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Testimonials and client stories
The testimonials and client stories below are here to give you a snapshot of what working together as coach and athlete would be like. You're always welcome to book in for a free, no-obligation chat to get to know me better. Coaching is a big commitment, and the coach-athlete relationship is the most important part, so it's vital we both feel we're the right fit for each other.
A is a busy professional with a packed life; she has two children, an active social life, and she travels overseas regularly for work. Her goal when we started working together was to break four hours for the marathon. She'd recently had a tough race, and wanted help with structure and motivation. A stuck to the plan with massive commitment and dedication, and five months later, improved her marathon PB by 15 minutes - still not quite making the big goal at 4:12, and then took another chunk off making it to 4:03.
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At the start of our relationship, A found it tough to use her internal perception of effort to judge pace - she massively preferred to have a set pace for each session. We've worked on this together throughout, helping A to trust herself and trust her body to find the right level of effort. It all came together in a race with huge emotional significance for A, in a city where her family live. A has always had immense determination and grit, but she used her newly-learned ability to trust and believe in herself to execute the perfect race, finally earning the coveted 3:57 finish.
L came to me in 2022 with a big goal: to run Scotland's Ramsay Round in under 24 hours. He'd completed the Bob Graham Round in sub-24 some years before, but felt his training hadn't been very structured or informed, and wanted a better approach.
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L juggles lots of pieces of his working life, many of which are active and physical. He also volunteers for his local Mountain Rescue team, so both time and spare physical capacity are limited. We devised a plan that made the most of his already well-developed aerobic base and regular low-intensity activity, and trained to develop speed endurance over the fells. L loved realising early on that most of his training week was 'easy pace', having previously gone hard on every single run. We also worked on fuelling, something he felt had limited his Bob. The key to L's training was communication and adaption - curveballs like MR callouts and lambing emergencies meant we constantly adjusted to what was possible, rather than worrying about what an 'ideal' plan looked like.
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L completed the Ramsay Round mainly solo and on-sight in 23:57 after a navigational slip-up; a nail-biting finish. We knew he had more in him, and sure enough, two years later he executed a Paddy Buckley Round to perfection, in 21:12 - in the top 30 all-time completions, and becoming one of fewer than 100 people to complete all three Big Rounds in under 24 hours.
H joined me with big goals and a huge appetite for training hard and learning everything she could. A spectacularly intuitive and fearless downhill runner, she is drawn to the mountains, and to big, challenging races.
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Training for H previously had been up and down - like many of us her ambitions sometimes drove her to push too hard, leading to periods of no training at all, when exhaustion overwhelmed. In our work together we figured out how to structure and periodise training for H - giving enough challenge to her programme to keep her busy and engaged, but making progress steady and sustainable so that she avoids burn out.
We broke out of the boom-bust cycle of training, and in under a year H achieved PBs at 5k, 10k and half-marathon and ran her first two marathons.
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