis. An early start for Higginson Marlow Parkrun and such a fantastic welcome there, with a posse of Chippenham Parkrun tourists in attendance and Brathay 10in10er, Rachel Ongs, pictured, also turning up…
My Big Tour of England gets underway on 1st July – 13 days from now. Throughout the tour I will be eating anything and everything. That’s because I am: Trained as an ultrarunner to make the best of any situation. The distances I run can’t be sustained by gels and I have to be able…
So, I got halfway through The Tunnel, which metaphorically and truthfully is a hard place to stop. I have had 2 meaningful DNFs before, at events I was determined to complete. The first was when horribly exposed to the arctic snowstorm in the wrong kit during the Lofoten Islands 100 mile, a race nearly all…
It’s all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you’re properly trained. Queen Elizabeth II The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images. Carl Jung Man needs difficulties; they…
Midway through a ‘what a year I’ve had’ type year for me I met a man who also lives between one exhilarating adventure and another. I was in Uganda, nominally for the marathon, truthfully for the adventure and the life-enhancing envelopment that comes with visiting the associated charitable projects. The man I met was Steve…
“The concept is simple, you start on the hour every hour and have to run and complete a 4.167 mile trail route in that time. You must run the loop and be back ready to start the next loop or you are out, the race continues until there is only one person who can complete…
The Back Yard format is the work of legendary racemaker Lazarus Lake and has quickly grown into a global phenomenon – as charted in an excellent recent BBC feature. In a nutshell – Back Yards are 4.16 miles long and runners complete one lap at a time, on the hour, every hour, until only one…
The offer of interviewing Marshall Ulrich on the publication of his new book Both Feet on the Ground saw an immediate yes for me. How much incentive do you need? Marshall is an ultra running adventuring hero, an icon of my sport and his book was billed as sharing profoundly the “Therapeutic Benefits of Immersion…