Blogs & race reports

Don’t stop believin’!

Yesterday, I won a race. Over the past few years, this has been happening fairly regularly and quite honestly, it’s a bit weird. I sort of feel outside of myself on days like this: people are congratulating me, saying cool things about me being an inspiration and a speedy runner, but it just doesn’t feel […]

A bit of fluff?

This is a genuine question: how do people feel about the word ‘chicked’? When I first heard it, I thought it was kind of cool. We ladies had a term for kicking male behind, grrrrl power, taking back our right to be feminine and all that jazz. But the more I’ve encountered it, the more […]

Crazy, Colossal with some Calamities.

Three weeks. Not just a holiday, a late honeymoon and an adventure but three weeks of specific, Alpine preparation before the CCC. This would be awesome. We’d have done the whole course, got loads of acclimatisation in and done some extra hiking practice. I was feeling positive that this would be a good race for […]

The Way of the Midge

What is it about doing a 100 mile race that makes you want to do another one immediately? After the Hardmoors 110 last year, I wanted to try something else, something that I could push myself to improve on. So many people that  love Hardmoors love the West Highland Way race, so I decided to […]

Knowing when to stop.

If it’s becoming a tradition for me to have one disappointing race a year, I hope it was today. After feeling so horrendous on the HM 30 last year, the rest of 2015 couldn’t have been better. So, hopefully, after dropping out of the HM 55 today, maybe the rest of 2016 is looking good! […]

Once upon a time in North Yorkshire

This story has a happy ending. I’ll tell you that now because it starts pretty miserably, on a grey New Year’s Day… The Hardmoors Grand Slam is something that captured my interest about four years ago, when I was a wide-eyed admirer of those strange folks known as ‘ultra-runners’. Conceived in 2011 by Jon Steele, […]

A Northern Ireland affair

There felt like quite a buzz in the lead up to this event, the Mourne Mountains over in Northern Ireland being a very new and quite unheard of place to me, NiRunning/Mourne Skyline MTR team  were hosting the last race in Skyrunning Uk series. The information and statistics confirmed this would be a tough one, with […]

A jolly around Mont Blanc

After 40 miles of pushing hard over mountains, approaching yet another summit, the distinct tinkle and knocking of bells began to approach: lots of bells in fact, but I was miles away from any town where the majority of people had been congregating, greeting each runner with enthusiastic cheering.  No, this was a gentle, random […]

Cleveland Way Relay – 110 miles flat out!

The Cleveland way relay is a team event which covers the whole route of the 110 mile Cleveland way, the route being broken up into legs, where each runner covers a distance ranging between 4 and 9 miles, with 16 legs in total. Teams start at 5 am in Filey and keep going until the end […]

CCC race report – A jolly around Mont Blanc

After 40 miles of pushing hard over mountains, approaching yet another summit, the distinct tinkle and knocking of bells began to approach: lots of bells in fact, but I was miles away from any town where the majority of people had been congregating, greeting each runner with enthusiastic cheering.  No, this was a gentle, random […]