This time 10 years ago, I was running around the south coast of England. I’d just reached Dorset and was about to start the South West Coast Path. I was one month and a few hundred miles into my run around the whole coast of Britain.

I set off on that adventure on November 1st 2015. It’s a date forever etched in my memory.

Yet the anniversary almost passed me by this year. I was in Mallorca, cheering Sophie on in the ultra that I should have been running, when a message popped up:

HAPPY 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY of your coasting adventure, Elise!

It was Jon, who I’d been co-delivering some training a few weeks earlier. I must have mentioned the date during my and-this-is-my-claim-to-fame spiel when I introduced myself to the class.

10 years. A whole decade. Hard to believe, really. To cover about ten cliches at once: in some ways it feels like yesterday, and in other ways it feels like a lifetime ago.

I’m trying to think back to the person I was when I set off on that run.

It was ludicrous, hones…

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The end of summer involved two multi-day trail adventures for me. The Snowdonia Slate Trail (which I wrote about in detail - sorry if you’re bored of hearing about it) and then a week in the Alps doing the Tour de Fiz with my dad (which I haven’t written about yet but will at some point, because it was great!).

Two very different trips in very different places covering very different distances - but my packing list was almost exactly the same.

I don’t feel confident about many things in life, but after a decade of doing them, I do kind of know how to pack for these sorts of trips. Enough to be comfy, not so much you’re cursing the weight. An art only perfected through lots of trial and error and regularly landing too far on either side of the fence.

What to pack is one of the things I get asked about the most, so I thought I’d write it all down.

Below you’ll find:

• A sample packing list (aka what I actually took on a recent trip)

• Golden rules for packing

• Specific k…

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It’s Sunday morning and I’m drinking my third coffee of the day.

I don’t feel like I got much sleep last night. I was tossing and turning all night in that way I always do after a long run. I think that’s a thing, isn’t it, it’s not just me? You run for six hours and you think you’ll be nice and tired and you are, kind of, but somehow that doesn’t translate into actually sleeping. I was halfway between asleep and awake, aware that I was hot and tossing the duvet off and squirming around (‘kebabing’, Isaac calls it, rolling over and over and over like a big rotating stick of doner), but also trapped in strange dreams that I couldn’t quite wake up from.

I ran 23 miles in a big loop around Coniston Water yesterday. I started near the south of the lake, and ran down some lanes and through some fields and along some perfect-running-terrain bridleways to Grizedale forest. The trail wove through dense trees and it was a bit eery. I needed a wee but was too scared to venture off the path - if …

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PROJECT PAUSE DETAILS

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I used to do a lot of hangover runs.

Attempting to tick off the Sunday long run regardless of how I’d spent Saturday night. Worse-for-wear parkruns and plenty of DNFs as a result. That New Year’s Day when I laced up without having actually been to bed at all. I even ran what still stands (I think?) as my 10km PB after a few too many cocktails the evening before. I missed my wave because I was prioritising coffee and had to weave amongst the charity tutus the whole way.

It was necessity, mostly. Drinking was a big part of my social life, one which it didn’t really occur to me to give up and which I therefore had to work around. When I moved to Bristol, I even joined a running club affiliated with a local brewery - sometimes those hangovers were a result of hanging out with my running friends.

I think I saw it as a point of pride too. I’d laugh about the bleary-eyed miles and pat myself on the back for not taking it - or myself - too seriously. I’m not like a regular runner, I’m a cool runner. (Mean Girls, obviously.)

Except hangovers have ruined a lot more runs than they have made. So many good intentions lost to late nights and groggy heads and poor choices. And, over the years, it’s been finding something I enjoy doing more than going on a night out that has led to my social life revolving much less around drinking these days. I still love going to the pub, but more often I’m catching up with friends over runs and walks and swims, squashed cheese sandwiches and flasks of tea.

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It’s Tuesday afternoon and I’ve just got back from taking my Grandad out for a coffee and a bacon roll. He’s 89 and, having been fiercely independent throughout his whole life, he’s recently had to give up his car. I can’t really imagine how that must feel - knowing that you might never leave the house again without somebody else taking you. It was nice to hang out, even if I’m sure a trip to the farm shop with me didn’t quite match up to driving himself to the allotment for an afternoon of digging.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with both sets of grandparents. I know that I’m lucky to be in my thirties and still have three of them left, and I equally know that opportunities to take them out are only going to become fewer and further between. It’s Grandma’s turn on Thursday afternoon. She’s requested a visit to a local antiques shop. Being able to do things like this is always when I feel most grateful to be self-employed. The freedom to skive off for a midweek outing, with nobody to answer to, is such a luxury. Actually, I might have my Dad to answer to - the general consensus is that they have a few too many antiques already and shouldn’t be buying more - but nobody professionally-speaking.

I’ve been freelancing for four and a half years now, ever since I got made redundant from my last full-time role back in September 2020 and decided to see how long I could go without getting another ‘proper’ job. That makes this my longest-held position by far. Without a doubt, the thing I love most is the feeling of having more time - no counting days of annual leave! - and that’s what I’d really struggle to give up again.

Sometimes I wonder if this feeling of having extra time is more of an illusion than a reality. My experience of ‘being my own boss’ is that it’s very all or nothing - I might have several months of back-to-back in-person events, and maybe they clash with a big book deadline and some content being due, and then there’s everything else to keep ticking over (admin, invoicing, social media, responding to leads, plans for upcoming gigs, etc) - and the result is an intense block of early mornings and late nights and feeling constantly behind everything.

But then, always, comes the lull. That’s the phase I’m in now. A few events and some things to get done, but nothing very pressing. Time at home, time to lay the foundations for future projects, time to mull over some ideas, time to have Tuesday morning bacon rolls with Grandad, time to immediately down tools at the merest hint of a good weather forecast.

I wonder, if I added up the hours I work over a year, how they’d compare to my old nine to fives. I’m certain that over the course of a year I average less than a standard 40-hour week now but perhaps not by as significant a margin as it feels. I don’t mind that though. While the reality is that, for the vast majority of us, we have to work and earn money in order to not starve (inconveniently), something I’ve never been able to get on board with is the concept of having this one precious life and spending five days out of every seven working. It might just be an illusion that I work substantially less now, a shadow puppet cast by the fluctuating nature of freelancing, but I’ll happily take this placebo effect if it makes me feel better about the whole thing.

But the price you pay for freedom and time is uncertainty. Although things generally seem to work out in the end, there’s always a lot of waiting around. Waiting for somebody to respond to a pitch, waiting for feedback, waiting for a talk to get confirmed, waiting for the budget to be finalised. It can make it hard to enjoy the quiet periods. Whereas I used to love having a fully booked social calendar, I’m often reluctant to make plans too far in advance now just in case. I might be free on paper but you never know if something is going to come up, and I hate having to cancel. So while I feel freer than I did as a salaried employee, I’m still largely beholden to other people’s decisions.

The uncertainty takes its toll sometimes. When the omnipresent background anxiety steps too much into the foreground - that’s when you’ll find me scrolling on LinkedIn Jobs and Indeed, wondering if the grass might be greener. Then, inevitably, something exciting will come to fruition, or I get paid to do something that doesn’t feel like work at all, or I go for a long run in the sunshine on a midweek morning and I think, okay, let’s just keep at it for a little while longer…

Freelancing: the good, the bad and the ugly

Freelancing makes me feel like I have a better work-life balance (flexibility, variety, autonomy) but, from talking to friends, I know that it would make some people feel like they had none (lack of separation between personal and private lives, no certainty or security). It’s tempting to just show the Instagram-worthy bits - pictures of my laptop in a scenic place annoyingly captioned ‘today’s office’ - and ignore the frequent existential crises I have as a result of it.

But just in case anybody is considering taking the leap here are, in my mind, the best and worst parts of it all…

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I ran my first marathon in 2014.

I had taken up running the year before, off the back of my 2013 New Year’s Resolution to finish a half marathon. With that goal boxed off, a full marathon felt like the obvious next step. I was at university at the time and involved in the RAG (Raising and Giving) society - if nothing else, I thought a marathon would be a good fundraising activity.

I really liked the idea of being a runner. I was obsessed with reading running blogs and loved the thought of being one of these people who just went out and casually ran double digits. I wanted to be the sort of person to whom running came easily, who laced up every single day as a matter of course.

Unfortunately, as I now realise, becoming one of those people takes work and it was work I didn’t know how to do. My life was chaotic at the time, in a student-y sort of way. I was working a million hours a week at a Greek restaurant to try and keep up with the minimum repayments…

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Walk Britain Book Launch Tickets

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I always find that the week after a big run is when my motivation is highest, especially if the preparation for it was on, let’s say, the subpar side.

There’s all the apprehension before the race, all the shoulda woulda couldas. Should have gone and got that niggle seen to, would have done that extra long run if it wasn’t for [insert extreme weather event], could have drank a few less pints and eaten a few less chocolate buttons the month before the race.

I find myself packing my bags and sorting my kit and wondering, why didn’t I just enter a shorter distance? Why am I choosing to put myself through the inevitable hours of suffering when I could just spend the weekend having a nice stroll or going out for brunch or watching Saturday night TV or whatever sensible things other people do with their weekends?

But once the effort of getting myself to the start line is over, I usually start to feel quite excited. I love the beginning of an event: everybody pinning on their numbers, last minute kit faff, the miracle of a very kind Spanish man appearing exactly where you are in the portaloo queue and telling you that there are some public toilets nearby, then like the Pied Piper of ultra runners leading a group of you to some completely empty and sparklingly clean loos a few metres away. (Okay the last one doesn’t always happen, but it did happen at Transgrancanaria this year!)

Then you begin and the race goes however it goes - sometimes you have a harder day than you deserve, other times you get off lightly. Afterwards there’s the inevitable period of saying never, ever again. Except barely 24 hours passes and then you’re researching future races, setting lofty goals and handing over your credit card.

You’re filled with a heady cocktail of endorphins and glorious hindsight at this point. Memories of how amazing crossing the finish line felt but very little recollection of just how hard it was to get there. A slideshow of all the incredible views playing on repeat inside your mind. The buzz of a weekend spent surrounded by other people who like doing the same weird things as you. The sweet spot of knowing exactly what you need to do differently next time, without having to actually put your money where your mouth is yet.

All that adds up to make me really want to go for a run. Especially if, as we seem to be lucky enough to be having in the UK right now, post-race coincides with a patch of relentless sunshine and all those soggy training runs become distant memories.

Unfortunately, it normally takes a little while for my legs to catch up with my brain. Instagram might sometimes want us believe that it’s normal to run an ultra every other weekend but big races take big recovery. The danger comes when you discover you’re a little bit too good at recovery and suddenly six months has passed, the post-race fire is all but out and your average step count has taken a real hit (ahem, me after CCC). I’m aiming for a slightly shorter turnaround this time, while still trying to remember that 50 miles is a long way for your legs to carry you in one stint.

So, with that in mind, here’s how I’ve spent the week post-Transgrancanaria…

Ultra marathon recovery diary

Sunday

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I reached the checkpoint at Garañón a little after 6.30pm on Saturday evening. The sun was low in the sky - I had watched it set through the trees on my approach to the campsite that hosts this aid station - and I was 43km (27 miles) into the Transgrancanaria Advanced race.

“Hot food?” a marshal wearing a green raincoat asked me as I crossed the timing mat. I nodded and he directed me into one of the cabins.

I set down my poles, took off my pack and ate one plate of pasta with butter, salt and parmesan, then another. I refilled my bottles with water and electrolyte tabs, got rid of the empty packets filling my pockets and replenished them with snacks for the next leg, waited in the queue for the toilets and reapplied anti-chafe, put on my head torch and set off into what I hoped wouldn’t be too long a night.

We were a fraction over halfway at this point. One marathon down, another to go. Yet I felt as though the back of it was well and truly broken. More than 3,000 of the route’s 4,000 m…

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I wrote this on Friday, before setting off to run 82km across Gran Canaria. Then I chickened out of sending it in case everything went horribly wrong and I had to be helicoptered off a mountain or something.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that (spoiler) I had a really good day out, better than I probably deserved. I’ll send you out a full debrief in a couple of days but for now, here’s the prelude ahead of my first ultra marathon of the year.

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It’s just before dinner time on Friday evening and I’m writing this on the balcony of my hotel room in Gran Canaria. I’ve pushed the table and chairs into the little bit of shade in the corner and I’m eating some salted pretzels before heading to the buffet for dinner.

The more carbs the better today. I flew out here yesterday ready for this year’s edition of Transgrancanaria. I’m attempting the ‘Advanced’ race this weekend: 82km with 4,000 metres of elevation over the island’s mountains. We set off at 9am tomorrow morning and the cut off is 21 hours. Meaning that, hopefully, I’ll cross the finish line at some point before 6am on Sunday morning.

Here’s what I’m excited about: February sunshine, not wearing head-to-toe waterproofs, paella at the aid stations, the post-race pool day on Sunday, drinking a sangria by the sea, going home a bit less pale than I arrived.

Here’s what I’m nervous about: how I’m going to handle the February sunshine after a winter of wearing head-to-toe waterproofs, the actual running, the fact one of my ankles is already looking a bit chunky and we’ve not even started yet.

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I didn’t pass my driving test until I was almost 30.

My mum had offered to pay for a few lessons for my 18th birthday but my motivation was low at the time. I would have still had to cover the rest of the cost of learning which felt pointless given there was no way I could afford a car at the end of it, not on the £4.28 an hour I earned working Saturdays in WHSmith. I ended up trading in the lessons for an interrailing pass to travel around Europe (on brand, it turned out). I went to uni, where hardly anybody I knew had a car, then moved to London afterwards, where the situation was the same. Learning to drive didn’t feel like a pressing concern.

When I moved to Bristol in late 2019, I thought it might finally be time. Then the pandemic hit, driving lessons were cancelled and you weren’t allowed to travel anywhere anyway. I threw myself head first into exploring every scenic place within walking or cycling distance of my new front door. It helped that I’d been put on furlough from my jo…

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Quitter’s Day falls on the second Friday in January and is, supposedly, the day when most people abandon their enthusiastically made New Year’s Resolutions. That was January 10th this year - getting on for two weeks ago, as I’m sending this - which presumably means that even more have been broken by now.

I’ve written before about how a New Year’s Resolution changed my life when, on 1st January 2013, I resolved to run a half marathon. I checked the box by completing the Great Birmingham Run in October of that year and I think it’s fair to say things got a little out of hand from there. Aside from reading, running remains the only hobby I’ver ever stuck with.

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This means there are many more which haven’t stood the test of time. Hobbies which I’ve been evangelic about for a period, committed to wholeheartedly and been absolutely obsessed with, yet still ended up abandoning eventually.

And that’s… fine? We often equate longevity with success but what’s wrong with just enjoying something for a limited time? The dictionary definition of a hobby is an “activity that someone does for pleasure when they are not working”. As long as something serves that purpose in the moment, then it’s not a failure just because you’re not still doing it on your deathbed.

That’s how I’m justifying all my discarded passions, anyway. And perhaps how you can excuse yours, too. For a good time, not a long time, or however it goes. Even if hat good time only lasted until the 10th day of January.

(This isn’t to say there aren’t rewards for perseverance, obviously. If you’ve just started running then please, please, please don’t give up yet. I promise it gets much more fun once it stops feeling so hard and nothing beats the feeling of crossing a finish line that you didn’t think you’d make it too.)

To belatedly celebrate Quitter’s Day, here are some of the hobbies I’ve given up on in, in chronological order. From fashion blogging (lol, don’t) to improv comedy, climbing to hot yoga and more, I fully drank the kool-aid of all of these. I put the kit on my Christmas list (cameras! harnesses! 5 kilos of flour straight from the mill!) and bored everybody senseless raving about them before, inevitably, moving onto something else.

Fashion blogging

When: 2012

Why I started: I’d just discovered blogging and YouTube and found the community of early adopters who seemed to just post stuff on the internet and then get given free clothes. That sounds great, I thought, I could do that (while deep in debt from maxing out my credit card in Topshop).

What I learned: That just because you like buying clothes, it doesn’t mean you know anything about fashion. And that a huge amount of work goes into it before the free clothes bit.

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According to Strava, I covered 1,661 miles (2,673 km) last year. I ran around two thirds of those, walked the other third and went on one token bike ride. Oh, and let’s not forget the two miles I clocked up paddling around Coniston Water in a Canadian canoe, listening to James Blunt - a clear highlight.

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Obviously these are only the miles I bothered pressing record for. I’m sure all the popping to the shops or walking to the pub or the endless trips back and forth to the kitchen to make yet another cup of tea must have added up to plenty more. These are clearly the ones that felt significant though; the ones covered with some sort of intent (and with a charged watch battery).

Like most things I do, I’m sure those numbers hover in the middle: more than some, a lot less than others. I’m mostly ambivalent about the figures. I’ve never set any firm distance goals for myself but I’m always happy if I manage to run 1,000 miles in a year. To me, that says I must have gone out at least semi-regularly and that I can’t have been too injured - both wins in my book.

It’s nice to think about what those numbers represent though. Within those miles are fun days out with friends, trips to new places, finishes of things I wasn’t sure I could do and loads and loads and loads of squashed cheese sandwiches. I’d be lying if I said they were all good miles (there was also a fair amount of traipsing around in the rain, feeling abject terror at the sight of various farmyard animals and rolling both ankles a worrying number of times) but on the whole more miles means less time moping on the sofa. That’s got to be good, right?

So, perhaps for my sake more than yours, I wanted to do a quick roundup of my best and worst miles of last year before we move on from 2024 entirely. I thought about scrolling through the archives on Komoot and Strava but decided to rely on memory in the end. If they were that good or that bad then surely I would remember them? Human memory might be famously hopeless, but perhaps it can usefully self-selecting too.

The lists are ordered by what came to mind first, rather than by severity or chronology. I’ll start with the miserable miles though, so we can finish on a high.

My worst miles of 2024

• The final climb of the George Fisher Tea Round, up Barrow, both times I attempted it last summer. You’re already knackered with well over 3,000 metres of climbing in your legs so far and you see this hill looming above you, which looked like nothing on the elevation graph, and you think, I’ve got to go up that?! It’s only a 300m climb but it feels like summiting Everest.

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Writing my Christmas wish list used to feel like a meticulous operation. I guess as a kid my personal spending power was otherwise non-existent (save for the couple of quid pocket money I got from my Nan each week) and this was my chance to get my hands on the things I’d spent all year lusting over in the Argos catalogue etc. I remember the palpable anticipation of waiting to see if I was going to be the proud owner of a Groovy Chick pencil case or the latest Jacqueline Wilson book or a new skirt from Tammy Girl.

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But as an adult, Christmas shopping often makes me feel a bit weird. I try to buy nice things that people are excited to receive, but I hate the thought of giving somebody something they just don’t want or need and which they end up shuffling around between cupboards until they eventually decide enough time has passed to take it to a charity shop. Similarly, I honestly feel physically sick thinking of somebody spending their hard earned money on something for me that just ends up collecting dust.

At the end of the day we all own too much crap anyway, and I worry that random gifts swapped between relatives who don’t really know each other that well (or even who do - choosing a genuinely great gift is hard!) only enhances the problem.

There are a few solutions. We could try and tackle the root cause of excessive gift giving and over consumerism at Christmas but, frankly, that feels like too big a task to be starting mid-December. Then there are practical ways to reduce the amount of aimless Christmas shopping we do: Secret Santa, homemade gifts only, preloved only, the straightforward option of simply asking somebody what they want.

But maybe for whatever reason the above isn’t possible. You don’t want to rock the boat, you need to buy a gift, you don’t want to add to landfill unnecessarily. In those circumstances, I think that practical presents are the way to go. They might not be the most exciting, but hopefully they’ll get used.

It’s funny because for my eighth birthday, my Grandma bought me a box of cod. Yes, I mean the fish. A whole box of frozen cod fillets. Apparently I really liked cod?Whenever the topic of weird gifts comes up, I always use this as my trump card. It is an undeniably bizarre present for a child and we’ve always laughed about it.

Perhaps she was onto something though. While I’m sure the Groovy Chick pencil case eventually ended up forgotten at the back of a cupboard, I’ve no doubt the cod got eaten. Grandma was ahead of her times, clearly.

If a box of cod feels a bit too maverick, hopefully the below list will provide some inspiration for slightly more mainstream but still extremely useful gifts for the outdoorsy people in your life. Most of them should be quite easy to get your hands on too, just in case you also rarely your start your Christmas shopping before December 22nd (guilty).

Practical gifts for outdoorsy people

Under £15

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The thing that I love most about being self-employed is the variety, the fact that every day and week is different. Sometimes you’re at home in your pyjamas twiddling your thumbs wondering if you’ll ever work again (this week), other times you’re travelling the length and breadth of the country, dashing between different events and wishing there were just a few more hours in the day (last week).

I love reading these weekly diary style posts from other people so I thought I’d have a go at writing one of my own. It feels a little bit self-absorbed to presume anybody will be interested, but I guess we’re all quite nosy really?

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The end of September marked my four year anniversary of being a full-time freelancer, earning 100% of my income from self-employment. There have been lots of ups and downs but I haven’t had to give up yet, which feels like something to celebrate.

I was interested in working for myself in some capacity long before I actually made it happen. Maybe I was choosing the wrong jobs but I thought there had to be more to life than counting days of annual leave and endless meetings about meetings on Zoom and crying in the toilets after those meetings and spending a fortune to live in a city I didn’t really want to live in, just so that I could go to a job I didn’t really want to go to. Surely?! My dad is self-employed too (as a one-man-band gardener), having found his previous salaried jobs soul-destroying. He describes himself as ‘basically unemployable’ now and I wondered if that feeling could be hereditary?

I loved the idea of setting my own schedule and having more flexibility but I had no understanding of how to make enough money to actually live on. I had dabbled in writing, public speaking and social media in the years since finishing my big run around the coast of Britain but often for free, or in exchange for “exposure” and gifted kit, tickets, etc.

And, famously, you can’t take exposure or free socks to the bank. I knew that other people actually paid their rent (or, even more miraculously, their mortgage) without having a 9-5 though. When I ended up diving headfirst into self-employment it was largely spurred on by this knowledge. It was the same logic that made me believe I could run around a country: if they can, then maybe I can too?

In this post I’ll share more about personal story of taking the leap into freelance life, my starting point (experience, finances, etc) and how I found work in the beginning. I’m seeing this as a ‘part one’ and in the coming weeks we’ll get into the weeds of what I’ve learned over the past four years, how things look now and practical advice for pursuing a less conventional career.

Taking the leap

I was made redundant from my last full-time position in September 2020. I was working for a charity at the time and my whole job was based around encouraging older people to meet up together in large groups. Suddenly, in the midst of a pandemic, that wasn’t such a good idea.

I’d been in the role for less than a year and I was on a 12-month fixed term contract. I wasn’t eligible for any proper redundancy pay but the way the timings worked out meant I would still get paid for the duration of my original contract (until the end of November 2020), without having to actually work the final two months. This was a blessing, really. I’d recently signed my first book deal, my deadline was looming and I had started to worry about how exactly I was going to finish it on time. A chunk of unexpected paid time off during which I could finish writing felt like a lucky break.

But there was still the question of what to do next.

I halfheartedly looked at what else was around but it was a pretty terrible time to be job hunting, especially in the outdoors/events/travel industries with everything so up in the air.

I wondered if this was the time to have a go at freelancing?

My starting point

I realise that this might all sound a bit gung ho. I suppose it was in many ways, but maybe it’s helpful to clarify what my personal circumstances looked like at the time:

• I was 28, single and didn’t have any big financial commitments like a mortgage. I was renting a room from a friend in Bristol for mates rates.

• I had no savings but I was debt-free for basically the first time in my adult life.

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A few months ago, I sent out a newsletter rounding up everything I’d read so far this year. Then I almost immediately fell off the reading wagon and clocked up a pitiful number of pages over the summer.

Why is that? When I’m reading a lot it’s all I want to do - insatiable, can’t get enough, find it extremely inconvenient that I’m expected to do anything else, god forbid anybody try and engage in conversation mid-paragraph. Yet reading is a lot like, say, doing my physio exercises and eating more vegetables than chocolate buttons and not starting the day by doom scrolling through social media. That is, it’s a simple thing that tangibly improves my life but that I find it very easy to slip out of the habit of.

Luckily, September brought with it a fair few hours on public transport, some evenings alone in hotel rooms and a solid amount of sunbathing. And in all of those circumstances, what are you going to do but get a book out?

So here’s September, in books1:

First up was the Clock Dance b…

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Back in 2018 I spent a week fast packing the Tour Du Mont Blanc with my dad, a 100ish mile route circling Mont Blanc. We stopped in Courmayeur on our second night and found a race finish line set up, with runners trickling in to cross it.

“Must be a marathon or something,” we thought, although some of those runners did look quite tired. Then we looked it up and learned about the Tor Des Geants for the first time.

What we learned is that TDG is definitely not ‘just’ a marathon, but instead a 330km mega ultra around the Aosta Valley in Italy, covering what’s listed officially as 24,000 metres of ascent but is more likely to be 30,000+ metres in reality. It’s a single-stage race so the clock never stops. Competitors will grab an hour or two of sleep here and there on a communal camp bed when they pass an aid station or designated refuge, or take a ‘trail nap’ for a few minutes if they really can’t stay awake any longer. The course is pretty gnarly too, with…

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The sun had just set on Champex-Lac and I was pulling my head torch on over my cap as I left the aid station, a little over halfway through the CCC. I had nearly 35 miles in my legs already and another 28 left to run. I was crying when I entered that aid station and I was still crying when I left, a handful of sweaty cheese clutched in my palm.

I was 12 hours into my attempt to run 100km through the Italian, Swiss and French Alps. The race takes you on a rollercoaster ride covering 6,000 metres of vertical gain as you skirt around the Mont Blanc massif - and I was finding it hard. Which, I suppose, shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise? Objectively, running a mountain ultra is a ‘hard’ thing to do.

Yet, for largely illogical reasons, I can’t shake off this aspiration that one day it’s going to feel easy. One day, I’ll be able to breeze through more than 60 miles of mountain trails. One day, I’ll finish one of these things without barely …

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It’s early on Thursday morning and I’m writing this from a balcony in the French Alps. We arrived in Chamonix yesterday evening after taking a bus from Geneva and eventually made it to our apartment after waiting approximately three hours for some burgers. At least when they arrived they were pretty good - and they meant what they said by ‘large’ fries. The carb loading had begun.

Actually, if I’m honest, it started at least ten days ago. I spent last week in a caravan in Tenby eating an inhumane volume of pub lunches. I was on at least two portions of chips per day. Is this how the pros are fuelling up ahead of one of the biggest weeks in the trail running calendar? Maybe? Probably not?

Never knowingly underfuelled. Perhaps that can be my motto for the race.

At 9am tomorrow morning - 24 hours away as I’m typing this - I’ll be on the start line of the CCC. It’s the 100km so-called “little sister” of the full UTMB and you run from Courmayeur in Italy back to Chamonix in France, passing th…

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This is last week’s newsletter. Sorry! Squeezing it in now then on Thursday you’ll get this week’s piece, all about how I’ve been preparing to run 100km around Mont Blanc. Which is something I have to actually do on Friday, i.e. in three days time. TERRIFYING!! Last night I dreamed that it was the morning of the race and a man turned up to our apartment claiming to be my friend’s new boyfriend (awkward given that her fiancé is travelling with us) and also that I didn’t have any snacks or socks. You can imagine the relief when I woke up and it was still only Tuesday and I’m not even in France yet. Phew.

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