Why I wrote Over The Hill

Deep into training for the New York Marathon in 2018 my friend Caz called me and said we had to sign up for something called the UTA. Although the race wasn’t until May, registrations were in September and sold out within days. UTA, UltraTrail Australia, was an ultramarathon in the Blue Mountains and in those days had three distances; 22k, 50k and 100k (now there’s an 11k and a Miler distance as well). So there I was, persuaded into the 50k, (“It’ll be fun!” Caz said) despite never having run on trail before. We were both 48 and up for it. Well, she was.

I had a decent training background, a marathon or two under my belt and a fair amount of confidence that I ‘knew’ running. Sure, I knew it would tough but with a vague, ‘double your marathon time’ as a guide, some local trails on my doorstep and a shiny new training plan from my coach, I was ready to kick butt on my first 50k.

Not for the first time, and definitely not the last, I was wrong.

 What I hadn’t accounted for was, well, almost everything. It wasn’t simply a case of transferring from pavement to trail. Everything felt different. Marathon training had taught me how to run, it hadn’t taught me how to endure. I didn’t know about the right gear, that my feet would have a different relationship with trail than they did with tarmac, that I’d need to eat while moving, that recovery would take longer, that I’d be in a mental tussle with myself for hours at a time, that life wasn’t so obliging at fitting in handy little pockets of time for a run in when every run took soooo long.

 In hindsight, running your first ultra because your friend said it would be fun really isn’t enough of a reason. My ‘why’ wasn’t strong enough. You need to have a really solid personal reason to run an ultra, enough of a one to get you through the months of training as well as the deep, dark moments of struggle during the race, without bailing.

 But at some point in the training block, I made peace with how different it all was. Instead of resenting every run, I accepted it and committed to it. And yes, on the day it was fun. Caz and I ran, hiked, ate and chatted our way round 50km and had a blast.

 I kept running ultras. Slowly, imperfectly (there’s never ‘perfect’) and with a lot of help and even more mistakes. There was something about it I loved. I still ran road races, mixing it up, but my heart was in the wild. And somewhere along the way, the idea took hold that if I could run my first ultra at 48, knowing the sum total of bugger all, then really anybody could and maybe there could be a book that could help them, as more experienced at life athletes.

But there wasn’t. Sure, there were plenty of books about running an ultra but they were aimed at a younger audience, or at least a more general one. There wasn’t anything that would give older athletes the confidence to have a go, with the expertise they needed, and the real-life experience of someone who had done it. So I wrote it.

Here's what I believe, and what this book is built on: your 40s, and older, is not a time to scale back your ambition. It’s a time to direct it more intelligently. The margin for error is narrower than it was in your twenties, yes. Recovery takes longer. Time is tighter and the psychology of trying something new — publicly, at an age when your professional and personal identity already feels fairly settled — carries the weight of potential failure. But none of that means you should aim lower, or not at all. It means you train smarter, recover more deliberately, and race with a kind of strategic patience and dogged determination that’s been earned over the years. Experience in life turns out to be surprisingly good preparation for the trials of the trails.

But my experience, however hard won, wasn’t enough, it is after all just one person’s. So each of the book's chapters, covering Health, Training, Strength Training, Nutrition, Gear, Feet, Mental Training and Race Day, starts with my own story: honest, occasionally humbling, sometimes funny in hindsight even when it wasn't funny at the time (type 2 fun). Then a specialist takes over. Not a celebrity name lending credibility to a project they had nothing to do with, but a genuine practitioner — a physician, a coach, a strength trainer, a sports nutritionist, a gear expert, a podiatrist, a psychologist — each of whom has run an ultramarathon themselves. Their advice isn't just professionally sound. It's lived. The chapters are like conversations, the distillation of knowledge from subject experts that’s taken years to accumulate. Not patronising, or judgy, straightforward and real.

In my running journey I’d read, watched and followed some amazing folk in the ultrarunning world so I took a shot and emailed some of them to ask them what their One Piece of Advice would be for the older athlete training and running their first ultra. And astonishingly a lot of them wrote back. David Roche, Dean Karnazes, Sophie Power, Damian Hall and others said yes without hesitation. If there’s one thing this sport has taught me is that ultrarunning, at every level and every age, is generous, collegiate and endlessly supportive. So many people helped me, I wanted this book to be the shoulders for others.

So if you’re standing roughly where I was; capable, curious, wondering whether your body’s up for something that seems almost impossibly big, this is the book I wish someone had handed me before that first UTA. It won’t spare you, but it just might mean you go into it a little more prepared than I was.