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Damian Hall
57 Plays4 years ago
Damians new book “In It for the Long Run” is due out on the 6th of May and is his story of his Pennine Way record attempt in July 2020.
You can connect with Damian on Instagram, @ultra_damo
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Transcript
Introduction to the UK Sports Chat Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome to this episode of the UK sports chat podcast. I'm Joe Williams and in today's episode I am speaking with ultra runner Damien Hall.
Damien Hall's Book and Environmental Focus
00:00:11
Speaker
Damien's new book in it for the long run is due out on May the 6th and this is his story of his Pennine Way record attempt in July of 2020.
00:00:22
Speaker
Damien used his record attempt to highlight environmental issues. His attempt was carbon negative. He used no plastics, and he and his pacing runners collected litter as they went, whilst also raising money for Greenpeace. Hope you enjoy this episode. Enjoy the rest of your week, and we'll see you on next week's episode of the podcast. Afternoon, Damien. Hello. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. How are you?
00:00:52
Speaker
Pretty good, thanks. Good, excellent. Well, thanks for coming on the UK Run Chat podcast to chat to us. Very good of you. Wow, pleasure to be invited. So, as I've just said in the intro, we're talking all about Year at Your New Book, in it for the long run, which is due out at the beginning of May, I believe. I think so, yeah.
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, May the 6th. Do you want to give us just an overview about the book? Tell us what it is and tell us about the challenge.
Writing the Book: Challenges and Reflections
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's a rubbish book. I'd recommend people don't buy it. It's a load of disgustingly self-indulgent nonsense about me and my running, really.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, not sure I can sum up any better than that. It's a load of nonsense. I've been following some of your social media posts, actually. You like to say that, don't you? Well, I feel more comfortable, you know, if you criticize yourself before anyone else criticizes you, then it's somehow a bit easier. But it is kind of a horrible feeling.
00:02:05
Speaker
No, I mean, I was thrilled to be given the, you know, the publisher approached me and said what I'd like to write about, I suppose, primarily about FKTs and records and long distance running. And I mean, that seemed really exciting at the time. But when you actually sort of hand it all over to the public, it's quite,
00:02:23
Speaker
It's quite frightening, actually, because you suddenly think, oh, did I describe that person fairly? Did I remember that bit accurately? Do I just sound like a massive prat? So yeah, quite a frightening time, if I'm honest. Yeah. This isn't your first book, is it? You've written others.
00:02:43
Speaker
It's my first kind of real book, I suppose, about me. Most of my other books are guide books or, you know, which are just turn left, turn right. Look out for the bull in that field. Yeah, it's my first kind of, I suppose, proper book. Yeah, I've done a couple of, oh, I've done one or two. I've done like one running book, I think, but it was almost like, yeah, little anecdotes and snippets. It was nothing personal, so to speak. Yeah, so.
00:03:12
Speaker
By the way, when I said earlier on, when I said, worried, I should sound like a prat, that was the bit where you were meant to say, oh, no, you don't sound like a prat. But, you know, it's too late now. I missed it, sorry. I'll probably never forgive you. I'm interested in how you've responded to that because you write. You write, don't you? You write for papers and Runner's World and all that. So it's interesting to hear
00:03:42
Speaker
how you've responded to that question. And I understand this because it's writing about you, but did you find it very different then and difficult to write about yourself?
00:03:55
Speaker
Um I suppose yes and yes and no um yeah I mean I've been a journalist I hardly do any journalism now I'm too busy coaching people but um I've been a journalist for sort of 20 odd years but I guess that was always that feeling that you know even if you didn't do your best bit of work and it goes into a magazine or you make a slight mistake um you know it's only around for a month and everyone's forgotten about it soon enough and a book feels a bit more permanent um
00:04:21
Speaker
But yeah, that was helpful because, you know, some races or experiences I'd had, I don't know, five, eight, nine, 10 years ago, I did have some sort of, you know, I had it kind of written down somewhere to refer to. So so that that was helpful in that respect. Because I guess I've only been running really sort of arguably eight, nine, 10 years. So but yeah, that was good. It was good to have those to refer to.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Pennine Way Record Competition
00:04:53
Speaker
So I'll let everyone know what the challenge was then. So you took on to run an FKT of the Pennine Way to all 268 miles a bit. And the fastest time, well, the time actually got broke, didn't it? Just before you ran it. But it took for a long time, hadn't it? I think it was the late 80s, was it?
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, so Mike Hartley had set a record who was an absolute legend of long distance running. He'd set a record 32 years ago now. So last summer it stood for 31 years and both myself and another runner called John Kelly, who's an American, but living over here in the neighboring County to me and who I consider a friend. We were both planning to have a go at it. He originally, he was,
00:05:48
Speaker
Anyway I only started planning to have a go when when races were cancelled but it had been on my radar for quite a few years especially as I'd walked the Pennine Way myself and yeah we ended up going within well he he he went first broke the record that stood for 31 years and I went
00:06:08
Speaker
Well, eight days later, I broke his record, which feels a bit mean on reflection. So I did feel quite bad about that. You know, you break a record that's still 31 years and you only got to say that for a week, really. But he was, you know, he was very gracious about it. He was there at the finish line to congratulate me and so on. And, and he's going to go again this year. So it could be an on running saga. Yeah, I did wonder when I saw that, I thought, I wonder if they're mates. And if you just thought, I'm going to go zonk with me.
00:06:38
Speaker
No, I've been asked that a lot. And actually, we both went live on BBC TV a few days afterwards in the morning television, and they were, yeah, they were kind of painting me out to be the baddie. You know, what sort of a friend am I who comes along a few days later? But we've both known for months that each other, in fact, for a long time, I was going to be going first. And it was, well, it's a long, long, complicated story, but he had a more complicated summer and wanted to go sooner.
00:07:04
Speaker
So he ended up going first. So it could have been either way. And yeah, I think we'll see. Yeah, he's going to have another go. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. So just for listeners to give them the figures, you ran in 61 hours, 35 minutes. Have you got that right?
00:07:24
Speaker
Probably. I don't always remember the numbers. That sounds about right. Yeah. So, and John had done it in 64 something just before you. So it's quite a big difference. You beat it by, wasn't it?
00:07:38
Speaker
It was it was three hours in the end. But John, he did suffer a lot more than me in terms of like he had some really bad tummy issues. Our friends at Summit Fever Media have made a film called Totally FKT, which they videoed both of us.
00:07:59
Speaker
And it's basically the film is just a long, gurning competition, both me and John pulling pained expressions. But he definitely had a worse time than me. He had, he was going really strongly and then got really bad tummy issues that happened him for, you know, over half of his run. And so, yeah, I'm sure he could run a better time than that. Hopefully, hopefully not too much
Pandemic and Fastest Known Time (FKT) Attempts
00:08:20
Speaker
better. Yeah, we'll find out. It's really, we had Ali, Ali Bevan on.
00:08:25
Speaker
and months back because he he's also written a book about about a lot of the fkt's last year this last 12 months really been the year for it which i suppose has been driven by by lockdown did that affect you deciding to when you were going to do this or was it already planned in for the last year
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, when I was going to do UTMB again, but when I realised that wasn't going to happen, I started thinking about some record attempts. In the end, last year, a lot of people did no races, but I did three record attempts, one of them I planned to do anyway, but the other two came in when
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, when there were no races. And I think that they have quite a lot of people that although if you had Ali Bevan on, yeah, he may have mentioned like Donny Campbell's Monroe, incredible Monroe run where where he was planning to do that anyway. So I'd say a lot of these FKTs and records happened because of the lockdown but not not all of them. And I think
00:09:23
Speaker
In fact, just this last weekend, I was helping a friend on a new record on the Paddy Buckley round, and from what I hear, May is going to be kind of crazy, actually. There are lots of people going for big records again, so it's all going to get very exciting again. Yeah, yeah, very good. So you ran... The Pennine race, so the Spine race, is usually south to north, isn't it? It's England to Scotland. But when you did this, you ran... Have I got that right? You ran Scotland going to England, is that right?
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah, there are a few reasons for that. I mean, partly I've done the spine raise twice and I've hiked the Pennine Way that direction and I sort of just didn't want to get too bored of it by doing it a fourth time in the same direction. But also I just noticed that the previous record holder, Mike Hartley, he had gone south so I phoned him up and
00:10:10
Speaker
asked him why and there are a few reasons but I mean one is simply that emotional thing of running towards home which can be quite powerful when it all gets a bit difficult but also there's a section right in the north called the cheviats and
00:10:26
Speaker
it's very difficult to get road access there access so you're probably about six seven eight hours without any road support up there so to me it made a lot more sense to get that done earlier when you don't need so much support rather than finish up and it's quite and it's one of the lumpiest bits of the whole the whole route as well so to me it made a lot of sense to get that done earlier the disadvantage we're going south is if the weather picks up it's coming right in your face so
00:10:50
Speaker
that there's that to factor in and John actually went the opposite direction he went went north um but i think this time he's going to go south um so yeah we'll see if it works out better for him this time yeah how do you go about preparing for a challenge like that because it honestly you you're a professional article right now but what how what changes compared to your normal training regime if you like when you're going for something like that
00:11:19
Speaker
Well, to be honest, it's not maybe as different as people might think. Most of the time I'm targeting running economy. And that would look really fairly similar to a marathon training. Well, in fact, actually, I usually do one big workout a week.
00:11:42
Speaker
a long run a week but quite a lot of the time it's not a monstrous long run it might be sixteen miles, lots of strides, strength work but then when you get close to a challenge I switch into a specific
00:11:58
Speaker
mode and that's where the long runs become more important and there are back-to-back long runs there not loads and loads but but yeah i think at one point i would have done 25 and then 20 the next day and then maybe 14 the next day with some hill strides in it that would have been the peak of my training um and
00:12:15
Speaker
I mean, ideally, you run on the same terrain, either exactly the same or as similar as possible as your challenge that's coming up. But really, the trading only changes about maybe six weeks out. Before then, you're trying to improve your economy, which a lot of that is to do with speed and easy volume, I suppose. Yeah. I did have a look at that video you mentioned a moment ago as well.
00:12:40
Speaker
You had a lot of, well, you have to have a lot of support, don't you, across that? How many people did you have involved with you across the challenge? Oh, I forget exactly in the end. It did...
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, I felt incredibly grateful. I've never tried to do that before, sort of arrange a team to help me, but I knew that if I wanted to compete with Mike Hartley's record, that, you know, that's the style he did it in, of having ideally two people running with you at all times, and one is carrying your kit for you, whether that's a bit of, you know, some...
00:13:12
Speaker
some clothing but more importantly food and drink and then ideally someone's just ahead of you you know navigating i mean i knew the route pretty well but it does help someone's just ahead of you you don't have to think about it too much they're opening opening gates i think i've forgotten how many gates there are but i calculated that if um if you slow down i think 10 seconds for a gate yeah um there were enough gates that you could save maybe 40 over 40 minutes if they were open for you
00:13:37
Speaker
So I mean, that's huge, actually. And of course, yeah, John broke the record by 30 minutes. So so, yeah, having people helping you like that sounds a bit lazy. But, you know, it does make a huge difference. And if that's what the people who have the record before me did, then then I'll try and copy it to try and match them.
00:13:54
Speaker
And then, yeah, you have a road crew as well. I'm very grateful for them, Nikki, Tim, and Mark. And they're going without sleep for two nights, just like you. They're getting ahead of you, trying to meet you in reasonably remote villages and, I don't know, make sure the van's fueled. Make sure you're getting all the food and liquid you need. So it's a pretty stressful job, actually. And they had, I don't know, they had a burst tire. There was a head injury at one point. They had quite the...
00:14:23
Speaker
quite the exciting time. Yeah, and all I'm thinking about is just keep going forward, keep going forward. They've got, you know, so much to think about. So yeah, very grateful to have a team around me helping. Yeah, yeah, I obviously wouldn't have been nearly as quick without them. Yeah, that's a cool, a cool role to play for Rio. As a friend doing that with you, really good.
00:14:49
Speaker
There were loads of people at the finish as well, wasn't there? There was a crew of supporters and runners as well cheering again. Yeah, I felt really moved actually, because this is sort of mid-late July. We're only just coming out of lockdown really at the time, so I really wasn't expecting any sort of crowd or anything. But just in the last, I'd say in the last few hours, that last afternoon, both friends and people I didn't know were sort of turning up on the trail and cheering me in and so on.
00:15:19
Speaker
When I got down into email, the official start and finish of the Pennine Way, I mean, in my head at least, there were sort of 30, 40, maybe even 50 people there, which was just mind blowing. I was just, yeah, really, really moved. That was a really special, really special day actually, yeah. Yeah, it looked fantastic. I had a look at the video. How do you describe the mental journey you go through on a challenge like that? Because you were quite descriptive with it in the video.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you sort of, I mean, you go through everything really. I mean, yeah, try not to see, try not to use those cliches of sort of, you know, I mean, it is like a roller coaster. You know, one minute you're, someone does something kind for you or you see a familiar face and you're, you know, happy as anything and then the next minute it's a,
00:16:15
Speaker
are crushing low or you stub your toe and tumble over and you're frustrated and embarrassed and the next minute you're fearful because you've lost some time and then you're grateful again to someone and then sometimes you just zone out because you're only half awake and you're just trudging along like a zombie. So that is kind of why I enjoy these adventures because
00:16:38
Speaker
you know they put you for everything a huge huge emotional adventure and i don't know it makes you it makes you feel alive really because you go through so many emotions that you wouldn't go through in a normal week and it's quite addictive i think um you know you come out of it and you get sort of
00:16:54
Speaker
post-expedition blues that sort of mountaineers and adventurers talk about you know obviously this is a smaller scale but you sort of miss it when it's gone you know you're sitting there and you can hardly walk and stuff and you could and you're having night sweats and um you know your body's half recognizable but you're already missing it and you already want the next one so it's um yeah it's quite an addictive quite an addictive world yeah
Environmental Initiatives in Running Challenges
00:17:17
Speaker
I read that you and your support team were picking up litter on your way and I know that the whole climate emergency is something that was important to you and that you actually built into this challenge. Can you tell us a bit about that?
00:17:32
Speaker
Yeah well first thing I should say of course is that you know by doing this I did encourage more car journeys than would have happened otherwise. Got to hold my hands up there but I've worked with a company called Our Carbon who audited me, well my whole family, my lifestyle for last year and we came up with a plan you know to reduce
00:17:54
Speaker
our personal CO2 emissions and then offset the ones we couldn't totally eradicate so that made us sort of carbon negative for the year and we're going to do the same again this year. And yeah I'm just really quite stressed about how imminent
00:18:15
Speaker
are in a climate emergency now and how politicians aren't acting quickly enough and that stresses me out quite a lot. You only have to check out the BBC website or the Guardian website. You can see plenty of stories about how we're behind targets and so on. I'll go off for 10 minutes if you don't interrupt me, but it's really concerning.
00:18:43
Speaker
I think there was, broadly speaking, two things people could do. There's the personal stuff, all the political stuff. And I suppose I've ended up doing a bit of both. But also, having some values, I also did it without fueling on any animal products and without creating any plastic waste, which was actually the trickier one. And then we collected litter as I went. I guess just to have a small environmental message with it gave it a lot more meaning for me. So when it got really difficult,
00:19:12
Speaker
That cliche of like know your why really came into my mind as sort of why was you know? Why was I doing this and I wouldn't think so much of I'm breaking up trying to break a record because ultimately that's a bit of a sort of Selfish little little pastime, but I was you know trying to I suppose spread or at least live by some some values and and that was quite powerful to me and kept me going really Yeah, yeah
00:19:37
Speaker
It's something that we see it spoken about a lot on our social media channels, but how do we do more specifically within running and race organisers as well? If I'll give an example, if you look at run button licensing for road races, say a half marathon, it's part of the license to have three water potions and inevitably they're filled up with plastic water bottles.
00:20:07
Speaker
It feels like with everything we've been through, the pandemic and COVID support guidelines, mainly before the races, that is now the time that the running industry or the events industry specifically really do something about it. So for example, do runners become self-sufficient on road races? And that's a lot more common in trail and opera races. But is that something that could come in as part of licensing, for example,
00:20:39
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a great question. It definitely upsets me as it upsets lots of people I think when you see sort of the road after a, after a half marathon or marathon in a big city it's just littered with plastic bottles. And of course we hope they're going to be recycled but often they're not, they could be incinerated or, yeah.
00:20:59
Speaker
that is a problem. I mean, I've heard of some events, they've got these kind of seaweed pouches, haven't they, that are biodegradable, but I don't know for a small amount, you know, that presumably they're a bit more costly. And you're right, you know, in a lot of trail races now, they won't give you, you have to basically bring your own cup, and they'll, you know, they'll fill it up for you. But that, I can see how that's more tricky in road events, although hopefully the seaweed option and similar options might become the norm.
00:21:27
Speaker
But ultimately, probably in most cases, depending on where the event is, but travelling to an event is probably going to be people's biggest carbon emissions in most cases. I suppose I'm speaking as someone who used to fly abroad quite a bit to race.
00:21:51
Speaker
Obviously, if a race is in the same country, usually getting a train there, that's pretty good for the, comparatively, that's pretty good for the environment. But that throws up a really good question, I think, about events. Is the travel, the emissions from travel to an event, is that on the event or is that on the individual? So I'm sure some events could do better at sort of incentivizing
00:22:15
Speaker
travel by public transport, and I've heard some that do, they might give you a discount or that sort of thing. So that's going to be a way forward. The other two, well, the three outside of running, the three areas that we're constantly told to look at are kind of your diet, your energy and your travel. So we've just covered off travel. Energy is actually a really easy one to sort out. You can switch to a renewable energy supplier in just five minutes online, either bulb or ecotricity.
00:22:44
Speaker
or pure planet you might even save some money you can do that easily and then diet is maybe the more controversial one but i think everyone knows now yeah we've got to really we're going to be eating less less meat especially red meat and less dairy and of course runners we we burn more calories so we're eating a bit more than average people so so maybe maybe we've got to show more responsibility i don't know i don't want to be too preachy about it all
00:23:09
Speaker
But yeah, it's a huge complex subject and it's difficult to know. Well, yeah, also in the running world, sorry, the big one is the clothing and the kit. And there's hopefully people have mostly heard now about sort of trees, not teas, for example, and rerun clothing who both are founded by friends of mine.
00:23:30
Speaker
and trees not teased amazing things and give race organizers the option now of just really easily when you sign up for race you can ask for a tree instead of a t-shirt because I think people should be allowed a t-shirt especially if it's your first half marathon or first marathon or whatever but there are just so many t-shirts around now and
00:23:47
Speaker
if they're nylon they take hundreds of years to biodegrade and if they're cotton they've used usually it's I think two and a half the same amount of drinking water as we might one person might drink in two and a half years to make them and then often the t-shirt isn't isn't really wanted or or used anyway so that's you know a bit of well it's very wasteful.
00:24:06
Speaker
and that that could be something people are better at.
Sustainability in Race Organization
00:24:09
Speaker
But I suppose, yeah, the bigger message is we're all over consuming. We're all probably buying too many, too much kit and too, too, too many pairs of shoes. But it's just something to think about, I suppose, but don't get too gloomy. It's not preachy. It's, you know, use the word preachy. It's not. It's important. It's very, very important.
00:24:31
Speaker
How much letter did you collect? I've interested you've got a car up or what? And I must say it was mostly my brilliant support runners who were collecting it for me but I'm pretty sure it was about eight kilograms in the end I think it was. And it was what you might expect up on the moors, up on the hills, there wasn't very much at all but it was nearly always like near a village or near a town
00:24:57
Speaker
um that you'd find that you'd find a bit and it was the classic things um you know plastic bottles or cans or sandwich wrappers and so on um but yeah i suppose it was about what we'd expect it wasn't worse or better um but yeah it's nice it was a sort of satisfying thing to do and then you and then you feel like you've i don't know i've tried to carry on doing that whenever i remember remember it's it's um
00:25:25
Speaker
I don't know, you get a little, I don't know which chemical goes off when you do something good, but whether it's dopamine or one of them, it's a nice feeling sometimes. You think, I went for a run and I collected a bit of litter. Yeah. What's next for you? Are there FKTs on the horizon?
Future Projects and Challenges
00:25:42
Speaker
There could be, yeah. Well, I'll still keep the details to myself, if you don't mind, but late May I'm aiming for something. Yeah, I've been targeting something quite similar to the Pennine Way, slightly shorter in distance, but the record has stood for 31 years again. So I will, yeah, I'll sort of reveal that nearer the time, but currently training for that. But I think May especially is gonna be,
00:26:11
Speaker
going to be quite crazy. I've heard of a few pan on way runs but also the Wainwrights in the Lake District. I've heard of I think four attempts on that at least I've heard of so it's going to be quite exciting I think. Busy months to follow along.
00:26:26
Speaker
Yeah, cool. Okay, well, for everyone listening, yeah, May the 6th in it for the long run, it comes out as Damien's story of his Pennine Way record attempt last July 2020. Damien, where can everyone connect with you if they want to?
00:26:42
Speaker
if you want them to. I think I'm probably fairly easy to, oh, I'm a TikTok guy, you know, I'm down with the kids. No, probably Instagram, I think I'm, I might be ultra demo, I think with an underscore in between, I think my name was gone. Instagram, I'm on Strava and Twitter and all of those, I'm probably easy to find, I'm probably quite annoying. So I wouldn't, again, I wouldn't recommend anyone follows me.
00:27:11
Speaker
All right, Damien. Cheers. Well, thanks for coming on. It's been good to chat and best of luck with that FKT in May. I look forward to looking out for it. Thank you very much indeed. Cheers. Take care.