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! […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Throwing it down at 5am on a dark October morning in Keswick, it seemed a long time since the bright lights of the Alps!  The third race in the new Skyrunning UK series, with 4000m of climbing and at over 80k, the 3×3000 High terrain event in the Lake district was the longest race in […]

Todays Hardmoors 55 mile race broke the norm of previous years snow and blizzards, providing todays competitors with fantastic conditions.  Dry solid ground and even a tail wind blowing down most of the Clevland way from Guisborough to Helmsley were a great platform for a hard and fast race: the athletes toeing the line did […]