I began school 'cross-country' (mainly roads and paths!) at the age of 11 but this was just on wet games afternoons so I consider myself having become a runner when I joined the school orienteering club at 13. Orienteering is all about navigating with map and compass between checkpoints as quickly as possible but my own navigation on the run was (and still is) "good" rather than "excellent" so I was usually at my best in flat, runnable areas where I could make the most of my speed. It was orienteering that developed my taste for shiggy. Perhaps it was particularly the time I went face down in the various forms of gunk that had collected in a New Forest underpass but there were also occasions when I was up to my waist in stagnant, evil-smelling swamps! I also got my first taste of mountain running while at school.
I also competed in 'run and ride' events in which two people raced over a few miles of paths and tracks with just one bike. One would ride ahead, dump the bike and run on while the other ran up to the bike, picked it up and cycled some way past the runner, dumped the bike and so on until you crossed the line together. Being a better runner than my partner I didn't do a lot of cycling and they were mighty tiring events! But excellent fun.
Upon going to Exeter University to study Geology I continued to orienteer (despite the usual student distractions) and made another major step in my journey towards ever more sublime running experiences by beginning to run mountain marathons. These involve two days of hill running, navigating between checkpoints while carrying all the kit you need for a night under canvas ... food, sleeping bag, tent, etc. My first few were not very encouraging with long days out feeling shattered most of the time but I lived in hope that they would get better and they did ... eventually! The earliest truly enjoyable one was in Scotland's Galloway Hills with Marie. There was no pressure to do well in this small, select event, the weather was perfect and the overnight stop by a remote loch was in the most magical place I have ever camped. Quite romantic, really!
After leaving Exeter and failing to get a job (50 application letters just got me 50 rejection letters to stick on my wall!) I went to Southampton for an MSc. in Oceanography during which time I became disillusioned with orienteering and gave it up. A hundred more job applications the following year finally yielded two offers and I joined Phillips Petroleum in Woking. This was a real turning point in my running life since there were showers in the office as well as a number of other runners so motivation was rarely a problem. When someone stops by your desk and says "C'mon" you just go, even if you were previously having second thoughts about venturing out into the wild, wet and windy weather!
Woking is excellent for off-road routes. The only downside is a distinct lack of hills but the miles of quiet lanes, tracks, paths and commons without interminable gates and stiles more than make up for that. For many years we legged our way around all the footpaths within a lunch "hour" (interpreted very liberally!) of the office with some truly magical running and a few edge-of-sanity epics. Some of our runs would begin at a reasonable pace before speeding up, the level of chatter falling minute by minute until we were steaming along, eyeballs out, to finish with a mad sprint back through the middle of town! Some of my colleagues were fast, one of them being a sub-four-minute miler who once qualified for an Olympic 1500m trial. (Sadly, he spends most of his time with one injury or another these days - the perils of high mileage from a young age.)
Phillips could field a pretty good team and we had some success with a second place to Thames Hare and Hounds in the Richmond Park Relays and an unexpected fourth place in the Corporate Challenge, a 3½-mile race round Battersea Park (London) with eight thousand runners, beaten only by very large companies (Ford, NatWest and Royal Mail) fielding some pretty nifty athletes like Eamonn Martin! The words on our vest summed it up - "Run Like Hell"!
I started road racing at this time, initially 10Ks, and occasionally ran the Surrey League cross-country events for Sutton and District but, more importantly, discovered multi-terrain running in the forms of the Beast, Stickler ... and the Grizzly! I also hashed a bit, the most memorable being with the Guildford Hash around the Wey Navigation after heavy rain. Looking for flour marks on chalky paths in the dark without a torch was tricky enough but when you were up to your thighs in (running) water it was distinctly exciting!
By '96 I was getting bored at Phillips so looked around for another job and ended up in Axminster. Here I discovered the twin joys of training in all the local shiggy and racing through a wider range of gunk across the whole of the Westcountry.
After success in short-distance races I felt that there was more to running than an hour or two and I began my foray into ultra distance events. I had always felt pretty shattered at the end of two-day mountain marathons so I was overjoyed to not only survive the three-day, 80-mile Great Lakeland Trail Race in '98 but to experience one of my most enjoyable runs ever on the last day.
In '99 I pushed the limits even further in various acts of madness: 70 miles and 42 peaks on the Bob Graham Round; 40 miles in six hours around a school field and fifty miles in eight and a half hours around Seaton and Colyford on New Year's Eve. The first taught me that I can run through the misery of a seven-hour low but that there are real physical limits, the second that 30 miles is quite easy if you're heading for 40 and the last that 40 miles is quite easy if you're aiming for 50!
Most of you know the rest. Lots of my experiences are written about on my website.
So what's running all about for me? It's about long summer runs with the sun shining down and the buzzards mewing overhead; it's about going out in the winter for a really good wallow, returning with legs caked in mud; it's about the comradeship of being out there with friends; it's about the lung-busting adrenaline of competition, steaming along that fine line between control and completely losing it; it's about daydreaming while floating along the uninhabited, uninhibited path; and, of course, it's about the occasional foray right to the edge of sanity.