Feeling that old Tuesday night burn

I love that feeling of running hard in a group, feeding off the energy of the others as we charge along Paignton seafront like a band of marauding warriors in little shorts

People keep asking me: “How do you train for a race like the Self-Transcendence 3100?”

I give them a blank look, and, at the risk of sounding like a complete idiot, I confess that I don’t know.

Surely I should have worked that out by now? (For anyone who hasn't been following closely, I'm planning to run the race in 2023.)

All I have to go on so far is my chat with Robbie Britton, in which he suggested sometimes doing three runs a day, and an email from the race organisers in which they said: “Most of the runners in the 3100 practice meditation and being in the moment.”

So, run a lot, and mediate. It sounds too simple. But maybe that’s the secret?

The truth is, in every project I’ve undertaken so far, I’ve gone about it with a degree of naivety that, looking back, was probably quite helpful. If I’d thought too much about what it meant to go and actually run with elite Kenyan marathoners, I probably would have stayed at home. If I’d fully appreciated how difficult it would be to gain access to top Japanese ekiden teams, or to run hundreds of miles in huge, hulking mountains, I may never have started out on those journeys. So, in some ways, ignorance is bliss. To some degree.