Where it started

I was 19, at university, playing football at weekends and running about 30 miles a week when I entered the Milton Keynes Marathon in 2013. I was running it for Cancer Research UK, having just lost my Nan. I didn’t really know how far a marathon was. I walked big chunks of it, I cried at the finish, and it took me 4 hours 4 minutes and 22 seconds.

A week later I ran the Sheffield Half on legs that had no business racing, and that was it. I was hooked. parkrun came next, 400 metres from my front door, then a race nearly every weekend.

The lesson that changed everything

Manchester 2015. I got pipped on the line by Keith Littlewood from Barnsley AC, a man twice my age. Afterwards I asked him what he’d been doing in training. His answer was “a lot of long slow miles”. That one sentence changed how I thought about running completely.

So I ran more, and I ran easier. On 30 November 2015 I went out for a run and I haven’t missed a day since. Then I went back to Manchester every spring, and every spring I was faster.

Along the way I won the Milton Keynes Marathon in 2017, the same race that nearly broke me 4 years earlier, and ran my first sub 2:30 at the Yorkshire Marathon in 2018. I won Hull in 2019 in a course record, despite getting lost and running 26.8 miles.

The mistakes, so you don’t make them

I haven’t got everything right. Somewhere between 2016 and 2019 I decided more was always better and peaked at a 170 mile week, 30 mile Mondays and all. It didn’t make me faster. In 2022 I broke my foot 3 times, mostly because I kept running on it before getting it scanned.

In the autumn of 2024 I was in the shape of my life, fresh off the London PB and building for Valencia, when my heel went. That ended in surgery in July 2025 to remove a Haglund’s deformity. I kept the streak going with a mile a day in a cast, then a boot, then on crutches. Not something I’d recommend to anyone I coach, but it taught me a lot about what a comeback actually takes. 13 months after surgery I ran 15:40 for 5K.

2:24, around a full time job

The 2:24:35 at London in April 2024 didn’t come from an altitude camp or a sponsorship deal. It came from a winter of easy miles before and after work, hard sessions with the Barnsley training group, and racing through the cold months. The marathon specific block was only 11 weeks. The rest was years of consistency stacking up.

That’s the part I coach. Not how to train like a full time athlete, but how to get fast while life carries on around you.

Now

I coach online with my partner Naomi Drakeford, who has run 2:46 for the marathon and raced everything from the Ironman World Championships to Olympic distance Worlds. We’ve both worked in the industry since 2010. I’m still racing with Barnsley AC, and right now I’m building for the Valencia Marathon on 6 December 2026, the race I was meant to run in 2024. You can follow every week of it on YouTube.

The name? Before I joined a club I wore the same blue top to every race. People started calling me the running man in blue, and it stuck.

Want the full story, race by race? It’s all in the blog, going back to 2016.