Run Unbound

A big week. 7 runs. 1 parkrun. 132km. 21h45.

75km in the Lakes over two days (the second in that steady Lake District rain), reccing the back half of the Lakeland 100 course. The ankle had no complaints. The quads grumbled about the vert.

One thing I’ve realised about fuelling long days: I love chocolate and sweets. I don’t love gels.

The nav was mostly straightforward. Now I know where the ground’s easy and where the paths are annoyingly stony.

After all that, I somehow managed a tempo parkrun, helping Ranelagh in the Mini Mob Match against Stragglers.

Somewhere in there it felt like the old, pre-ankle ni**le days again ☺️

💡 Coaching point

Fuelling matters. For most of us, Precision doesn’t.

The difference between eating too little and eating enough is enormous. The difference between 75g and 82g of carbohydrate per hour is much smaller.

The same goes for carbohydrate blends. For most runners, eating enough and tolerating it matters more than whether the ratio is exactly what the latest marketing campaign says it should be.

Gels are useful because they’re convenient and predictable. But once you know roughly how much carbohydrate is in the foods you enjoy, real food often works perfectly well too.

Get the big things right first. Then worry about the decimals.

7 runs including 3 relay legs. 1 strength. 77km. 12h15.

Back to London after Cornwall. Tired legs, and home life got a bit more complicated. Sally broke her ankle on holiday. It’s a really tough time for her and I’m trying to do my bit to help.

The South Downs Way 100 Mile Relay was on Saturday. A team of six, three legs each, with horizontal driving rain at times adding to the experience.

I made two navigation mistakes. The first was missing a turn mid-leg and adding an unnecessary kilometre. The second was loading the wrong GPX before my second leg. Another runner kindly pointed out I was going the wrong way after about 300 metres. Embarrassing, particularly the second one. Entirely avoidable.

We still finished 2nd vets team, and fortunately neither mistake changed the result.

The most encouraging thing all week was something else. Three hard 10km efforts in one day and the ankle held up. Another promising sign.

💡 Coaching point

Get your navigation on point.

Recce the route if you can. Knowing what’s coming lets you race rather than navigate.

Make sure your GPX is right. Don’t just assume it is.

Check the route on your watch. Don’t get carried away racing and forget.

The hard part should be the running.

Race Roundup: Sun, Rain, Relays and a Magic Hour

A proper mixed bag. All of it worth it.

🇺🇸 Utah Valley Marathon – Douglas
4:48:17. State 17. Running at altitude in 30-degree heat by mile 20. He made the right calls, kept moving and got it done. Utah is in the bag.

💙💛 South Downs Way Relay – , , & me
🥈 in the vets competition for the men. The women were denied 🥉by a technicality that was the race organisers’ own doing. Frustrating probably doesn’t cover it. An awesome event, albeit a bleaker experience than usual. Horizontal 50mph rain will do that. Huge thanks to and .monster for the marathon job driving us round all day.

🔟 Dorking 10 – Matt H & Bridgit
Matt broke the hour mark with a PB of 59:20. Bridgit matched her time from last year in 1:37:39. Solid runs all round.

🦌 Parkland Relays – , , Phil, , Ed F, &
First overall for Ranelagh. 1st and 2nd in the Vets. The event delivered as it always does and Ranelagh did too.

🌳 Wimbledon Trail Series Race 2 – Ellie
Slippery underfoot after the rain, tough but fun. She got round. More to come.

Relays, road miles and a magic hour. Not a bad weekend 💚

The apps that earn their place on my phone and one I’m cooling on. Runner and coach both.

Garmin Connect. Run data and navigation; the workhorse.

TrainingPeaks. Where I schedule and review my own plan and everyone else’s. The session as it actually happened, not as it was written.

Outdooractive. My go-to for routes; better than OS to my mind. It has the OS maps plus European maps for when the races are further from home.

Strava. The social network I can’t quite leave. The selling is wearing a little thin, but I’m still there for the community. It’s also where I see the lines people actually run, not just the ones the map suggests.

Apple Notes. Where the strength work and the scribbled bits live.

Todoist. Because otherwise nothing would happen.

Then the weather. Three of them.

Met Office for the radar and a mountain forecast that occasionally talks me off the ledge MWIS puts me on.

MWIS (Mountain Weather Information Service). Not technically an app, but a second pessimistic opinion never hurt anyone heading up a mountain.

Apple Weather for the important question: when will it stop raining?

None of them run the miles for you.

They point.
They record.
They warn.

The work is still yours.

What app would you struggle to delete?

Half-term in Cornwall. Flowrider and the aquapark at Retallack, and a surfing lesson with . Plenty of activity that wasn’t running.

Oh, and my biggest training week since October. 6 runs. 103km. 16hrs. Back-to-back long runs.

Somewhere in all of that, I started to feel like myself as a runner again.

I can’t fully explain it. I’m still slower than I’d like. But something shifted.

I think I’d been so focused on protecting my ankle for so long that my running had quietly become about the injury, not the running.

Last week I made a conscious decision to stop organising my training around it.

My ankle will always be a bit niggly. That’s just the road I’m on.

Time to get on with it.

💡 Coaching point

A chronic injury can quietly become the centre of your training.

You start making decisions around it. Protecting it. Managing it.

Sometimes that’s necessary.

But at some point, if you’re going to move forward, the running has to become the main thing again.

Treat the injury. Adapt around it.

Just don’t give it more influence than it deserves.

Race Roundup: Stockholm and the Coad Cup

🇸🇪 Stockholm Marathon –

4:52:18. Difficult conditions and all the right decisions made along the way, including easing off when the heat demanded it. Not the time she wanted but smart racing. First marathon done.

💙💛 Ranelagh Coad Cup – Bec, Mark & Charlie

Belated congratulations to three Unbounders who braved the heat on Tuesday night. Midweek miles count too.

May’s Coaching Tips

A few reminders from a month of hills, races, missed sessions, family walks, and trying not to overcomplicate things:

🥾 Hiking is a skill. It’s also training - big days on your feet count, especially when the terrain gets rough later in races.

😊 Leave room for fun - not every run has to justify itself. Sometimes the point is simply that you wanted to be there.

🏁 If you’re training to race, don’t train to train - the week before a race, protecting the start line matters more than squeezing in another session.

📉 Consistency is easy to lose and slow to rebuild - even B-races cost more than race day. Long uninterrupted stretches of good training are usually what move things forward.

None of this is complicated. But good training rarely is.

5 runs. 1 strength. 87km. 13hrs.

Two days rest after the Green Belt Relay, then back to it.

First back-to-back long runs of the block. Three hours, then 90 minutes around Richmond. Not specific Lakeland prep. Not meant to be. Just building.

Something shifted this week. Not in performance — in approach.

For the past month I knew something was off. It took me a while to spot it.

I’ve been so focused on managing the ankle that I’ve quietly lost consistency.
Protecting it. Offloading it. Letting it make decisions it shouldn’t be making.

Time to start training again, not just managing.

The blue line is fitness.
You can see where it plateaued.

💡 Coaching point

Consistency is easy to lose and slow to rebuild.

Illness, injury, race tapering — they all break it, and sometimes that’s exactly right.

But even B-races cost you more than race day. There’s the taper before and the recovery after. Weeks where you’re holding back when you should be building.

It’s worth asking, honestly, whether every race in your calendar is earning its place.

If you’re building towards a big goal, the aim is a long, uninterrupted stretch of good training.
Everything else should protect that.

Race Roundup: Everything Is Better in the Shade

A bank holiday weekend of heat, grit and lessons learned.

💪🏻 Berlin Hyrox –
1:13. An awesome event, a strong effort and a finish that required more management than planned as the heat took hold. Still, she got it done.

🏙️ Queen of the Suburbs – Ed F
A solid run to dip under 5 hours in his first 50K. The heat made itself known early, but he kept moving and got the job done.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Edinburgh Marathon –
5:51:59. No injuries, no drama. Ruth loved it.

🏔️ Terhills 50K – .runstrong
16th overall in 5:16. Heat caused cramps – an unwelcome but familiar bank holiday guest. With two more long days as part of his Eiger 250 build, the weekend isn’t over.

Heat, grit and a few lessons learned. Not a bad bank holiday 💚