If I was to try to talk you through my 18 years of competitive running so far, I could be here for quite some time. Fortunately, the internet is such a wonderful resource now. There is one excellent website, The Power of 10, which allows you to search any athlete and lists all of their race performances, provided they have met the site's qualifying criteria.
Link to my past race performances and personal best times.
For the last few years, I have been recording all of my training and racing on the Eightlane website. Click here to view my past training logs.
One of the reasons I decided to start blogging and posting my training on the internet is because I think that my story can offer inspiration to juniors and young seniors who aren't at the top but have the desire to progress and achieve what they can. The very first race result I have a copy of at home was an U15 boys race within the South East Lancs Cross Country League. I finished 48th out of 52. My first National Cross Country Championship was 1998 where I finished 52nd in the U20 race, the following year I was 29th and since then I have ran in every National with finishing positions of 96th, 72nd, 18th, 23rd, 27th, 37th, 29th, 18th, 27th and 18th. It was only this year that at the age of 31 I finally represented England at Cross Country. Consistency has been key - I haven't had more than six successive days off since 1996 and as I have slowly improved, I have believed in myself more and more. I still don't think of myself as talented or elite but work very hard and know that when I am running well I can compete with all but a handful of runners in the UK. If just one young athlete reading this takes some inspiration from this then writing this blog will be worthwhile.
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