I remember trying to explain the job to a friend.

This was around 2016. We were six years into Key Digital and I’d just taken on someone whose role, as far as I could describe it, was to look after our online presence — the website, the data, the email marketing, building the kind of digital footprint that I sensed was going to matter even though I couldn’t have told you exactly why in precise terms.

My friend was a business owner. Sharp, experienced, running a decent operation in a different market. He looked at me the way you look at someone who’s just said something that doesn’t quite parse.

“So what does she actually do?” he said.

I tried again. Something about search, something about data, something about where customers were going to be looking for us in five years’ time.

He nodded slowly in the way that means he’d moved on.

I don’t tell that story to make myself look clever. I got plenty wrong in those years. But I’d sensed something was shifting, and I’d acted on the instinct before I could fully articulate it. The job title that confused him in 2016 is now on every business’s hiring list. The question is just whether you hired early or late.

---

We set Key Digital up in 2010. From day one we ran on an IP phone system with digital numbers, and a CRM that tracked every customer interaction we had. I know how unremarkable that sounds now. In 2010, most of our competitors were running on fixed legacy systems — phones tied to a building, customer data living in someone’s head or a spreadsheet nobody could find.

We could work from anywhere. We could route calls without employing a receptionist. We were building and owning our data at a point when plenty of people in our market were still sending postal mailshots.

We weren’t geniuses. We just paid attention to where things were heading and didn’t wait until the direction was obvious to everyone.

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Catherine went to get her hair done.

That’s it. That’s how it started.

No book. No doctor. No damascene moment on a hillside. Just an ordinary Tuesday in a hairdresser’s chair somewhere in the north of England, where a woman asked my wife if she’d seen a documentary called Forks Over Knives.

Catherine came home intrigued.

We watched it that evening on the sofa.

We haven’t eaten meat since.

What the Documentary Said

Forks Over Knives makes a simple argument.

The majority of the degenerative diseases that kill people in the western world — heart disease, certain cancers, type 2 diabetes — are driven largely by the food we eat. Specifically by animal products and processed food. And largely reversible through a whole food plant based diet.

It’s not a comfortable watch if you’ve spent your whole life eating the way most people eat. It’s not designed to be.

We sat on the sofa and watched it in the way you watch something that is quietly rearranging your assumptions. Not arguing with it. Not fully agreeing with it. Just letting it land.

By the end neither of us said very much.

We didn’t need to.

The Steak I Didn’t Enjoy

About a month later I decided to test myself.

We went out for a meal and I ordered steak and chips. Proper steak. The kind I’d eaten hundreds of times before without thinking twice.

I didn’t enjoy it.

Not in a dramatic way — no sudden revulsion, no moment of clarity. I just sat there eating something I’d always liked and realised I didn’t like it anymore.

Your body craves what you feed it. I’d spent a month feeding it differently and somewhere along the way the craving had quietly moved on without telling me.

I pushed the plate away and didn’t order steak again.

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The Best Meal I’ve Ever Had

Before the documentary we’d booked a seven course tasting menu to celebrate our anniversary.

A proper restaurant. The kind with small portions and long pauses between courses and food that takes itself seriously. We’d been looking forward to it for months.

The problem was we’d booked it as meat eaters. And now we weren’t.

We rang ahead and asked if they could do a vegetarian version instead of the standard menu.

They could.

I want to tell you it was fine. A reasonable substitution, competently executed, slightly inferior to what we’d originally planned.

But that’s not what happened.

It was the best meal I have ever eaten. Seven courses, not one of them containing meat, each one more inventive and more satisfying than the last. Catherine and I sat across the table from each other and ate slowly and talked and looked at each other occasionally with the slightly stunned expression of people whose assumptions are being dismantled in real time.

I had believed — without really thinking about it, the way you believe things you’ve never questioned — that great food needed meat. That a celebration meal without it was a compromise. That you were always settling for second best.

That anniversary dinner ended that belief permanently.

You can make extraordinary food without meat. Not despite the constraint — because of it. The creativity lives in the limitation.

How It Actually Works in Our House

We went whole food plant based first. Cold turkey — if you’ll forgive the expression.

Then after a while we added fish and seafood back in. Not for health reasons. For practical ones. When you’re eating out with friends, or in a pub, or somewhere that hasn’t quite caught up with the plant based revolution, a prawn dish or a piece of fish on the menu is the difference between participating and sitting there nursing a side salad.

Pescatarian is where we landed. It makes life easier without compromising anything we care about.

Catherine does most of the cooking. Apparently I make too much mess — a charge I don’t entirely dispute. Which means she’s the one constantly learning new recipes, new techniques, new ways of making plants taste extraordinary.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you before you make a change like this.

We eat far better now than we ever did before. Not because plant based food is inherently superior. But because we had to learn to cook properly. Fresh ingredients. New techniques. Recipes we’d never have looked at when we were reaching for the same old staples or pulling something out of a packet.

The constraint forced the creativity. And the creativity turned out to be the best part.

We’ve also noticed something else. Most of the time when we eat out now it doesn’t match what we eat at home. Not because restaurants are bad — some are excellent. But because Catherine has become a genuinely brilliant cook, and the bar in our kitchen is higher than it used to be.

That’s not something either of us expected when we sat down to watch a documentary on a Tuesday evening.

She’s possibly more committed to it than I am now. Certainly more creative with it.

It started with a conversation at a hairdresser she can’t remember the name of, about a documentary she hadn’t heard of, on an ordinary Tuesday that turned out to matter enormously.

What Changed and What Didn’t

I still run every day. I still train for things that seem slightly unreasonable to most people. I still believe that the long game is the only game worth playing.

But the way I fuel that life looks nothing like it did ten years ago.

No meat. Mostly plants. Fish when it makes sense. Food that I actually think about rather than just consume.

And here’s the thing I couldn’t have told you before that anniversary dinner — before I sat across a table from my wife and ate seven courses that contained nothing I’d have previously considered celebration food:

Eating well is not a sacrifice.

It’s not the price you pay for being healthy. It’s not the joyless half-life of someone who’s given up the good stuff.

It’s just food. Thought about properly. Cooked with care.

The hairdresser whose name we never knew asked my wife a question about a documentary.

We’ve eaten differently every day since.

I don’t know if she has any idea.

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A few weeks after my bowel resection I helped carry a photocopier up a flight of stairs.

Still had my stitches in. There was a job on, the customer needed it done, and I was there. So I picked up my end and we went up the stairs.

I’m not telling you that as a badge of honour. I’m telling you because it’s the clearest illustration I have of something that took me a long time to properly understand — that when you’ve decided the business comes first, you will talk yourself into almost anything. And you won’t even notice you’re doing it.

---

The Crohn’s had been building for years before it got serious. Managed on painkillers, worked around, never quite dealt with properly because there was always something more pressing. By 2016 I was on a liquid diet — solid food simply wouldn’t pass. I ran the business on nutritional drinks and kept going because stopping didn’t feel like an option.

The surgery that year removed a metre of bowel. Two days in ICU. Catherine was there, and I won’t speak for what she was carrying in those hours, but I know what I saw in her face.

I’ve never had a Crohn’s symptom since. Whatever they took out, they took the problem with it.

But within weeks I was on a staircase with a photocopier and a fresh set of stitches.

Because the job needed doing.

---

There’s a question worth sitting with here — and I’d ask you to resist the urge to answer it too quickly.

**What are you currently managing, minimising, or pushing through that your body has been telling you about for longer than you’d care to admit?**

Not a dramatic question. Not an accusation. Just an honest one.

Because in my experience, entrepreneurs are remarkably good at two things: building businesses and ignoring warning signs. The same qualities that make you effective — the ability to push through discomfort, to defer gratification, to keep moving when everything in you wants to stop — those qualities do not distinguish between a difficult quarter and a serious health problem. They just push.

The business doesn’t know the difference either. It will take whatever you give it.

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Three months after a surgeon removed a metre of my intestines I went for a run.

I have no idea what I was thinking.

The Book That Started It

I’d been reading about running. Nothing specific — one of those comprehensive guides that covers everything from first steps to marathon training. The kind of book you buy when you’re not yet a runner but you’re thinking about becoming one.

Somewhere in the middle of it I read something that stopped me.

Long distance running, it said, suppresses the immune system. Particularly in the weeks building up to a marathon. Runners need to be careful — a cold, an infection, anything that puts the immune system under additional stress could derail months of training and ruin race day.

I put the book down.

I picked it back up.

I read it again.

Now I want to be completely clear about something. I have no scientific evidence for what I’m about to tell you. No doctor suggested it. No study confirmed it. What I had was a theory, formed in a quiet room by a man who had just had a metre of his intestines removed and was trying to find a reason to believe things could be different.

Crohn’s disease is, at its core, an overactive immune system attacking the digestive tract.

Running suppresses the immune system.

Therefore —

It was the most unscientific logic I have ever applied to anything in my life. It was also the logic that changed everything.

The First Run

About three months after the resection I laced up a pair of trainers and went out.

The canal was flat. I picked it deliberately — no hills, no excuses, nothing to negotiate with. Just a path alongside water and whatever I had left in a body that had been through a great deal.

Forty five minutes. Roughly 5k. I felt awful by the end.

I went home, lay on the sofa, and didn’t run again for a week.

It took that long to recover.

The following week I went again. Forty five minutes. Canal. Felt awful. Went home.

Once a week. That was the whole programme. No app, no coach, no plan. Just one run a week, feeling rough afterwards, going back anyway.

I want to be honest about why I kept going in those early weeks. It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t a runner’s high. It was the theory. The stubborn, unscientific, completely unverifiable belief that I was doing something to my immune system that might — might — mean I never ended up back on that operating table.

Sometimes belief is enough to make you act. Even when the evidence is thin.

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The Day It Changed

A few months in, on a warm day, I ran 10k along the canal.

I don’t know why that day was different. The same path, the same trainers, the same body that had been shuffling through these sessions for months.

But somewhere around the 8k mark something shifted. The effort stopped feeling like punishment and started feeling like something else entirely. Something I don’t have a precise word for.

I got back home shaking. Not the usual post-run tiredness — proper shaking, the kind that comes when your body has done something it didn’t know it could do. I went to bed to warm up and recover.

And lying there, still shaking, I got my phone out and signed up for the Burnley 10k.

But here’s the rule I created that day — almost without realising it.

Before I finished one challenge I would sign up for the next one.

Not after. Before. While I was still in it, still uncertain, still finding out what I was capable of. Before I crossed that line I needed to know there was another line waiting.

So before the Burnley 10k I signed up for a half marathon. Before the half marathon I signed up for Chester. And before Chester — before I’d even stood on that start line — I’d already entered a marathon in January.

Chester. Four Hours, Forty Three Minutes, Forty Seconds.

Eighteen months after the resection I stood on the start line of the Chester Marathon.

I won’t pretend I knew what I was doing. I’d followed a plan, done the long runs, trusted the process in the way that first time marathoners trust the process — with slightly more hope than certainty.

Mile 25. Cramp. The kind that arrives without warning and makes every remaining step a negotiation.

I kept going. What else do you do at mile 25?

And then something strange happened.

The final stretch of the Chester Marathon finishes on a racecourse. Proper turf. And after 25 miles of tarmac the ground felt — springy. Alive. Like running on a completely different surface.

My legs were drunk. That’s the only way I can describe it. I thought I was sprinting for the line. I probably looked like I was moving in slow motion. But in my head I was flying.

Four hours, forty three minutes, forty seconds.

Eighteen months earlier I couldn’t run for forty five minutes without spending a week recovering.

I cried. Of course I did.

The next year I ran twelve marathons in twelve months. Including my first ultra.

The rule was working.

Where the Rule Gets Tested

The thing about always setting the next challenge before you finish the current one is that the challenges keep getting bigger.

Twelve marathons became ultras. Ultras became hundreds. Last summer I ran the Spine Challenger South — 113 miles along one of Britain’s most demanding trails.

Up until that point I had always run the full distance in training. Always. Which meant I always knew, with certainty, that I would finish. I’d already done it. Race day was confirmation, not discovery.

The Spine Challenger changed that. 113 miles is not something you run in training. For the first time in my running life I genuinely didn’t know if I would finish.

I did. But it was different. The certainty was gone.

This year it’s the Leeds to Liverpool Canal Race. 130 miles. Two days of non-stop running along the same waterway where I once shuffled a 5k and spent a week recovering.

I still don’t know if I’ll finish.

And for the first time I’m considering breaking my own rule — not setting the next challenge until after. Because if I don’t finish I’ll be back next year. And sometimes the most powerful thing you can tell yourself at mile 90, when everything hurts and stopping feels entirely reasonable, is this:

If you give up now you have to go through all this again just to get back to this point.

That’s not a threat. That’s a strategy.

Maybe after LLCR the next challenge looks different entirely. Seven marathons in seven days. Twelve 50ks in twelve months. Something that tests a different kind of endurance.

I genuinely don’t know yet.

And for the first time in over ten years of running, not knowing feels like exactly the right place to be.

What I Know Now

I still have no scientific evidence for my immune system theory.

My consultant has never endorsed it. No study has confirmed it. It remains exactly what it was on the day I formed it — a theory, built from logic and desperation, by a man who needed a reason to put his trainers on.

But here is what I do know.

I haven’t had a Crohn’s flare-up in over a decade.

I run every day. Not because a streak demands it — I got past that — because it’s who I am now.

Maybe the theory is right. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe the diet, the stress, the whole changed life is what made the difference and the running is just the part I can measure.

I don’t need to know which one it is.

I just need to keep putting my trainers on.

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Gary always wanted to be successful.

I don’t say that to damn him. I say it because it’s the most important thing about him, and because wanting to be successful is not the same thing as building something that lasts. That distinction cost Gary everything, and I watched it happen slowly enough that I could see every stage of it.

We worked together years before either of us had a business — same large company, same industry, same starting point. He was good. Understood the product, understood the market, had the kind of energy that makes you think someone’s going to do well. When we both eventually left to set up on our own, I wasn’t surprised he went the same way. He had ambition. You could see it from across the room.

What I didn’t know then was what kind of ambition it was.

---

The sports car came first. Then the house — big place, proper money, the kind that ends up in Lancashire Life with a photo spread and a quote about vision. The office looked the part. The talk was confident. From the outside, Gary was doing it.

From slightly closer in, the picture was different.

He’d had four businesses by the time our paths crossed properly. The names changed. The story was always broadly the same. Things would build, things would stretch, the credit would run out, and then somehow there’d be a new vehicle, a fresh start, the same energy pointed at the same horizon.

I didn’t judge him for it at the time. I’m not sure I fully understood it.

What I did understand was why, every so often, Gary would ring up needing parts. Cash, with an invoice, collected in person.

By then none of his suppliers would touch him. Credit maxed, trust spent. But he still needed stock to keep moving, and I had what he needed.

I supplied him. Not because it was good business — it wasn’t, particularly — but because I knew why he was asking and I wanted to help. He wasn’t a crook. He never took money he didn’t intend to pay back. He just couldn’t quite get the foundations right, and I think somewhere underneath it all he knew that, even if he’d never have said it.

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Every Easter, I did the stocktake alone.

It wasn’t a decision I made once and revisited. It just became the thing. Catherine would have a few days that looked something like a normal holiday — catching up on the house, seeing family, breathing — and I’d be in the warehouse with a clipboard and a cold coffee, counting stock.

It took most of the long weekend. And I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t entirely hate it.

There was something satisfying about getting a proper handle on the numbers. Easter stocktake meant we went into our year end — end of May — with clean data, fewer surprises, a business that felt briefly under control. I knew where we stood. That mattered.

But there was always a moment, usually sometime on the Saturday afternoon, when the other feeling arrived.

We shouldn’t need to do it like this.

Twelve months in and we were still catching up with ourselves at Easter. Then thirteen months. Then further down the line than I’d care to admit. The satisfaction of getting on top of it and the quiet embarrassment of still needing to — those two things coexisted every single year.

That tension, I’ve come to think, is one of the most honest feelings in business.

---

The operating model, for most of those thirteen years, was simple enough.

I worked weekends. Catherine did the admin in the evenings, in front of the TV. That was the rhythm — not a crisis, not a temporary arrangement, just the shape of the thing. It’s what building a business on your own terms actually looks like from the inside, and I’m not going to dress it up as something more glamorous than it was.

We got better over time. Found our version of flow. The systems improved, the team grew, the Easter stocktake got less painful. What had taken a full long weekend in year two took a day and a half in year eight. That’s not nothing — that’s compounding, applied to operations rather than money.

But here’s the thing I’d want you to sit with.

The one week we properly switched off — fully, completely, without the business needing something — was Christmas. Because the business was closed. Not because we’d built something that ran without us. Because the doors were physically shut.

Every other break had an asterisk.

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I was twenty-one when they told me I had Crohn’s disease.

I nodded, took the leaflet, and got on with my life.

That was a mistake.

The Advice That Should Have Finished Me

Crohn’s is a disease of the digestive system. It inflames, it scars, it blocks. It makes eating — one of the most basic human acts — an exercise in anxiety and pain.

In the early years I managed it the only way I knew how. Painkillers. Willpower. Ignoring things that deserved my attention.

Then came the advice that still stops me when I think about it.

My consultant sat Catherine down — my wife, red haired, practical, the person who has always seen things more clearly than me — and told her something extraordinary.

Feed him McDonalds. Junk food passes through easier. A salad could cause a blockage.

A doctor. A qualified medical professional. Telling my wife that processed food was the safer option.

And here’s the thing — he was right. For a damaged, scarred, narrowed digestive system, ultra processed food was genuinely easier to manage than fresh vegetables. The system was so broken that the food designed to destroy it had become the food keeping it going.

So that’s what I ate.

Burgers without sesame buns — too risky. Fry-ups with half the plate missing — no beans, no tomatoes, no mushrooms. Food reduced to whatever would pass through without causing a crisis.

The weight piled on. Of course it did. A junk food diet with a body that couldn’t exercise properly was only ever going to go one way.

And Crohn’s does something else that nobody tells you about. It saps your energy in a way that’s hard to explain. When your digestive system is compromised you’re not absorbing nutrients properly. You’re eating but you’re not fuelling. You feel perpetually half empty — tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

I was overweight, exhausted, and medically instructed to eat McDonald’s.

That is not a life worth living.

The Price of a Normal Life

But here’s the thing about chronic illness that nobody talks about.

You will do almost anything to feel normal.

For years I went out for meals. Birthday dinners. Christmas tables. Celebrations I couldn’t miss and wouldn’t miss. I’d sit down, order food, eat it — sometimes between courses — knowing with absolute certainty what was going to happen later.

When a proper meal hit the first restriction it was coming back up. Not a choice. Not a behaviour. Just biology. My body doing the only thing it could do when food met scar tissue.

I’d excuse myself quietly. Deal with it. Come back to the table.

Nobody knew. Or if they did they didn’t say.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because I want you to understand what Crohn’s actually costs — not in medical terms but in human ones. The price of a Christmas dinner. The price of being there. The price of pretending, for a few hours, that your body works like everyone else’s.

You pay it. Because the alternative is sitting at home while the world carries on without you.

The Year My Food Shop Was at the Chemist

Eventually even that stopped working.

The flare-ups got worse. The blockages more frequent. The pain bad enough that hospital became familiar — three admissions in three months, each one arriving with the same symptoms as appendicitis, each one frightening the people around me even after I’d stopped being frightened myself.

Then a year on a liquid diet.

My weekly food shop became a monthly trip to the chemist. Three prescribed drinks a day — nothing else. I’d walk out with so many boxes they were too heavy to carry in one go. A hundred cartons of beige nutrition, stacked in the hallway, keeping me alive but not much more than that.

I remember sitting at tables while everyone else ate. Being handed a menu and ordering nothing. The small daily indignity of a body that had stopped cooperating with the most ordinary things.

That’s not living. That’s just not dying.

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The Operating Table

After my third admission in three months my consultant ran out of patience.

It was time for surgery. A resection — they would remove the worst section, a metre of damaged intestine, and give me a fighting chance at something better.

I won’t dress it up. Surgery for Crohn’s is not a cure. The disease doesn’t disappear — it finds new territory. Resection after resection, each one removing more, until eventually there is nothing left to remove. I knew that going in.

What I also knew, lying in that hospital bed waiting for the anaesthetic, was that if I came out the other side and changed nothing — the stress, the diet, the sedentary life I’d been living — I would end up back on that table. And the table after that. And the one after that.

Two days in resus afterwards. In and out of consciousness. Catherine there.

When I came round properly I made a decision. Not dramatic. No lightning bolt. Just quiet and certain.

Something had to change. Three things, actually.

Less stress. Better food. Start moving.

Simple logic. No guru. No programme. No six week plan.

Just a man who had run out of excuses and almost run out of intestine.

What I Know Now

Crohn’s disease is not curable. I want to be clear about that.

But I haven’t had a flare-up in over a decade.

I eat a whole food plant based diet — the opposite of everything my consultant once recommended. I run every day. I manage my stress differently than I did at twenty-one, or thirty-one, or forty-one.

The consultant told Catherine to feed me McDonalds.

I haven’t eaten meat in years.

I don’t say that to be clever. I say it because the distance between those two sentences is the entire story of how a life can change — not in six weeks, not on a programme, not because someone sold me a transformation.

But slowly. Imperfectly. Over more years than I was counting.

One decision at a time.

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Every Easter, I did the stocktake alone.

It wasn’t a decision I made once and revisited. It just became the thing. Catherine would have a few days that looked something like a normal holiday — catching up on the house, seeing family, breathing — and I’d be in the warehouse with a clipboard and a cold coffee, counting stock.

It took most of the long weekend. And I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t entirely hate it.

There was something satisfying about getting a proper handle on the numbers. Easter stocktake meant we went into our year end — end of May — with clean data, fewer surprises, a business that felt briefly under control. I knew where we stood. That mattered.

But there was always a moment, usually sometime on the Saturday afternoon, when the other feeling arrived.

We shouldn’t need to do it like this.

Twelve months in and we were still catching up with ourselves at Easter. Then thirteen months. Then further down the line than I’d care to admit. The satisfaction of getting on top of it and the quiet embarrassment of still needing to — those two things coexisted every single year.

That tension, I’ve come to think, is one of the most honest feelings in business.

---

The operating model, for most of those thirteen years, was simple enough.

I worked weekends. Catherine did the admin in the evenings, in front of the TV. That was the rhythm — not a crisis, not a temporary arrangement, just the shape of the thing. It’s what building a business on your own terms actually looks like from the inside, and I’m not going to dress it up as something more glamorous than it was.

We got better over time. Found our version of flow. The systems improved, the team grew, the Easter stocktake got less painful. What had taken a full long weekend in year two took a day and a half in year eight. That’s not nothing — that’s compounding, applied to operations rather than money.

But here’s the thing I’d want you to sit with.

The one week we properly switched off — fully, completely, without the business needing something — was Christmas. Because the business was closed. Not because we’d built something that ran without us. Because the doors were physically shut.

Every other break had an asterisk.

Read more

There’s a conversation happening everywhere right now. In gyms, in GP surgeries, in the comments section of every health and wellness account on the internet.

It goes something like this.

Have you tried the new injection? My cousin lost three stone. My colleague is down two dress sizes. My neighbour hasn’t touched a biscuit in six months.

And look — I understand the appeal. I genuinely do. If you’ve spent years fighting your weight, feeling out of control around food, trying and failing and trying again — the idea that a weekly injection can quiet all of that noise must feel like a miracle.

But I’ve spent thirty years living inside a broken digestive system. A year on a liquid diet. A surgery that removed a metre of my intestines. And what that experience taught me — slowly, painfully, irreversibly — is that there is no pill, no injection, no procedure that fixes the thing underneath.

It only ever fixes the symptom.

The Perfect Business Model

Let’s be honest about what GLP-1 drugs are from a commercial perspective.

You take them, they work, you stop taking them, the weight comes back. So you take them again. For the rest of your life, in many cases.

I’m not suggesting that’s a conspiracy. I’m suggesting that’s just how appetite suppression works when nothing else has changed. The drug doesn’t retrain your relationship with food. It doesn’t fix the dopamine loop that sends you to the fridge at 10pm. It doesn’t address why you eat what you eat, when you eat it, or what eating means to you emotionally.

It turns down the volume. It doesn’t change the station.

And when you stop taking it, the volume comes back up.

From a business model perspective, it’s close to perfect. A chronic condition requiring a lifelong solution. Recurring revenue. Enormous market. I’ll leave you to decide how you feel about that.

The Sticking Plaster Argument

Here’s what bothers me most.

We have a food system problem. We have a culture problem. We have an environment in which ultra-processed food is cheaper, more convenient, more heavily marketed, and more immediately rewarding than the alternative. We’ve built a world that makes it genuinely hard to eat well — especially if you’re time-poor, money-poor, or both.

And our answer to that is a £200-a-month injection.

I eat a pescatarian, whole food plant-based diet. Not perfectly — I want to be clear about that. I’m not standing here with a halo on. But I made that shift after reading about athletes who were performing at extraordinary levels on plants, and I’ve never looked back.

What changed wasn’t willpower. What changed was information, then habit, then identity. In that order. Over years, not weeks.

If we redirected even a fraction of the money flowing into weight loss drugs toward making fresh fruit and vegetables genuinely accessible — affordable, available, normal — we’d move the dial in a way that no injection ever could.

But that doesn’t generate quarterly returns. And it doesn’t generate tax revenue from pharmaceutical profit. So we don’t talk about it seriously.

What I’ll Concede

I’m not here to tell anyone what to do with their own body. That’s not my place.

And I’ll concede this: for some people, GLP-1 drugs genuinely do serve as a bridge. The weight comes off, they start moving, they start feeling better, they start making different choices. The drug kicks the door open and they walk through it into something sustainable.

That’s real. That happens. And if that’s you, I’m not dismissing it.

But a bridge only works if you’re heading somewhere. If the destination is still processed food, sedentary living, and the same relationship with eating you had before — the bridge just brings you back to the same place.

A pill can suppress your appetite.

It cannot build your habits.

It cannot earn you the identity of someone who lives differently.

That part only comes one way. Slowly. Repeatedly. Over more time than anyone wants to hear about.

The Longer Game

I’ve been running for about fifteen years now. More than eighty marathons and ultras. I run every day — not because a streak demands it, I got past that — because it’s who I am now.

Nobody handed me that. No injection, no supplement, no thirty-day programme gave it to me.

I built it the only way you can build anything real — one unremarkable day at a time, across years I wasn’t counting, toward a version of myself I couldn’t fully picture yet.

That’s available to everyone.

It just doesn’t come in a box.

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By 2014 I was on a liquid-only diet.

Not a choice. A necessity. Years of Crohn’s disease, decades of symptoms I’d pushed through, managed, minimised — and eventually the bill came due. Strictures had formed. The inflammation had done its work quietly, patiently, while I’d done mine. Painkillers had kept me functional. Kept me working. Kept me from having to stop and deal with what my body had been trying to tell me for a very long time.

We’d started Key Digital three years earlier. The business was growing. There was always a reason to keep going.

There’s always a reason to keep going.

The surgery was a bowel resection. I spent two days in ICU afterwards. Catherine was there. We both thought — and we’ve talked about this since, in the way you only talk about things once they’re safely in the past — that I might not come home.

I did come home.

And somewhere in the recovery, something shifted. Not a dramatic conversion. Not a moment of clarity on a hospital bed. More of a quiet recalibration. An acknowledgement that I had spent years treating my body as something to be overridden rather than maintained. That I had applied discipline and rigour and long-game thinking to the business and almost none of it to myself.

I started running not long after. Tentatively at first — you don’t bounce back from major abdominal surgery — and then with increasing commitment. And what I found, over months and then years, was that the running didn’t just make me physically stronger. It made me a better operator. Clearer thinking. More patient. Better at absorbing pressure without it accumulating somewhere it would eventually cause damage.

I hadn’t expected that. I’d thought I was just going for a run.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about entrepreneurial health, having learned it the hard way.

The body keeps score. It doesn’t send invoices. It doesn’t schedule meetings to discuss your arrears. It just accumulates the debt quietly, in the background, while you focus on everything else — until the debt becomes a demand and the demand becomes a crisis.

Most founders I’ve known are meticulous about risk in the business. They’d never ignore a structural problem in their finances or their operations for years at a stretch. They’d never take painkillers for a recurring system failure and just keep running the machine.

But they’ll do exactly that to themselves.

Because the business feels urgent and the body doesn’t. Until it does.

You are the asset. The one that can’t be replaced, can’t be insured against, and has no redundancy built in. The business can survive a bad quarter. It can survive losing a client or a key member of staff. There are versions of most business problems that you can recover from.

There is only one version of you.

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The Map Has Been Redrawn

For most of human history, the deal was straightforward. You were born. If you survived childhood — which was far from guaranteed — you worked hard, physically, for most of your life. Then you got old quickly and died.

Life expectancy has more than doubled in two centuries. But here’s the thing almost nobody talks about: that isn’t because people got fitter. It’s because they stopped dying young of things that had nothing to do with fitness.

The rise in life expectancy came from clean water, sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, and improvements in neonatal care. As a Harvard medical historian bluntly put it, most people credit medical advances for the increase — but most historians would not. The steepest rise occurred from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, before most of the effective treatments we recognise today even existed.

Our great-grandparents didn’t die young because they were unfit. They died young because infections killed them. Medicine fixed that. We got more years.

What medicine couldn’t fix — what nobody even thought to address — was what we’d do with them.

Longer Lives. The Same Old Ending.

Although people may live longer now, many are doing so with poorer physical function and reduced quality of life. We extended lifespan. We didn’t automatically extend healthspan — the years in which you are strong, capable, independent, and fully alive.

The generations before ours moved more through necessity. In the early 1960s, almost half of jobs required at least moderate physical activity. By the 2000s, fewer than 20% demanded that level of exertion, and daily work-related energy expenditure had dropped by over 100 calories for both men and women. Before that, people were out in fields, mines, and factories. Their bodies were working.

But that movement was incidental. It came from labour, not from intention. And it stopped when the labour stopped. Nobody was training at 65 with the explicit goal of staying strong into their 80s. The concept simply didn’t exist.

The latter part of the 20th century brought rapid technological advancement — computers, smartphones, digital devices — leading to a significant increase in sedentary behaviour. We engineered the physical work out of our days and replaced it with screens. We got longer lives and softer bodies.

That’s the world most people are navigating right now. More years, but no guarantee of good ones.

The Pioneers

Here is where something genuinely new is happening.

A generation of people is doing something with no real historical precedent. Not working hard because they have to. Not staying active by accident. But deliberately, consistently, structurally training into their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond — with the specific intention of closing the gap between how long they live and how well they live.

The science on what this does is striking.

Sedentary adults lose aerobic capacity at roughly 12% per decade. Masters athletes who keep training lose it at around 5.5% per decade — less than half the rate. Lifelong aerobic exercise cuts the age-related loss of muscle volume by around 50%, and the infiltration of fat into muscle tissue — one of the quiet markers of physical decline — is also reduced by around 50%.

Masters athletes show markedly greater physiological function and more favourable risk profiles for cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, frailty, and cognitive decline than their sedentary counterparts. Researchers have gone as far as saying that studying this group puts ageing back into the domain of physiology rather than clinical medicine. Which is another way of saying: what looks like inevitable decline is, in many cases, a lifestyle outcome.

And it’s never too late to begin. A study comparing masters endurance runners who had trained all their adult lives with those who only took it up after the age of 50 found no meaningful difference in athletic performance or physical composition between the two groups — despite a 30-year gap in training history.

The Gap Nobody Warned Us About

There’s a question worth sitting with — whether you’ve just sold a business, taken early retirement, stepped back from a career, or simply reached the point where you’re asking what the second half actually looks like.

We were sold an idea. Work hard, build something worth having, get out at the right time, and life after that is the reward. For many of us, getting out was exactly the right call.

But nobody warned us about the gap. The gap between the age at which you finish and the age at which, if you’ve looked after yourself, you might still be very much alive and capable. That gap could be 30 years. It could be 40.

What fills it matters. Not just financially — though we’ve written about that — but physically. The person who achieves a remarkable exit, or a clean and early retirement, and then spends the next two decades in gradual decline has, in a very real sense, won the wrong game.

Life to Your Years

I can’t tell you that what I do will add years to my life. Nobody can make that promise. What I can tell you is that it is adding life to my years — and at 56, with 80-odd marathons and ultras behind me and more ahead, I feel that difference every single day.

I started running in 2016, slowly and reluctantly, after a health event I couldn’t ignore. I had no idea what I was beginning. I’m now in the best physical shape of my life. That isn’t a boast. It’s evidence — not just of what the body can do, but of what happens when you commit to the long game and refuse to let the calendar make your decisions for you.

We are, I think, the first generation with both the longevity and the knowledge to do this differently. Not the generation that worked hard physically because they had no choice. Not the generation that sat down when the work stopped. Pioneers. Opening up territory that nobody before us ever reached, because they never had the years, the science, or the option.

The map has been redrawn.

The question is whether you’re going to explore it.

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I met a man at a business event a few years ago. He’d just sold his company. Twelve years of work, a clean exit, a number that would have made most people in that room go quiet.

Someone asked him what he was going to do next.

He looked genuinely startled. Not overwhelmed. Not emotional. Just... blank. Like the question had never occurred to him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I’ll start another one.”

He wasn’t being humble. He wasn’t deflecting. He meant it. The business had been the answer for so long that he’d forgotten what the question was.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot.

There’s a version of entrepreneurial ambition that’s really just forward motion dressed up as purpose. You’re working hard, building something real, hitting milestones — and it all feels meaningful because it’s difficult and consuming and the numbers are going in the right direction.

But difficult isn’t the same as purposeful. Consuming isn’t the same as fulfilling. And a number going in the right direction is only useful if you know what you’re pointing it at.

Most entrepreneurs I’ve known — and I include my earlier self in this — can answer the what without hesitation. What are you building? A technology business. A services firm. A brand. A team. Fine. Good. All accurate.

Ask them what for and the answer gets murkier.

“Financial security.” Okay — but what does that look like on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re sixty?

“To prove something.” To whom? And once it’s proved, then what?

“Because I love the challenge.” That’s a personality trait. It’s not a destination.

None of these are wrong answers. But they’re not complete ones either. And if you’re spending ten or fifteen years of your finite life building something, incomplete probably isn’t good enough.

Here’s what I’ve come to think.

The business isn’t the point. It never was.

The business is the vehicle. It’s the thing that generates the resources — financial, but also experiential, relational, psychological — to fund the life you actually want. And if you haven’t defined that life with any clarity, then you’re essentially building a very sophisticated machine with no idea what you’re manufacturing.

You can do that for years. Decades, even. The machine will keep running. You’ll keep feeding it. And one day someone will ask you what you’re going to do next, and you’ll look startled, because the machine was always the answer and you forgot to write down the question.

I’m not telling you to stop building. I’m asking you to run both things in parallel — the business and the life you’re building it for. Not sequentially. Not “I’ll figure out what I want once I’ve exited.” Now. With the same rigour you’d apply to a revenue target or a hiring decision.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: the clearer you are about what you’re building for, the better the business decisions get. You stop chasing contracts that pay well but cost you everything else. You stop building teams in a shape that serves the business but not the exit. You start making choices that compound towards something you’ve actually chosen, rather than defaulting to whatever’s in front of you.

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It was somewhere around mile eighteen on a training run last winter. Cold, dark, the kind of morning where you question every decision you’ve ever made. My legs were heavy, my head was heavier, and I had a very clear thought:

I could just stop. Start fresh tomorrow. Do it properly.

I’ve had that thought before. You probably have too. And here’s the thing — it always sounds reasonable. It always dresses itself up as wisdom. I’m not quitting, I’m recalibrating. I’m not giving up, I’m being strategic.

I kept running.

Not because I’m tough. Because I’ve learned — slowly, painfully, over years of training and a fair few mistakes — that the urge to start again is almost never about the plan. It’s about the discomfort of staying with one.

We live in a world that sells reinvention. New year, new you. New system, new results. New journal, new habits, new morning routine. There’s an entire industry built on the idea that the reason you haven’t achieved what you want is because you haven’t found the right framework yet.

It’s nonsense. And deep down, you already know it.

The diet you abandoned in February wasn’t flawed. The exercise habit you dropped in March wasn’t wrong. The creative project you shelved in April wasn’t a bad idea. They all had one problem: you stopped doing them before they had time to work.

That’s not a plan problem. That’s a consistency problem. And no new plan fixes a consistency problem. It just delays the reckoning.

Here’s what I’ve noticed after 80-odd marathons and ultras: there is no point in a long race where it feels good to keep going. There are good patches and bad patches, but there is no moment where your body says yes, absolutely, this is completely comfortable, crack on. The whole thing is a negotiation between what you planned to do and what feels possible right now.

The runners who finish aren’t the ones with the best training plans. They’re the ones who decided, somewhere on a cold hill at mile thirty, that the plan they had was good enough — and that abandoning it would cost more than finishing it.

Life works the same way. So does building anything worth having.

And before someone says it — yes, some people can’t run right now. Knees. Shin splints. Something that flared up and never quite settled back down. I hear it a lot, and I’m not dismissing it. Injuries are real.

But here’s what running has taught me about injury: more often than not, the pain isn’t the problem. It’s the signal. The shin splints aren’t telling you to stop moving. They’re telling you that something underneath — a weakness, an imbalance, something you’ve been ignoring — needs attention. The answer isn’t rest and hope. It’s stretching you’ve been skipping, strength work you’ve been avoiding, the slow unglamorous effort of fixing the thing that was always slightly wrong.

That’s not a comfortable message. But it’s an honest one.

And it applies well beyond running. Most of the things we quit — we quit because they’ve exposed something. A gap in our discipline. A habit we haven’t built yet. An area we’re weaker in than we’d like to admit. The plan didn’t fail. It found the weakness. And instead of doing the work to fix it, we found a new plan that hadn’t found it yet.

The weakness is still there. It always is. Until you deal with it.

Think about the last thing you quit. Not gave up on forever — just paused, restarted, revised, or quietly shelved.

Was the plan actually wrong? Or was it just hard, and hard started to feel like a sign that something was wrong?

There’s a difference between a plan that genuinely isn’t working and a plan that’s working but uncomfortable. Most people can’t tell the two apart because they abandon ship before there’s enough data to know. Three weeks into a new habit isn’t enough. Six weeks of a new approach to your health, your relationships, your mornings — that’s barely a warm-up.

Consistency doesn’t feel like progress. That’s the cruel trick of it. It feels repetitive and unglamorous and slightly boring. Right up until it doesn’t. Right up until you look back six months later and realise the hill got smaller, or the kilometres got easier, or the thing you were building started to look like something real.

But you have to stay with it long enough to find out.

I’m not telling you to ignore bad plans. Some plans are wrong. Some things genuinely need changing. The key is asking an honest question before you reach for something new:

Am I quitting because this isn’t working — or because it hasn’t worked yet?

That’s the question. It’s not always comfortable. It doesn’t always have a clean answer. But it’s the right one.

Because most of the time, if you’re honest with yourself, you already know the answer. You don’t need a new plan. You need to stop quitting the old one and find out what it’s actually capable of.

The plan didn’t fail you. You just left the trail before the finish line came into view.

Get back on the path.

Andy

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In today’s world, it’s far too easy to pass the buck. If a hire doesn’t work out, we blame the candidate. If a business deal fails, we blame the market. If we DNF a race, we blame the weather.

But the truth I’ve learned is this: When you own the outcome, you own the solution.

Accountability isn’t a burden; it’s a tool. And the best way to sharpen that tool is to make your intentions public. I call it the “Public Contract.”

The Midnight Choice

A few years ago, I faced a real test of this. A team member had a serious accident, aquaplaning into a central barrier. Catherine and I spent the night in A&E with him, keeping his wife informed while she was stuck 50 miles away.

The problem? I was due to start a 50k challenge at 2:00 AM.

To celebrate my 50th Parkrun and raise money for Pendleside Hospice, I’d planned to run the 5k loop ten times, finishing with the official 9:00 AM Parkrun.

At midnight in that hospital, I was exhausted and drained. I could have easily cancelled. But I had already created a system of accountability that made “quitting” feel worse than running:

• The Hospice: People had already donated their hard-earned money.

• The Volunteers: People were getting up at dawn to open the gates just for me.

• The Pacer: My friend Dave had his alarm set for 1:30 AM to meet me in the dark.

Sharing Your Intentions

This is why I’m a big believer in telling people what you’re going to do. Whether it’s telling your team a business goal or sharing a training milestone on social media, you are signing a contract.

When you keep your goals a secret, it’s easy to let yourself off the hook. But when you share your goal, you invite a healthy kind of pressure. You aren’t just running for yourself anymore; you’re running for everyone you told.

I left Catherine at the hospital and met Dave at 2:00 AM. By 9:00 AM, I had 45k in my legs and stood on the start line for the final 5k. Catherine even managed to get our colleague home and make it to the finish line just in time to see me finish.

Ownership = Achievement

It is too easy to dodge responsibility. But if you hold yourself accountable—by verbalizing your goals and owning your mistakes—you can achieve things that seemed impossible when they were just “private dreams.” Every DNF I’ve had was my fault for not preparing; every successful hire was my win for getting it right.

The Lesson: If you’re struggling to stay disciplined, stop keeping your goals a secret. Tell your partner, post it on social media, or start a fundraiser. Give yourself a reason to show up when you’d rather stay in bed.

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The sceptics came out of the woodwork after I announced my plans to run 100 miles on my 100th birthday.

“Andy, be realistic. You’re 58. A 100-mile run at 100? You might not even make it that far. What then? All those miles for nothing?”

I laughed. Because they’re looking at my life like a balance sheet. They think the “profit” only happens at the finish line. They think the Long Run is a transaction.

They’re dead wrong.

The Raw Story

Saturday morning. 9:00 AM.

Burnley Parkrun. Towneley Park. A 28-minute lung-buster through one of the most beautiful parks in Lancashire. My heart is thumping against my ribs like a trapped bird. My legs are heavy, but my head is clear.

I cross the line, catch my breath, and then the real training begins.

We don’t go home. A dozen of us pile into the Stables Cafe — damp shirts and all, smelling of rain and effort. Sub-20 runners. People who walked it in 45 minutes. Volunteers who spent their morning standing in the cold with a stopwatch just to make sure everyone got their time. Every age. Every background. Every walk of life. One thing in common.

The last to arrive is always Anthony. Anthony volunteers as the tail walker every single week. He walks behind the final finisher the entire way round, making sure nobody feels alone out there.

Nobody comes last at Parkrun.

We sit there for two hours. Steam on the windows. A massive slice of Victoria sponge on the table — the kind of cake that makes a nutritionist weep but makes a runner feel like a king. In summer we take our coffees outside and sit by the Rotunda, watching the park fill up with dog walkers and families who have no idea what we just put ourselves through.

We don’t talk about optimising our lives. We talk about the raw stuff. The joy of scaling a mountain at 4:00 AM just to watch the sky turn from bruised purple to gold. The silence of the woods where the only thing you hear is your own breath and the sharp, clear call of birdsong.

Then there’s the digital tribe. The Strava kudos from a mate three towns over who’s grinding out his own miles in the driving hail. The messages from like-minded lunatics who get why you’d rather have mud under your fingernails than a remote control in your hand.

I’ve met more fascinating people on a muddy single-track trail than I ever did in a corporate boardroom. Why? Because when you’re twelve miles into a run, the mask slips. You’re too tired to lie. You’re just two humans moving through the world.

If this resonates with you, there’s more every Tuesday in The Long Run Mindset — stories from 75+ marathons, ultras, a resuscitation ward, and 1,564 days of running without a single day off. Free to subscribe. One email a week.

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The Lesson

Most people are saving themselves for a retirement that looks like a slow fade-out in front of a TV. They spend forty years protecting their joints and avoiding risk, only to find that when they finally have the time to live, they’ve forgotten how. Or worse, their body has forgotten how to let them.

If I spend the next thirty years training for that Centenarian Ultra and I drop dead at 85, I’ve still won.

I’ve won because my 70s were spent watching sunrises from peaks instead of through a window. I’ve won because my 80s were filled with the laughter of friends in crowded cafes. I’ve won because I chose to be a participant in the world, not a spectator.

The training isn’t just about the muscle. It’s about the soul. It’s about the community that keeps you honest and the nature that keeps you humble.

I’m not just building a body that lasts. I’m building a life worth living while it does.

YOUR TAKEAWAY

Check your Liveability Score. If you’re so focused on the destination that you’re ignoring the cake, the coffee, and the camaraderie, you’re missing the point of the long run.

The 100-mile goal is the North Star — it gives me direction. But the life is what happens on the way there. It’s the 28-minute blast through Towneley Park, the Strava banter, and the deep soul-level connections made in the dirt.

Go to a cafe after your next run. Don’t look at the calories. Look at the people across the table. Tell them a story. Listen to theirs.

Nobody comes last.

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I used to know a founder — good business, sound fundamentals, the kind of slow-build story that actually works — who made a decision that cost him two years.

A competitor landed a big contract. The kind that gets talked about. And within six weeks, this founder had restructured his team, expanded his pitch, and started going after work that was too big, too soon, for a business that wasn’t ready to deliver it properly.

Not because his strategy was wrong. Not because the market had changed. Because someone else had gone past him looking comfortable, and he couldn’t help but respond.

Two years of strain, two years of overreach, two years of being somewhere he hadn’t planned to be. He recovered. But it cost him more than time.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Because the pull he felt — the instinct to respond to someone else’s pace — is almost impossible to suppress entirely. I’ve felt it myself, in business and in running. Eighty-odd marathons and ultras and I still catch myself doing it. Someone goes past you at mile eighteen looking fresh, and before you’ve thought about it, you’ve picked up your pace to match theirs. Two miles later you’re hanging on. Four miles later the wheels have come off completely.

The problem is that you never have the full picture. You see their stride. You don’t see their race plan.

I watched it happen to entrepreneurs around me for thirteen years at Key Digital. Someone would be building something solid — patient, consistent, good work compounding quietly over time. Then a competitor would land a big client, or someone in their network would open a flashy new office, or they’d read about a business in their sector raising a round of funding.

And just like that, they’d change course. Start sprinting. Hire too fast. Pitch too wide. Stretch into territory they weren’t ready for.

Not because the fundamentals had changed. Because someone else had gone past them looking comfortable.

There was one year — probably year seven or eight — when a competitor won a contract that stung a little. Bigger than anything we were chasing at the time. There was pressure, unspoken but felt, to respond. To go after larger work faster than we were ready to deliver it properly.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with Catherine going through it. All the reasons we should react. All the logic that made response feel like strategy.

She listened to all of it. And then she said: “They’re not us, though.”

Not a question. Not a debate. Just four words that cut straight through the noise.

They’re not us. Different margins, different overheads, different pressures, different definition of a good outcome. Maybe they needed that contract in a way we didn’t. Maybe they were buying revenue to paper over something else. Maybe they’d timed it right and got lucky. We had no idea. What we knew was our race. Our plan. The number we were building towards, and the kind of business we wanted to be when we got there.

We didn't change course. We stayed at our pace. And a few years later, Catherine and I walked away with our number.

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I’ve always found it fascinating: I see more people hitting the wall or needing medical assistance in half marathons than in 100-mile ultras.

Why? Preparation.

Most people think they can “wing” 13 miles. Nobody thinks they can wing a hundred. And that difference in attitude changes everything — before they even get to the start line.

The Further You Go, The More The Small Things Become The Only Things

As the distance increases, the margin for error shrinks towards zero.

Marathons force you to think about fluid and fuel. 50ks make you consider navigation and chafing. 50 miles require a plan for changing weather and GI issues. And 100 miles demand a strategy for footcare, mental hallucinations, and even 15-minute “dirt naps” in a hedge at 3am.

It’s not that longer races attract more serious runners. It’s that longer races make you serious. The distance does the work. It strips away the illusion that good intentions and a decent pair of trainers will see you through.

Half marathon runners get caught out because the distance doesn’t demand a plan. It allows you to be underprepared and still finish. Most of the time.

Until it doesn’t.

The Pendle Way

A few years ago, I lined up for the Pendle Way in a Day — a 40-mile ultra, over Pendle Hill and around the surrounding fells, usually run the first weekend of February.

I should have known what February in Lancashire meant. I did know. I just didn’t act on it.

The conditions that day were brutal. Driving rain and wind from the off, temperatures dropping below zero as we climbed. By mile ten I was soaked to the skin. Not damp — soaked. The kind of wet where your gloves are heavy and your jacket has stopped doing anything useful. By mile fifteen I was wearing every piece of kit I owned and it wasn’t enough. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t even get my gloves off to open a gel.

I was shuffling across an exposed fell in sub-zero wind, my body beginning to shut down. Not dramatically. Quietly. That’s how hypothermia works — it doesn’t announce itself. It just starts making decisions for you.

What saved me wasn’t fitness. I had plenty of that. What saved me was knowing the route. I’d recced it. I knew exactly where I was, and I knew where the next road crossing was. I called Catherine, walked to the road, and she picked me up.

Another hour out there and I’m not sure the story ends the same way.

I retired, called the race officer, and sat in a warm car feeling equal parts relieved and humiliated. I’d underestimated the conditions. I had the miles in my legs — I didn’t have the kit on my back.

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The Bowland Ultra

A few years later, I learned the second half of the lesson.

The Bowland Ultra — 45 miles over the Bowland Fells in January. I turned up properly this time. Layers sorted, nutrition planned, waterproofs tested. I’d done the work.

The fells were stunning. Snow-covered and silent, the kind of morning that makes you remember why you do this. Beautiful, but unforgiving. In places the snow was knee-deep on the path. Step off it — and out there, covered in white, you couldn’t always tell where the path was — and you’d go in waist-deep. Every step demanded attention.

Descending off one of the fells, I hit a patch of ice. I’d put my snow spikes on by then, but it wasn’t enough. I went down hard.

The fall itself wasn’t serious. Winded, shaken, a bit battered — but nothing broken. I got up, took stock, and started moving again. That’s when the back pain started. Not sharp. Deep. The kind that tightens with every stride until running becomes unbearable and even a slow shuffle feels like a negotiation.

I made it to the next checkpoint. Then I retired.

Here’s the thing though: I was warm. I was dry. I was safe. I made a clear-headed decision based on a real assessment of my body, not a panicked scramble for the nearest road. I’d got the kit right this time. I just couldn’t finish. And that’s a completely different kind of DNF.

The Cost of Underestimation

Two DNFs. Same fells, roughly. Very different outcomes.

In the first, poor preparation nearly cost me my health. I had the fitness but not the kit, and I was lucky the route knowledge was there to bail me out.

In the second, good preparation meant a bad day stayed a bad day. It didn’t become a crisis. I retired on my own terms, not the mountain’s.

In business, poor preparation costs you a bad quarter. In the fells, it costs you your health. Sometimes more.

The difference isn’t talent. It isn’t even experience, necessarily. It’s whether you took the conditions seriously before you got into them.

The Recce

The word “recce” comes from military reconnaissance. Going ahead. Checking the ground. Finding out what you’re actually dealing with before you commit.

Every serious ultra runner does recces. Not because they’re nervous — because they’re professional about it. They know that familiarity with the route is a form of kit. Knowing where you are when things go wrong is the difference between a controlled retirement and a mountain rescue callout.

I see business owners who skip the recce constantly. They have goals — vivid, detailed, motivating goals. But they haven’t walked the route. They haven’t stood on the hill on a quiet Tuesday and asked themselves: what happens here if the weather changes?

A goal is where you want to go. A recce is finding out what stands between you and it.

Don’t mistake the two.

A goal without a plan is just a dream.

And on an exposed fell in February, dreams don’t keep you warm.

Ask yourself honestly: do you have a plan, or do you have a goal with a hopeful face on it? Have you done the recce — on your finances, your health, your business — or are you assuming the conditions will stay kind?

They won’t always. The weather will change. The question is whether you’ll be ready when it does.

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Stephen Covey said it thirty years ago and every business leader nodded along.

Begin with the end in mind.

They wrote it in their notebooks. They applied it to the next negotiation, the next product launch, the next quarterly target. They got very good at beginning specific projects with the end in mind.

And then they went back to building a business with no defined finish line.

Most entrepreneurs I know have never written the number down.

Not the revenue target. Not the EBITDA multiple. Not the profit target. The number. The one that means you never have to take a meeting you don’t want, a client you don’t like, or a job you don’t need. The number that means the business has done its job and you can get on with living.

Covey’s principle is taught in boardrooms and MBA programmes around the world. It gets applied to projects, negotiations, and five-year plans.

Almost nobody applies it to their business exit. Their career. Their life.

And that absence — that single unanswered question — is quietly running in the background of every decision they make.

Here’s what makes it harder.

The number isn’t just a figure. It’s a decision about what enough actually means. And most people avoid that decision for their entire career, because answering it honestly requires you to look past the image of success and ask what you actually need.

Not what sounds good at a networking event. Not what impresses people who don’t know your margins. What you genuinely need to live the life you want, on your terms, without the business consuming every waking hour until there’s nothing left to spend the money on.

That’s a harder question than it looks.

And then there’s lifestyle creep. The thing that makes the number a moving target for people who never pinned it down.

Here’s where entrepreneurs specifically get caught. It’s not a salary increase that does it — entrepreneurs don’t get pay rises. What happens is subtler. The business does well. The draws get bigger. The reinvestment decisions get more comfortable. The house gets better, the car gets better, the holidays get better. None of it feels excessive in the moment. Each decision feels like a fair reward for what you’ve built.

But nobody stops to count the cost in time.

That’s the calculation most people never make.

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Business class to New York is a genuine pleasure. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t have it. But what does it actually cost in time? In years of your working life? If your business needs to be worth an extra £200,000 at exit to fund a decade of business class travel, is that trade worth making? One more year building? Two? Five?

Only you can answer that. But you can only answer it honestly if you’ve defined what enough looks like first.

The same question applies to everything. The second home. The watches, the cars, the restaurants. Every upgrade to the lifestyle is a decision about how long you’re prepared to keep building. Most people make those decisions without ever doing that maths.

I’m not arguing against living well. Quite the opposite.

The point is that improving your life and wasting the years you have left are not always different things — and without a clear number, you can’t tell which one you’re doing.

I’ve watched people build for twenty-five years who could have walked away at fifteen with everything they actually needed. The extra decade bought them a bigger house and a better car and cost them the retirement they’d promised themselves.

They didn’t know what enough was. So they never stopped.

Catherine and I wrote our number down early. Not as a wish. As a target.

It shaped every decision we made for thirteen years. What we reinvested. What we drew. What we refused to do. When we almost walked away in 2013 and chose instead to go all in one last time. When a broker called while I was isolating in bed with Covid two weeks before our wedding — and I actually listened, because we were close enough to our number to make the conversation worth having.

We didn’t deprive ourselves. We made deliberate choices about what was worth having now and what we were prepared to wait for. We knew the cost of every upgrade in time, not just money.

When we eventually walked away with our number, it wasn’t luck. It was the result of beginning with the end in mind — not for a project, but for the business and the life.

Covey was right.

Begin with the end in mind.

He just didn’t say it loudly enough about the things that matter most.

If you’re building something right now and you haven’t written the number down — not just the exit target, but the life it needs to fund and what that life is genuinely worth in years — that’s the most important thing you’ll do this week.

Not the sales call. Not the strategy deck. Not the LinkedIn post.

The number. What it funds. What it costs in time.

Because a business without a finish line isn’t a vehicle.

It’s a treadmill.

Andy Ratcliffe writes about the long game — exits, financial freedom, and what comes next.

The injury, the Vivos, and why “it doesn’t always get worse” might be the most important thing I know.

Twenty weeks out from the 130 mile Liverpool - Leeds Canal Race, and I’ve just lost three weeks of training to a swollen foot. Let me tell you what happened, what I’ve learned, and why I ended up buying a bike.

The background first. Training had been going well — 50k Tuesday long runs for four consecutive weeks, which were doing exactly what I needed them to do: revealing weaknesses. Two things kept showing up. Weak glutes. And persistent pain in my first and second toes on my right foot.

The terrain on the LLCR is different from anything I’ve raced before. Flat, hard, tarmac and compact surfaces with the occasional grass or mud section thrown in. My usual minimalist shoes are brilliant for technical mountain or fell terrain — the biomechanical chain handles the impact beautifully. But over 35 hours on hard flat ground, that chain has to absorb a very different kind of punishment. I’ve been trialling different shoes each Tuesday to work out what actually performs on this surface, and there’s still plenty to figure out. Being at the end of August, sweat is going to be a real problem — keeping my feet dry, managing shear, avoiding blisters. That stuff can end a race. The fact I can change shoes at checkpoints makes this one of the most important things I need to get right before August.

Which brings me to the Vivos.

When I first transitioned to barefoot shoes, I bought two pairs of Vivobarefoot — the ones everyone raves about. They never worked for me. After about an hour they’d rub the top of my feet and I’d be done. One pair has about 150 miles on it; the other has six. Two very expensive paperweights. Sensible Andy would have donated them months ago. Instead, I decided to get my money’s worth.

I wore a pair for parkrun. Three miles, a bit of rubbing, feet fine the next day. I wore them again the following day. I remembered immediately why I’d stopped. Cut the run short.

A couple of days later I did my Tuesday long run in my cushioned trail shoes — the ones that carried me through 113 miles on the Summer Spine Challenger last year. No rubbing. A small amount of the toe pain I’d been experiencing, but nothing to worry about. Until I took my shoes off.

My right foot was swollen like a balloon.

Matt, my physio, came the next day. He flushed a lot of the swelling away and was fairly confident it wasn’t a stress fracture — just bruising. Reduce the mileage. Do these rehab exercises for your toes and glutes. Then come back gradually.

Any runner knows what comes next. Two weeks of reduced mileage, barely 12 miles in a week where I’d been doing 50 to 60. No pain during runs. Pain and slight swelling after every run. It wasn’t getting better, and I’d convinced myself it was a stress fracture — which, combined with developing calf tightness and the early signs of plantar fasciitis, had me spiralling into a pretty dark place. I stopped running altogether for nearly a week.

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I went back to Matt fully expecting to be sent for an X-ray.

He talked me through every possibility — an oedema (bruising), a stress fracture, arthritis. The arthritis was the least likely given how quickly it came on. The oedema was the most likely and would also explain the other niggles. Stress fracture was still on the table, but here’s the thing: the treatment for both a stress fracture and an oedema is rest. So we’d treat it as an oedema and see.

And then Matt said something that only works because he knows me well: don’t stop running, because I know that’ll affect your mood too much, and then you probably won’t do the rehab either. If the swelling or pain gets too bad, get on a bike.

That afternoon I bought a bike.

An exercise bike, to be specific. It sits in the corner of the room looking very pleased with itself. Brand new, slightly smug, and so far entirely unridden. I’m not ruling out the possibility that it becomes the world’s most expensive coat rack. But the point is, I had a plan — and having a plan was enough to stop me doing something stupid.

The next morning I did my go-to fitness test — half a mile from home to Gorple Track, a three-mile route with 1,000 feet of ascent up to Gorple Rocks. What we call the Big Rocks. It’s a tough climb, and the descent demands concentration. I’ve done it enough times to know exactly what my body is telling me up there.

I was expecting to turn around halfway. Either fitness or foot pain was going to stop me.

Something amazing happened instead. I felt strong. I enjoyed every step. I came home after seven miles with no pain, no swelling, and two Strava segment PBs.

I’ve run every day since.

When this goes out on Tuesday, I’ll be heading out on my first long run in four weeks. I know I’ve lost fitness — and I’ve had to sit through the banter from friends. It’s those silly shoes you wear. You need a rest day. You’re doing too much. On the face of it, they’re not wrong. There’s truth in all of it.

But here’s the lesson.

Everything has a cost. I paid the price for a combination of overtraining and being tight with my money over the Vivos. And I also gained something — knowledge about what my feet need for this race that I wouldn’t have without those miles.

The old mantra held true: it doesn’t always get worse. That seven-mile run on Gorple could have ended in the X-ray department. It didn’t.

And once again, I’m grateful for the power of the crew.

Matt knows me. Within 24 hours I went from frustrated and grounded to back on the fells — not because of a magic fix, but because he gave me the right advice for me. We talked through the risks honestly. We agreed we’d deal with whatever happened. That’s what you need from a support team.

The bike, for its part, has so far contributed nothing whatsoever. But I feel better knowing it’s there.

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The Long Run Mindset for a Life Worth Living — every Tuesday.

In June 1986, Andrew Ridgeley walked away from one of the most successful pop acts in the world.

Wham! had sold over 30 million records. Six UK number ones. Sellout tours. A concert in China — the first Western pop group to play there. They were at the height of their fame, not the end of it. Nobody was forcing the decision.

Ridgeley made it anyway.

Years later he was asked about the split. He corrected the interviewer. It wasn't a split, he said. They brought Wham! to a close in a manner of their own choosing. He knew George's future lay outside the band. He knew his own future did too. So they finished it properly — a farewell concert at Wembley Stadium in front of 72,000 people — and walked away on their own terms.

Ridgeley moved to Cornwall. Quiet life. Out of the spotlight.

George Michael stayed in the game. More albums, more tours, more headlines — the brilliant and troubled solo career of one of the greatest voices of his generation.

George Michael died on Christmas Day 2016. He was 53.

I'm not drawing a simple moral from that. George Michael's life was his own and the reasons for how it ended are complex and not mine to reduce to a business lesson.

What I am saying is this.

One of them knew when. He made the decision himself, while the choice was still his to make, and built a life on the other side of it. The other stayed in the game until the game ended it for him.

The question this newsletter exists to ask is a simple one.

Will you know when?

Most entrepreneurs I know have a vague idea of when they want to exit.

Fifty-five. Sixty. When it feels right.

What they don't have is a plan for recognising the moment when it actually arrives. And that gap — between the intention and the ability to act on it clearly, at the right time, for the right reasons — is where a lot of very good exits go wrong.

The moment doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive with a fanfare or a sign that says *this is it, you're done, you can go now.* It arrives quietly — in a broker call you nearly didn't answer, in a morning when the answer to a question you've been asking yourself for years is finally different from what it's always been.

And if you haven't done the work to recognise it, you'll miss it. Or worse — you'll feel it and talk yourself out of it, because there's always one more year that would make the business worth a little more, one more thing to fix before it goes to market, one more reason why now isn't quite right.

I know this from my own experience.

The broker called while I was isolating in bed with Covid, two weeks before our wedding. I nearly didn't answer. Something made me pick up — and I've thought about what that something was many times since. It wasn't desperation. It wasn't exhaustion. It was readiness. A quiet, settled sense that we were close enough to our number to make the conversation worth having. For the first time in thirteen years of building, I could hear the question “have you considered selling?” without the automatic internal response that said “not yet, not now, too much still to do.”

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