Race Reports
There’s a rock, somewhere between Malga Travenanzes and Col dei Bos, and every time I pass it, I know that I am fully alive. I know because two years ago, at my lowest point running wise, I lay down on it and tried to give up. Why I thought lying on a rock in the baking midday sun was the solution to my problems is a mystery. Then a fellow Brit went past and told me to get up and get going, and it was a bit awkward. I was embarrassed for the guy because he seemed to think I could continue. Silly. But out of embarrassment for his misjudgment of the situation, I got up and continued climbing to the Col. When I passed the same rock last year, tired but not yet beaten, it was the catalyst for me to push on and turn things around. So, when... View Article
There was a shirtless man in a Viking helmet and a kilt, furiously waving a skull and crossbones. I can’t explain exactly why, but I do know he could work a crowd. He started hammering a bass drum and demanding we clap to the ever hastening beat. Next thing you know there’s a tre, duo, uno and we’re flooding out of the town square of Radda and onto a frenzied downhill start. I had no idea what to expect going into this race. Training has been disrupted repeatedly by sinus issues and taper involved a near miss turning my ankle bouldering. To top it off my heart rate had spent ten days going through the roof. On the other hand, this course is far more runnable than most trail marathons. Its 2,000m of vert are spread across near constant undulations rather than the long sustained climbs of the mountain races.... View Article
October 10, 2025,
by Pete
I’d never considered that champagne would sting my eyes. It turns out, it does. By the time I found this out, however, my worries were over and there was nothing left to do but smile. I’ve wanted to run Ultra Pirineu for years. It’s one of those races that has a certain mythos in the trail running world. It could be the fervour of the Catalans, the beauty of the Pyrenees, or maybe the fact Kilian Jornet hails from here and still holds the course record. In this year’s plan it was the grand finale: return to ultra running with Lavaredo and then build on it at Pirineu. This was going to be the victory lap at the end of the come back year, or something like that. I arrived in Bagà the afternoon before and made my way to the shared glamping. It’s a small town and accommodation is... View Article
September 19, 2025,
by Pete
There are two races I run most years for reasons entirely detached from the race itself; Blaydon and the Great North Run. I don’t run them because the courses are good, or because I might get a personal best, or even because it’s convenient. I run them because I’m northern and it’s what we do. It’s road running, it’s fast, the stupid shoes make my stupid quads hurt. But it’s what we do. Blaydon was three weeks before Lavaredo and went surprisingly well. As is often the case with Blaydon, it would’ve comfortably been a 10km personal best if only the race wasn’t a 9.6km race, plenty of positives and a lovely little confidence boost ahead of the year’s first a-race. The Great North Run was four weeks out from my other a-race, Ultra Pirineu, and the build up had been turbulent to say the least. At the start of... View Article
The plan was simple really. Have a week’s rest after Lavaredo, take that nicely worked on fitness into ten days of training in Chamonix, then come home and have a bit of fun at Maverick Race’s event in the Chilterns. The medium route (22km) looked just right for a runnable blast around the English country side and I was fairly confident in my ability to get round it fast. Confident, that was, until I got ill in Chamonix. I spent most of the trip in my bedroom, or taking short easy walks. Everyday I saw La Jonction but didn’t get to run up it, gazed along the valley towards Croix de Fer but the day I was feeling well enough to run never came. On the last day I managed a short trot along Petit Balcon Sud, a delight as ever but far less than I’d had planned. Back home... View Article
I would say I’ve had a score to settle with Lavaredo, but that’s not strictly true: I’ve had a score to settle with myself and the Dolomitic mountains that host Lavaredo Ultra Trail were the amphitheater in which it had to happen. Last year’s race was a perfect trifecta of ill health, spiralling over training as I tried to mitigate it, and a complete inability to pace sensibly. Three glorious hours of fun followed by a very long death march. In the year since I had to stop running for a while, get medical help from a specialist sports doctor, and accept that my training had become unhealthy. I was recommended a coach with specific experience in helping people who had experienced over training syndrome and so, since January, I’ve been rebuilding for this weekend. One year on, it was time to go again. Call it recovery, call it redemption,... View Article
The English have a long history of doing stupid things in Tenerife. I’m not just talking about drunk tourists at all inclusive resorts either. In 1797, after trying to seize the port of Santa Cruz, they were beaten, broken and surrounded in a convent but still tried to persuade Tenerife to surrender. So, when I charged through the first aid station several minutes ahead of my best possible scenario time, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was going to be the latest in a long line of Brits embarrassing themselves on these shores. It was simple really, a good friend had ran the route the same morning and told me it was runnable and I’d enjoy it. I took her at her word and decided to go hard from the outset, starting a little further forward than planned and caning the road section at the start. My lungs were... View Article
Maybe Carroll Shelby isn’t the first person most people think of while sprinting down the side of a mountain in the middle of Cumbria, but we are where we are. You see I glanced at my watch and realised my heart rate had been red lining for almost two hours. But do you know how it felt? It felt incredible. And so I remembered a treadmill session earlier in the year. It was on my lunch break and I’d been watching Ford vs Ferrari while putting in the extra miles. There’s a sequence where Matt Damon, playing Carroll Shelby, talks about the feeling of driving at 7,000 RPM. There’s a point at 7,000 RPM… where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. Just disappears. And all that’s left is a body moving through space and time. 7,000 RPM. That’s where you meet it. You feel it coming. It creeps up on... View Article
I had a startling moment of clarity as I slogged my way along Val Travenanzes: I’ve got life wrong, I thought. It’s all wrong. I’m not capable of running ultra marathons, my body can’t hold this much stress. I can never, ever, do this again. Time to quit running and spend my money on therapy. You can’t run from your problems forever. I was done. It had started gloriously. I’d came into the race off the back of a horrible training spell where nothing would come together but, as we started the ascent out of La Val early morning, that faded away. I felt like my halcyon days had returned. I was controlling my effort and still making good time. Hundreds of bodies moving in what seemed to be a single organism, first in a crowd but morphing into a long line. We were being lured into running fast through... View Article
Ultra Trail Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur – 100M race report For a good few hours on Friday night, I though it was on. I felt invincible, blinded by adrenaline, pushing myself back up through the field. It’d been a rotten start. I felt fatigued and under the weather from the get go. I decided to start near the back and take things easy, knowing I should be able to make up places later on. The first section is a short climb on a fire road followed by a trail with switchbacks to get you down into Saint-Étienne-de-Tinée, where local school children formed a scream tunnel of outstretched arms that echoed, “allez, allez, allez”. From there it’s straight into a 1400m climb up to Refuge de Rabuons. The early afternoon heat was oppressive and the climb seemed to go on for days. I took a good long stop at the aid... View Article
