My running and my children – the things I love most – never quite sync together. Running, unlike say football, cricket or darts, is a rubbish spectator event. Whenever I ask my kids to come and watch me race, at best, they’ll wait around somewhere for an hour getting incredibly bored, then look the wrong way the moment I run past doing my best to look semi-heroic with my thin white arms and flushed face.
Even at trail events, where crowds are smaller, we have a long history of a child needing the toilet, or simply to urgently do something less boring, at that crucial moment when I run past. That magic (and probably a bit selfish) moment has just never quite happened and I’d pretty much given up on the futile dream that they’d see me do well in a race – and maybe feel a tiny bit proud of me. Instead of calling me Stupid Pooh Head all the time. So when my wife and two kids, aged two and five, joined me in Chamonix in August, on the pretence that it was a family holiday, I didn’t hold out much hope for UTMB being any different.