Why I'm Running 40 Miles In September
40 Miles On The Basics — Part One
I'm not a natural runner. I want to get that out of the way first, because there's a version of this post that opens with a sunrise photo and a quote about limits, and that isn't going to be this one.
In September I'm running the High Peak 40. It's 40.5 miles across the Peak District with around 5,800 feet of climbing, and there's a cut-off time. Plenty of the climbing I'll walk, because everyone walks the climbs. That isn't modesty, it's just how the sport works.
I'm doing it for Alzheimer's Research UK.
I've had family members with this disease. I still do.
I've watched what it does, and it isn't only what it does to the person who gets diagnosed. It's what's left for everyone around them. People who didn't choose to become carers doing it anyway, mostly without help, mostly without anyone noticing, and mostly for years.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to. There's no version of this where a bloke running a long way across Derbyshire fixes anything. It doesn't. What it does is put money towards the people who might.
Alzheimer's Research UK funds the science. What causes it, how to find it earlier, and what might one day stop it. Not care, not comfort, not managing the decline — all of which matter enormously and none of which is what this particular charity does. They're going after the disease itself.
Nothing funded this year helps my family. The timelines are longer than that. But somebody else's family, twenty years out, gets a different conversation with a consultant than we did — and that only happens if the work gets paid for now.
So the run isn't the point. The run is the reason to ask.
Why 40 miles and not something sensible
Because it's the right size of hard.
Ten miles isn't an ask. Nobody sponsors ten miles. A hundred is a different sport and I'd be lying about being able to do it. Forty is far enough that I've had to change how I live for the last twelve months. It's close enough that if I do the boring things properly, I'll finish.
That's the honest version of most difficult things, I think. Not talent. Not a breakthrough. Not a shortcut somebody sold you. Just doing unglamorous things consistently for longer than is comfortable.
What I'm going to write about
I'll put up a few posts between now and the start line. Not a training diary, nobody needs that. More the things I'm finding out as I go.
What actually goes wrong at mile thirty, which as far as I can tell is mostly feet and morale rather than fitness. Why the descents hurt more than the climbs, which nobody warned me about and everyone who's already done it seems to know. What eating for eleven hours on your feet looks like when you're not a professional.
Mostly I'll be writing about the basics, because that's all this is. Sleep. Food. Time on your feet. Getting outside. The stuff that doesn't trend and doesn't need a launch — which is the same reason we started a supplement company at the unfashionable end of the market, but that's a different post and it doesn't belong in this one.
The ask
If you've got a fiver and this cause means something to you, the page is here.
Every pound goes to Alzheimer's Research UK.Sponsor the run
And if it doesn't, that's fine too. Read the posts anyway. Some of it might be useful the next time you're looking at something long and steep.
Frazer is running the High Peak 40 as an individual fundraiser.
Alzheimer's Research UK is a registered charity, numbers 1077089 and SC042474.