Charlotte Purdue Warrior

Charlotte Purdue is a natural; a natural marathon runner, competitor and role model in women’s sport. We’re hoping a bit of her superhero quality rubs off on us all

Words Rachel Ifans

Charlotte Purdue has had a tough year, although you wouldn’t know it by talking to her.

After a couple of years of being dealt considerable blows – think being separated from her coach by a global pandemic, being injured in the run up to the Tokyo Olympic trials, being overlooked for Olympic qualification and having her appeal rejected – she stills comes across as one of the most friendly and forward-looking people you could hope to meet.

Now, you may say that athletes are trained to be strong and positive mentally, and that knockbacks and resilience come with the territory, but there’s something a bit different about Charlotte. She’s determined, she’ll stand her ground, but her good humour and easy nature seem to go deeper than what you learn on the sports psychologist’s couch. It’s not that she doesn’t feel the pain of missed opportunities and the frustrations that come with being an elite athlete – be they injuries or the infuriatingly complex and sometimes nonsensical rules of qualification – it’s that she seems to hold them as lightly as possible.

Easy runner

Charlotte, now 30, has always found longdistance running easy. She says: “It’s always been the case; I can run for two hours, no problem at all. I don’t even need to drink when I’m doing it.”

She started running when she was 13 and her friends signed her up for the school cross country. She came fourth out of the year group, and the top six went on to represent the school in a district race in which she came 16th. She explains: “[My performance] was nothing special but at the end of the race, a man from a local running club said he saw the way that I started at the back and came through the field and he thought I had good potential as a runner.”

To say that that encouragement spurred her on would be an understatement.