By Pedal and Foot

Beachy Head Marathon My first attempt at 26.2 miles   Beachy Head Marathon takes place the last weekend in October every year and starts and finishes in Eastbourne. The route is 26.2 miles long and features 300 steps, 14 gates and over 1300m of elevation gain (that’s more than the height of Snowdon!) it is predominately off road, can get very muddy and starts as it means to go on with a very steep hill. Now to a seasoned trail or mountain runner those figures may not seem like much but to a road runner living and training on the flat streets of Cardiff they seemed impossibly large. Yet I decided I wanted to complete Beachy Head as my first Marathon, so I signed up and paid my money. To a student the entry fee for a marathon is certainely a lot of money so it was a good incentive to train and train I did. I was up at 5am before uni and then running again in the evenings, I did fartlek, hill sprint, long runs, short runs but above all I concentrated on running fast and I...

By Pedal and Foot Welcome to my blog about my adventures and experiences in the UK and further afield predominantly by bike or on foot.  I’m a graduate in Environmental Science working in the conservation industry and I try and fill any free time I can find with outdoor activities, though I must confess that I seem to spend more time fixing and researching bikes than riding them! I am a cyclist, a runner, a sailor, a hillwalker and generally someone who is happiest outside. These days I a most definitely a cyclist, I feel like spending 4 months living on a bike qualifies me as a cyclist. However only a few years back I would have never called myself a cyclist. Sure I cycled regularly, I cycled to uni, to meet friends in the pub, to go shopping, to get to running races and to go sailing but I wasn’t a cyclist. To me cycling was merely a means of transport, I used a bike to get places and for nothing more. Now I am a cyclist, I ...