About
This site is authored by me, Mark Perkins. I live with my little family in sunny Brighton, where I work as a web developer. I used to do a whole lot of windsurfing, but now I mostly just run.
I started running at Uni in Southampton as a way to make myself feel a little bit better about all the crap I was putting into my body at the time. A couple of my housemates (one of whom - Sarah - I ended up marrying) and I did a bit of semi-regular running together, with a few local 10km road races thrown in for good measure too.
One of these housemates, Ian (the one I didn’t marry, and who is a bit handy with a compass), then suggested that we do a the LAMM - a two day mountain marathon in Scotland. The first day was utterly miserable. I’ve never been so cold or tired in my whole life. We were massively undertrained and I totally underestimated the scale of the surroundings and the challenge. I nearly killed him for his Jelly Babies on the side of a Scottish mountain side in the middle of a blizzard. In July.
Luckily the second day was less cold, no snow, and considerably more enjoyable. Finishing was a great experience, and one I was very proud of at the time. I think that moment was probably the one that I got a real taste of what ‘proper’ endurance sports are all about, even though I didn’t really realise it at the time.
After Uni I generally continued running - some years more than others, some years hardly at all - through the birth of my two kids (Sadie and Josie) and my marriage to Sarah. I did a couple of trail marathons, a few half marathons (including a pass-out-puke-and-DNF at a very hot Plymouth half marathon) and generally kept things ticking along. I also had a year or so where running looking at my watch too much caused me to really start hating running, and I basically stopped entirely for a little while.
2011 was a year of very little running and a lot of work, stress and eating. At the start of January 2012 I was pretty much resigned to slowly becoming more and more overweight and generally leading a sedentary life of eating in front of a computer.
Not quite sure what changed, but by the end of January I’d decided that this actually wasn’t what I wanted at all, and I started running again. More so than ever before in fact. Somehow I got reading about ultra-marathons, and Sarah and I started seriously thinking about doing something that we’d always talked about doing - running from our house in Brighton to my parents house near Emsworth, along the South Downs.
A successful 45-odd mile run later and I’m pretty excited to see how much further I can convince my body to keep putting one foot in front of another.