The ultra I didn’t run

The Classic Quarter 2026 was going to be my first ultra. Lizard Point to Land’s End, forty-four miles along the bottom edge of Cornwall. I had spent a couple of years building towards something like it without ever quite admitting that was what I was doing: a couple of marathons, more halves than I can be bothered to count, and a Cousin Jack, which is eighteen miles of the Penwith coast path and the first time I properly understood what this terrain does to a pace chart. The Quarter was the next step up. I had the training in. I was ready for it.

Six weeks out, my back went.

Not a niggle. Four months of not running at all. I pulled out of the race, and then I spent a summer doing rehab and watching other people’s photos come through from the start line I should have been standing on.

Starting again is its own thing

I have tentatively started running again. Tentatively is the word. I am a few kilos heavier than I was in May and most of the fitness has quietly left the building, which is what four months off does whether you deserve it or not. The distances I was doing without thinking about them are now the distances I have to think about.

It turns out this is a much less interesting story to tell than a race report, and a much more common one. Most runners spend more time coming back from something than they do on a start line. Nobody writes that bit down.

“The plan is not complicated. Get the weight back off, build very slowly through the winter, and be at Lizard Point in June 2027 in a state to enjoy it.”

The 2027 plan, and where this site came from

I am signed up for the 2027 Classic Quarter. It goes straight through Penzance and Newlyn, where I spent my teens and where my family still live, and finishes at Land’s End, where I grew up. A route built out of my own childhood, more or less.

Between now and then I am hoping to complete a lot of the coast path myself. Another excuse to visit home. It is also exactly how the tracker on this site came about: I wanted to know how much of it I had actually done, section by section, and there was no good way to find out. So I built one.

I should say where I am writing this from, because it matters. I live in Amsterdam, which as far as I can tell has zero cliffs and not many hills either. Building a map of the Cornish coast from somewhere that flat is probably a bit ridiculous. But it’s an honest reason for a site to exist: it keeps a line open to home, and it scratches an itch for the kind of nature I only really appreciated once I didn’t have it on my doorstep anymore.

The other half of it is the friends. I’ve always run, on and off, but it only became a proper habit about three years ago, which, if the rest of the internet is anything to go by, is roughly when most of us in our thirties discovered running. A few of us from home ended up doing the same thing at the same time, and that’s more or less how PZ (x) RC started: a group of friends using running as an excuse to stay in touch and get outside on the coast, some of us taking it more seriously than others. The full name is PZ (x) Wasters RC. It’s a nod to the fact that most of us have simply swapped nights out for early mornings on the cliffs. Some of the time, anyway. They are the reason a tracker is worth building at all: nobody ticks off two hundred and ninety-four miles on their own.