I can't really properly describe how I feel about myself now, because I'm not entirely sure I know. On Sunday I ran 44 miles, finding some very good things within myself along the way, but I still don't think it's properly sunk in.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I ran around 27 miles to the start line of a new local race, a 17-mile cross country called the Hartland Hartbreaker. I was feeling not so much nervous as…

I'm now within a week of my first unofficial 'training' ultra and in the meantime I've become 'oh, you're him' to the other runners that I'm coming across. I think at this point, 'him' is a bit of a figure of gentle mickey-taking and disbelief rather than anything too esteemed just yet, but it's still a bit unnerving to go to a race and be greeted with 'are you the guy who's running to Bristol?' every five minutes.

While the …

Yeah, yeah, yeah, runner-for-more-than-a-year... What's next? :)

After my last post, I've run two half-marathon races and learned a few things (as always), but I still feel like I want to keep this post brief. Whereas last time's was a sort of retrospective where I didn't mind talking about what I'd been up to, this time around I feel like I'm definitely in more of a 'just want to be doing it' frame of mind. I think I know a reason for this, but I'll get to that in a…

Holy cow, I've been a runner for more than a year.

Way back, I'd imagined that my 52-week blog post would have been a big event; a romantic retrospective of a year's progression from a complete novice to actually calling myself a capital-R 'Runner'. In my mind's eye, I'd write about all the lessons I've learned - all the recovery methods tried, all the nipples chafed, all the sunsets seen and distances covered... in reality, I've spent the ten weeks since my last…