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James Riley
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13/07/2026

Race Roundup: A Weekend in the Hills

Hot, hard and worth every step. Mostly.

🌳 Maverick Chilterns 50 – Liam Joyce
45th in 5:52:56. Hard at the start, but stronger at the end, with plenty of overtaking. The heat made itself known and the checkpoints were welcome. That’s how you manage a 50K in July.

🇨🇭 Verbier Marathon – Douglas
9:41:52. 11th V60. Technical single track, boulder fields, big drop-offs, scrambling, and thunderstorms during the afternoon. His words: “Delighted to finish in one piece.” And given what’s coming next weekend, that was exactly the right priority.

🏔️ Wasdale Fell Race – Suzy Whatmough Massage Therapy
7th woman in 4:25:44 on a shortened course due to the heat. Loved it. The stream at the end was, apparently, amazing. Peak Suzy.

💚 Imber Court Relay – Gary
A warm mention for Gary, helping Elmbridge to 5th. Good to see him able to give it full beans.

Hot hills, smart decisions and plenty still to come. Not a bad weekend 💚

09/07/2026

Heat isn’t a cheat code.

The confusion is that two true things get mashed together. Deliberate heat training works. It’s a real, planned stimulus that builds meaningful adaptations. But accidentally cooking a threshold session in the heat isn’t the same thing. If it’s too hot to hold the intended intensity, you’ve changed the session. You might gain some heat adaptation, but you also give away some of the threshold stimulus you came for.

The fix isn’t complicated. Decide what today’s session is actually for, then protect that one thing. If it’s threshold, train threshold. If it’s heat adaptation, train for heat.

Everything else is just the weather trying to take credit for your training.

Were you in the “heat is free fitness” camp, or the “heat is quietly wrecking my splits” one?

30/06/2026

Cut the volume back deliberately last week. 6 runs. 73km. 11h30.

8 × 3 minutes uphill on the treadmill and a controlled tempo parkrun in 19:34. Nothing spectacular. It was hot, so my heart rate was higher than usual, but otherwise there wasn’t much to report.

Which is probably exactly what a recovery week should look like.

💡 Coaching point

Don’t judge a training week in isolation. 73km isn’t a good week or a bad week. It’s just the right week.

Look at it on its own and it seems unremarkable. Put it between two big blocks and it becomes part of the training that makes those weeks possible.

The temptation is to ask, “Could I have done more?” A better question is, “Does this week fit the plan?”

Training happens in blocks, not individual weeks.

16/06/2026

A big week. 7 runs. 1 parkrun. 132km. 21h45.

75km in the Lakes over two days (the second in that steady Lake District rain), reccing the back half of the Lakeland 100 course. The ankle had no complaints. The quads grumbled about the vert.

One thing I’ve realised about fuelling long days: I love chocolate and sweets. I don’t love gels.

The nav was mostly straightforward. Now I know where the ground’s easy and where the paths are annoyingly stony.

After all that, I somehow managed a tempo parkrun, helping Ranelagh in the Mini Mob Match against Stragglers.

Somewhere in there it felt like the old, pre-ankle niggle days again ☺️

💡 Coaching point

Fuelling matters. For most of us, Precision doesn’t.

The difference between eating too little and eating enough is enormous. The difference between 75g and 82g of carbohydrate per hour is much smaller.

The same goes for carbohydrate blends. For most runners, eating enough and tolerating it matters more than whether the ratio is exactly what the latest marketing campaign says it should be.

Gels are useful because they’re convenient and predictable. But once you know roughly how much carbohydrate is in the foods you enjoy, real food often works perfectly well too.

Get the big things right first. Then worry about the decimals.

09/06/2026

7 runs including 3 relay legs. 1 strength. 77km. 12h15.

Back to London after Cornwall. Tired legs, and home life got a bit more complicated. Sally broke her ankle on holiday. It’s a really tough time for her and I’m trying to do my bit to help.

The South Downs Way 100 Mile Relay was on Saturday. A team of six, three legs each, with horizontal driving rain at times adding to the experience.

I made two navigation mistakes. The first was missing a turn mid-leg and adding an unnecessary kilometre. The second was loading the wrong GPX before my second leg. Another runner kindly pointed out I was going the wrong way after about 300 metres. Embarrassing, particularly the second one. Entirely avoidable.

We still finished 2nd vets team, and fortunately neither mistake changed the result.

The most encouraging thing all week was something else. Three hard 10km efforts in one day and the ankle held up. Another promising sign.

💡 Coaching point

Get your navigation on point.

Recce the route if you can. Knowing what’s coming lets you race rather than navigate.

Make sure your GPX is right. Don’t just assume it is.

Check the route on your watch. Don’t get carried away racing and forget.

The hard part should be the running.

08/06/2026

Race Roundup: Sun, Rain, Relays and a Magic Hour

A proper mixed bag. All of it worth it.

🇺🇸 Utah Valley Marathon – Douglas
4:48:17. State 17. Running at altitude in 30-degree heat by mile 20. He made the right calls, kept moving and got it done. Utah is in the bag.

💙💛 South Downs Way Relay – , , & me
🥈 in the vets competition for the men. The women were denied 🥉by a technicality that was the race organisers’ own doing. Frustrating probably doesn’t cover it. An awesome event, albeit a bleaker experience than usual. Horizontal 50mph rain will do that. Huge thanks to and .monster for the marathon job driving us round all day.

🔟 Dorking 10 – Matt H & Bridgit
Matt broke the hour mark with a PB of 59:20. Bridgit matched her time from last year in 1:37:39. Solid runs all round.

🦌 Parkland Relays – , , Phil, , Ed F, &
First overall for Ranelagh. 1st and 2nd in the Vets. The event delivered as it always does and Ranelagh did too.

🌳 Wimbledon Trail Series Race 2 – Ellie
Slippery underfoot after the rain, tough but fun. She got round. More to come.

Relays, road miles and a magic hour. Not a bad weekend 💚

04/06/2026

The apps that earn their place on my phone and one I’m cooling on. Runner and coach both.

Garmin Connect. Run data and navigation; the workhorse.

TrainingPeaks. Where I schedule and review my own plan and everyone else’s. The session as it actually happened, not as it was written.

Outdooractive. My go-to for routes; better than OS to my mind. It has the OS maps plus European maps for when the races are further from home.

Strava. The social network I can’t quite leave. The selling is wearing a little thin, but I’m still there for the community. It’s also where I see the lines people actually run, not just the ones the map suggests.

Apple Notes. Where the strength work and the scribbled bits live.

Todoist. Because otherwise nothing would happen.

Then the weather. Three of them.

Met Office for the radar and a mountain forecast that occasionally talks me off the ledge MWIS puts me on.

MWIS (Mountain Weather Information Service). Not technically an app, but a second pessimistic opinion never hurt anyone heading up a mountain.

Apple Weather for the important question: when will it stop raining?

None of them run the miles for you.

They point.
They record.
They warn.

The work is still yours.

What app would you struggle to delete?

03/06/2026

Half-term in Cornwall. Flowrider and the aquapark at Retallack, and a surfing lesson with . Plenty of activity that wasn’t running.

Oh, and my biggest training week since October. 6 runs. 103km. 16hrs. Back-to-back long runs.

Somewhere in all of that, I started to feel like myself as a runner again.

I can’t fully explain it. I’m still slower than I’d like. But something shifted.

I think I’d been so focused on protecting my ankle for so long that my running had quietly become about the injury, not the running.

Last week I made a conscious decision to stop organising my training around it.

My ankle will always be a bit niggly. That’s just the road I’m on.

Time to get on with it.

💡 Coaching point

A chronic injury can quietly become the centre of your training.

You start making decisions around it. Protecting it. Managing it.

Sometimes that’s necessary.

But at some point, if you’re going to move forward, the running has to become the main thing again.

Treat the injury. Adapt around it.

Just don’t give it more influence than it deserves.

01/06/2026

Race Roundup: Stockholm and the Coad Cup

🇸🇪 Stockholm Marathon –

4:52:18. Difficult conditions and all the right decisions made along the way, including easing off when the heat demanded it. Not the time she wanted but smart racing. First marathon done.

💙💛 Ranelagh Coad Cup – Bec, Mark & Charlie

Belated congratulations to three Unbounders who braved the heat on Tuesday night. Midweek miles count too.

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