I hate the phrase 'Go hard or go home'. I hate the phrase 'Bikini body'. The words 'guilt-free' when used to describe food get my back up too. There's a lot of things I dislike about how health and fitness is sometimes packaged and sold, so I'm doing something about it. For the past couple [...]

  Since SnowDublin, I’ve been trying to balance two things: upping my mileage for January’s ultra and not rushing back into training and injuring myself. A couple of days after Dublin marathon my legs felt fine, good even. But I knew that they were lying to me. They’d run a lot of miles in a [...]

For the past three days I've woken up at 6am. It has been dark and cold outside. I've put the kettle on, had some breakfast, looked at Twitter while listening to Radio 4 and then headed off to run five miles though London to work. And I've enjoyed it. Getting up at 6am isn't just [...]

It's fair to say that I was not looking forward to this race. I'd entered my coach, Chris, into the Men's Health Survival of the Fittest because, well, he's a healthy man. It made sense. He asked why I wasn't doing it and apparently not being a man doesn't exclude you, so I had no [...]

Often I pull open the vegetable drawer of the fridge to get an onion or an avocado, and there it sits: one lone carrot. I buy carrots planning to eat them. I have grand plans while I'm out shopping to be the sort of person that cuts up a carrot into sticks and takes them to [...]

Club kit. Boden running tights Last December I was back in Peterborough and I'd gone to the local Parkrun. It was a frosty Saturday morning and parts of the route still had a thin layer of ice covering them. My dad had come with me and he waited at the start. [...]

“Thanks for coaching me this year. I’ve got you entry to an obstacle race.” “Are you doing it too? It would be more fun to race together.” And that’s how I came to be entered into the Men’s Health Survival of the Fittest. It involves climbing over things and getting into cold, muddy water. In [...]

November and December: the autumn marathon season has come to a close and it's the time of year when runners look back on the past year and start getting an itchy trigger finger on race entry websites. I've already entered two races for 2015, so I say this with my feet on both sides of [...]

I have many pairs of trainers. I've run many miles in them. I have a pair of spikes for cross country, some trail shoes and fell shoes for different terrains, a pair for the track that's a little lighter and a pair I wear for everyday training and running marathons. The pair I wear for [...]

"Why are you doing it though?" I got asked this a lot before doing SnowDublin. While my non-running friends and colleagues have got used to the idea that I think running is fun, the idea that running twice as far might be twice as fun was a leap too far. But it's true, the main [...]