The Weird World of Extreme Ultras with Mark Cockbain The Weird World of Extreme Ultras with Mark Cockbain

When did you start running and why?

Well, it was back when I was in my late twenties. It started with marathons. I wanted to run a marathon, so I did the Paris Marathon and then went on to do more and more of them. Eventually, I got in under three hours, and I decided I wanted to go longer next, so I started looking at ultras.

Was this in the '90s?

Yeah, the first marathon was in the late '90s. Once I'd cracked three hours, I knew I wasn't going to get any faster, and then I saw an advert for the Marathon des Sables in a magazine, and I thought, 'I can't believe people do that kind of thing—'

You mean run 250km across the Sahara Desert?

Yeah, so then I started training for that.

MDS was your first ultra?

Well, the training for that was my first ultras. I think there were a couple of 50 milers leading up to MDS, but I really jumped in at the deep end with that. There wasn't much of an internet back then, so you received information about ultrarunning through word of mouth. There was a very small ultra community in the UK and less than ten ultramarathons. So, entering the Marathon des Sables, I didn't have much of an idea of what I was doing at the time. Obviously, you've got to take all your food and equipment for the whole week and carry it with you, so that was another angle to it. You had to carry a backpack, and I remember standing at the starting line and wondering what I was doing. Because the backpack was quite heavy—ten to twelve kilograms—and I was standing there with sunglasses on, and I'm thinking, 'It's really hot, this is impossible, what am I doing?'

I'll bet.

But after that—because you mix with a lot of different people at that event—I found out about other races. So, it was a good starting point, really, and you get a bit of confidence once you finish a race like that, and you meet people who tell you about other races. But I remember there was an article about Badwater in one of the Sunday papers—people running through Death Valley—and I was amazed by it. I couldn't believe people could run in that kind of heat. So, I heard about that one, and then I watched something on telly about someone running six back-to-back marathons in Greece, non-stop, and this was the Spartathalon. I remember watching that and thinking, 'Oh, my god. How could anyone do that kind of thing?' And it stuck in my head, and, as I say, at the time, there was no real internet, but I researched them and thought, 'These are races that I want to do when I've got a bit more experience.' So, I always had those kinds of things in the back of my mind, and then I just started entering more and more ultras and training toward those kind of bigger races.

It must seem crazy to you now, a couple of decades on, seeing how the ultra scene has changed.

Oh, it's unbelievable. You can literally do two different ultras every weekend in the UK now. But like I say, when I started there were less than ten. There was your classics: London to Brighton, the Grand Union Canal Race, Two Bridges in Scotland, Dartmoor Discovery, and maybe a handful of others, but if you wanted to build up your ultra CV, you'd probably have to repeat a lot of those races, so I was looking at races abroad. But it's gotten so much more popular, and now there's so much more information out there and so many races. I don't think you do them all in a lifetime.

How did you get started designing races?

Well, I kinda just ran myself into the ground. I went on to do so many ultras—the Badwaters, the Spartathalons, across the Arctic, across deserts—and I had an underlying knee issue. When I was younger, I had a bit of cartilage removed from my knee, and then after MDS, I did a race in the Jordan desert, and I started having a problem with the same knee. I had more cartilage removed, and eventually I was training in 2011 or 2012 for this race across America... I think it went for 70 days or something like that... So, I was training for that, and my right knee just catastrophically went.

Ah, fuck.

Yeah. And I went and got a diagnosis, and I've basically got no cartilage left in it. I tried so many different things: stem cell injections in the USA, I saw numerous consultants, you know, but there's nothing that can be done for the moment. I'm still kind of holding out. Anyway, it's basically an addiction. You finish a race, and then you want to do more and more, and you can't stop, so the knee put an end to it. But I thought, 'What am I gonna do now?'

That sucks.

It was kind of a low time. But I decided not to let it get me down because I still wanted to be in with that crowd; I've got a lot of friends that do the races, so I started looking at designing races myself. I began looking for long-distance paths in the UK that hadn't been used before, but then I thought I needed to throw in some elements. Because all the races that I'd done were extreme, they had an x-factor, whether it be altitude or extreme weather conditions, and with all those races that I finished, I was just hanging on at the end, and each finish meant so much, you know?

Right.

So, I wanted to make races that were extremely difficult to finish, so that for those people that did finish, they'd always remember spilling their guts to get there. So, the first thing I looked at was Viking Way, which is an old path here in the UK: 147 miles (236 km) long. But then, there's another race in the UK, the Grand Union Canal, which is a similar distance, so I thought I'd cut down the finish time so that you have to run it at a decent pace the whole way, and I'll have it in winter so the conditions are horrendous, and there were also hills on this route; it wasn't flat, and it was muddy and everything—

That sounds excellent. 

Yeah, so I threw different elements into the race, and there was minimal support. We had checkpoints every 25 miles...

How'd it go?

That was a success, and I managed to keep in touch with some of the people I used to run with. So, I thought, 'What else can I do?' And I think the next one I did was called The Hill.

I just read about The Hill. It sounds awful. For the readers, what is it?

It's a hill in the Peak District in December. You're basically climbing up and down a hill, a three-mile round trip, 55 times to get up 160 miles (257 km).

Jesus.

Yeah, it was horrendous. There's snow on the ground and the wind is blowing, and you're up above sea level, and you've got 48 hours to cover 160 miles. We only got one finisher the first year.

Tell me about The Chained Ultra. What was that?

Yeah, I thought it'd be a good idea to chain two people together—

[laughter]

—and I looked for a circular route in the middle of England and found Rutland Round. For the first edition of that, I wanted to make it really, really difficult. And I thought that chaining two people together would be pretty tough, but then I made it 130 miles (209 km), and you have to do it in 32 hours, with minimal support, and the chained-together runners don't actually know each other.

What?!

So, people turned up, and then we drew names out of a hat to see who would be chained to who.

You're kidding. 

It was so funny.