Between 2011 and 2026 I started Spartathlon five times, finished it once, crewed seven times, and helped turn a loose bunch of Brits on Facebook into the British Spartathlon Team: free team and crew kit, GPS trackers, and a Community Interest Company. This is that story, warts and all, from a man who failed driving tests seven times and still believes persistence beats talent. It is a personal view and to quote the late Queen "recollections may vary"
It's a race that, as I wrote back in 2013, "burns into your soul". It has certainly burned through a fair few of my weekends, toenails and euros.
At a glance
Five starts, one finish (34:44:51 in 2015), and every edition bar one attended as runner or crew since 2012.
<| Year | My role | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Crew for Andrew "Macca" McKillop, with Peter; also crewed Savannah from the 80 km checkpoint | Macca pulled at halfway. Resigned from the BST management team after the race |
| 2025 | Crew for Macca, with Chrissy | Macca finished, fuelled by baklava. Ten years since my finish |
| 2024 | Crew for Macca, with Chrissy (her first Spartathlon); ran the crew WhatsApp group | DNF |
| 2023 | Crew for Alastair Higgins, with Gary Seary | Finished. First Spartathlon Beer Mile |
| 2022 | Roving support on a healing broken foot; ran the BST Twitter feed | 360 starters, 182 finishers |
| 2021 | Crew for Fabio, then for David Bone | Fabio pulled at Hellas Can (80 km) |
| 2020 | Race cancelled (pandemic) | |
| 2019 | Crew for Paul Ali, with my son Tom | Paul finished |
| 2018 | Crew for Russell Tullett, with Sandra Hopkins | DNF. I'd stepped back from BST admin that summer |
| 2017 | Withdrew; gave my place back | Memorial kit for John Foden |
| 2016 | Runner, fifth attempt | DNF at Halkion, about 112 km |
| 2015 | Runner, crewed by Nick Papageorge and Yiannis | Finished, 34:44:51. First year I ran the BST kit and sponsorship |
| 2014 | Runner, crewed by Nick and Yiannis; filmed for The Road to Sparta | Timed out at 132 km, 1 am |
| 2013 | Runner, coached by Mark Cockbain | Pulled at CP42, 145 km, 2:45 am |
| 2012 | Runner, race number 5 | Pulled at CP19, about 70 km, after 8h20 |
| 2011 | Ultrabalaton, 212 km in 31.5 hours | Qualified |
How it started
I'd first heard of Spartathlon in the 1980s and quietly promised myself I'd run it by the time I was 50. In 2011, while working in Hungary, colleagues talked me into Ultrabalaton: 212 km round Lake Balaton, which I finished in 31 and a half hours. Mark Woolley then told me I'd qualified for my dream race. I was amazed.
Mark introduced me, via Facebook, to a group of British runners with the same itch: Allan Rumbles, James Adams, James Elson and the great Mark Cockbain among them. Back in those days social media wasn't yet poisonous, and that group became the seed of everything that followed. Then my wonderful wife Chrissy gave her permission, which, as anyone married more than twenty years knows, is the final seal of approval.
Entry for 2012 cost €400. Stuart Shipley, who designed and printed that year's British shirts (we paid for them ourselves), told me that in the Noughties you could still apply in late summer, because hardly anyone outside Greece, Japan and Germany bothered. There were no crews until Hellas Can, no WhatsApp group, no trackers and no ballot.
Four DNFs and a finish (2012–2016)
Each failure taught me one thing, and it took me four goes to learn them all. As I put it in 2015: go too slow, as I did in 2012, and you don't reach Corinth; go too fast, as I did in 2014, and you watch your buffer drain away; dawdle at a checkpoint, as I did in 2013, and the Death Bus gets you.
2012: too slow. The organisers had me down as German, so I was race number 5 in the Hotel Congo with the Germans and Japanese. I misread the checkpoint boards, thinking I had half an hour in hand when I had five minutes, and was pulled at CP19 after about 70 km and 8 hours 20. The consolation was the company on the Death Bus and the beer at CP21. Watching James Adams and only two others kiss the statue the next day filled me with envy.
2013: too soft. Mark Cockbain coached me after giving me tips on my first Grand Union Canal Race. I arrived five kilos lighter, with a 100 km best down from 11:20 to 9:56, and reached Nemea at 124 km feeling on top of the world. Then I left my coach's notes at CP30, threw up a day's worth of gels, sat down at CP42 to rub a cramping calf, and lost my number at 2:45 am after 145 km. At four the next morning I walked up the finishing street in Sparta, photographed the foot of the statue and cried my eyes out.
2014: too fast, too heavy. Nick Papageorge and Yiannis crewed me for the first time. Nick had been on the original 1983 expedition with John Foden. I also featured in a film of four runners' attempts with Mark Woolley, a nurse called Angela and some numpty called Dean Karnazes; only Dean finished. I went out at 5:35 per kilometre, hit Nemea right on the cut-off and timed out at 132 km at 1 am. A hernia operation followed, and so did a fast that took me from 73 kg to 67 kg.
2015: endlich. Martin Bacon told me that doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result made me an idiot. So I went back to Cockbain's plan, trained in bin bags and a weighted vest, ran with a teacher called Fatih twice a week round the Kemnade See, and wrote two rules on my arms. The gist of the left one was "behave"; the right said "Do not refuse to continue". I reached the marathon in 4:06 and Nemea in 13:34, with two and a half hours in hand, passed the CP where I'd quit in 2013 under a full moon, and climbed the mountain wondering why anyone calls the descent "a road". With my Liverpool towel round my neck I walked the last 2.4 km singing You'll Never Walk Alone, refused to run when John & Shirley Steele told me to, accepted a vodka martini from Nick, and phoned Chrissy before I kissed the foot. The time was 34:44:51. It had taken four years.
2016: the second-time curse. The Spartathlon photography club had put a poster of my 2015 finish in Sparta's main square, and a runner from the Philippines called Fermin told me I was his hero. I told him he needed better heroes. I was heavier, slower and, mentally, done by Halkion at about 112 km. Nik Petalas reminded me of the old curse: finish one year, fail the next.
In 2017 I withdrew, because I knew I couldn't do the race justice and wanted the place to go to someone more deserving. It went to Tarique, on the British team. I've chased a qualifier since, at Sparta City 24h in 2023 (after a Lufthansa strike got me there three hours late), Barcelona 24h in 2024 and an 18-hour walk in Germany in November 2025, but broken bones in both legs and fifteen extra kilos mean my focus is now firmly on crewing.
Building the British Spartathlon Team
The idea that shaped the BST was simple: if we couldn't put sponsors on the runners tops, we'd put them on the crews. Free kit, paid for by sponsors and carried by crews, then gave us a reason to keep the race organisers, the International Spartathlon Association (ISA), on side. Trackers and better data followed.
Crew kits: the vehicle for sponsors
In 2014 Mark Woolley found an energy company to sponsor the team kit, and we were told off for having a sponsor's name on race kit. The rules don't allow advertising on what runners wear. My fix in 2015 was to give each runner two white running tops with no commercial logos, and to give each crew two red crew tops with the sponsors' logos printed on them.
After the 2014 edition myself and Paul Ali got together. He agreed to do the website and we roped James Ellis in to do the publicity.
I had already talked to Dave Ireland, who as a teacher, with his students had supported the original John Foden expedition. Dave now ran a sporting goods store and agreed to supply the runners kits for 2015. But we had an issue getting other sponsors. We needed to be creative.
Crews follow their runners the full 246 km, stand at every crew checkpoint, and turn up in every finish-line photo, so a red shirt is a moving billboard. That gave sponsors something real for their money and meant runners and crews paid nothing. From January 2015 I raised the sponsorship, got the designs agreed (what is it about kit that turns everyone into a professional designer?) and got it printed and delivered. The 2015 package was two runner tops, two crew tops, four buffs and a hat per runner, plus a few other bits we could beg, all at zero cost to the runners. I'm pleased to say we have kept to that idea ever since and other nations have since copied the idea.
Keeping the ISA sweet
Crew shirts with logos only work with the ISA's blessing, so the relationship mattered. At registration in 2015 we gave ISA President Kostis crew shirts and buffs as a token of the team's thanks. We gave the same to the Kouyoufas family, who have run the mountain-base checkpoint for thirty-odd years. Kit for the ISA and the volunteers who look after us has been part of the routine ever since, although some still don't understand the importance of it.
That goodwill opened doors. Over the years the BST nudged the ISA on technical shirts, GPS tracking, more evenly sized national teams. In 2017 we made a memorial top for John Foden and encouraged every other national team to do the same.
Trackers: from 19 Brits to the whole field
In 2015 I brought GPS tracking to the team. Richard Weremiuk, then of Race Drone, sponsored matchbox-sized trackers that reported every five minutes, and nineteen of the British team carried them so crews, families and friends could follow them. The BST kept using Richard's trackers, now TrackTrail, and helped him, as well as Tim & Freya from Legends tracking win the ISA contract. Today every runner in the race is tracked live, and the race managers use the data to catch cheats; in 2025 they pulled a runner whose tracker was doing 60 km/h. As I told Richard in 2022, it makes crewing "so much easier than before".
The people
The team was never mine alone. For years it was Paul Ali, James Ellis and me pulling in favours and begging for cash, then Russell Tullett on shirts, David Bone on the website, Ian Thomas on the paperwork, Ali Young on socials, and many more. I liked to call us an anarcho-syndicalist commune. In 2018 I was unwell and stepped back for a while, and that was the year the shirt printer failed to deliver. That was mainly my fault for trusting the supplier.
Making it official: the CIC
By 2021 the BST had outgrown a WhatsApp group, a PayPal account and goodwill. Small sponsors would hand a few hundred pounds to some blokes they'd met at a race; a serious corporate sponsor wants a legal entity, a bank account, published accounts and someone accountable. My aim was to get us onto a legal footing so we could chase fewer, bigger sponsors rather than many small ones, which are a nightmare to manage. I'd learned that from my previous charity work and turning the Frankfurt International Ski Club into a registered German charity.
I'd been pushing for it since about 2016 and finally, as I put it to Ali Young, bullied the rest of the management team into it in 2022–23. The steps:
- March 2022: Some of us attended a Sport England's Club Matters legal-structures workshop and compared a Community Interest Company with a Community Amateur Sports Club.
- Summer 2022: We picked the CIC, on advice from Keith Godden, who ran the Canal Races CIC, anyone who benefits from the company couldn't be a director, so James Ellis and David Bone stepped aside from being named.
- Spring 2023: BST Spartathlon Team CIC was registered, with a business bank account, an accountant and annual returns. "I am so pleased we are finally official," I told Ali Young in May. "It has taken years."
Ian was the UK-based director and Person with Significant Control, which the bank required, and he carried far more of the bureaucracy than I'd bargained for. I sent him three bottles of Malbec as a thank-you from the team. When he stepped down in October 2025 (effective February 2026), Steve Gordon took over the bank and Companies House side.
With the CIC in place we could produce a proper sponsorship pack and offer tiers. Sponsors have included Avani Solutions, Rathbones, Butcombe Brewing, Oyster Wealth Management, TrackTrail, Camino Ultra and Wingman Designs, In June 2024 I also launched the BST online shop, fully outsourced, with a small cut of every sale going to next year's kit; it usually covers the buffs.
The crewing years (2018–2026)
My crewing record is better than my running one, though Spartathlon spares nobody, crew included. My job, is to keep them fed and watered and to stay chill.
- 2018, Russell Tullett. I felt I owed Russell a crewing duty, and paid it. Russell didn't finish. I also found Paul Ali in a bad way after his DNF and wrapped him in a space blanket; he claims he didn't know I was there.
- 2019, Paul Ali, crewed with my son Tom. Paul finished, then sent me 30 days of sarcasm dressed up as praise for my 126.8 km at Bottrop 24h. I came home inspired, bought a red Moleskine notebook and swore off booze and cigarettes until I finish again. That did not last long, although I still do the daily diary,
- 2021, Fabio. A post-pandemic edition with no mayor's reception. Fabio was pulled at Hellas Can, so we carried on and crewed David Bone instead.
- 2022, roving. I came out on a broken foot and helped Sasha crew her brother Jonni Suckling. The experience was so bad I swore never again. I also ran the BST Twitter feed which as a dyslexic who abhors social media, made me so obviously the right man.
- 2023, Alastair Higgins, with Gary Seary doing all the driving and introducing me to Teddy Pendergrass. Alastair finished. It was the first time I can remember every British runner getting through Hellas Can at 80 km.
- 2024, Andrew "Macca" McKillop, with Chrissy at her first Spartathlon. I also ran the crew WhatsApp group that year, with tips from Gill Thomas. Macca didn't finish. I also found answering all the questions from runners and crew nearly finished me. "Why do you have to spend so much time doing that? Can't someone else do it?" Chrissy asked me. "Who else would do it?" was my only answer
- 2025, Macca again, with Chrissy. We force-fed him baklava and got him to the statue. Ian Thomas reached ten consecutive finishes, and I finally met Rune and Mary Larsson, multiple winners from the early days.
- 2026, Macca once more, with Peter Foxall. At the new 80 km checkpoint Nathan Flear needed someone to drive Anya, crew for his second runner, Savannah, and nobody else volunteered, so from there we were crewing two people at once. Before agreeing to do that I looked out at that checkpoint, probably the last place on the race where most crew gather as the race starts stretching out as the faster run go so far ahead of the slow. It is a fine example of the best aspects of humanity, people from many countries all helping eachother. Sadly both Macca and Savannah were pulled at halfway, probably because trying to crew two people was too much for me Anya and Peter.
The low point of every year is the same: not having the right words for those who don't finish. Having DNF'd four times, I understand how sick with yourself you feel after years of effort, and I've spent many a Monday night in Barley's drinking with DNFers. The high point is the finishing straight, every time. I often get extremely emotional watching the last runners come in just before the 7pm deadline.
Fun, fairness and who gets to run
The Spartathlon Beer Mile. In 2023 Matt Blackburn and I founded it: four laps, four cans, the morning after the race, bring your own beer (four for the race and one to pay for the trophy). My son makes the trophy, a Leonidas with a beer cans on a plinth. By 2025 more than a dozen runners were taking part, which matters less than the entertainment value.
No cheating, full stop. Crews helping runners between official crew points is against the rules, and it has got worse since crews were allowed to leave supplies at intermediate checkpoints. My line to the British crews has always been that our red shirts make us very visible, we haven't cheated in over a decade, and we aren't starting now.
The fees letter. In January 2025 I wrote an open letter to the ISA, in a personal capacity, about the compulsory accommodation package for international runners. It had gone from €400 in 2012 to €1,250 in 2025, while Greek runners could enter for €450. A ISA Board member replied with the cost breakdown: €133 a day for six days of full board, transport, insurance and hotels, plus their wish to keep every nation together in the same hotels. I agree that runners and crews should really stay in the same hotels as well. The whole idea is to mix with other countries and cultures, although I understand the increasing costs make it difficult. I published their reply in full and said plainly that the lurid accusations some people were throwing at the ISA's volunteers were beneath us.
Sparta for All. Looking round the start line under the Acropolis, year after year, I didn't see many people who looked that different from me. In July 2025 I launched "Sparta for All" to reach British BAME groups to ask what the barriers are, because the last thing I wanted was a white-saviour story. After the 2025 race, with Ali Young and feedback from the women on the team, I drafted a vision: 25% female British participation by 2030 and 50% by 2035, female role models front and centre (Mary Larsson offered to help), a code of conduct, and kit that fits women. The 2026 team was the first to get female-fit shirts and vests. The code of conduct and a diversity statement never got agreed.
2026: stepping down
I resigned from the BST management team in the days after the 2026 race. It wasn't one thing, and it wasn't a sulk. It was the end of a long run of small frustrations, and I'd rather set them out honestly than let rumour do it.
I had intended to resign after the 2025 race, my ten year anniversary, but when Ian beat me to it, I thought I should hang on while his replacement was put in place.
Before the 2026 race I'd told the team I wanted a year off the organising and just to crew Macca. On the weekend itself that didn't hold. A few niggly things happened that built up and I saw what was important to me wasn't to others, if that isn't an indicator that I should go then bigger things decided it.
The first was having to crew someone else when others could have done it, which just showed a lack of support, like Chrissy mentioned before.
A second is diversity: getting male and female shirts and vests agreed had been a slog, and the code of conduct and a public statement on inclusion kept stalling. Trying to get people to agree to outreach was just not going to happen without a lot of moaning from me. I couldn't face another year of pushing that boulder. Saying you are inclusive is not enough in my book, you have to DO something.
Finally was seeing the team's own channels discuss runners checking in at the official hotels and passing their keys to others. I know it happens, but the BST shouldn't be seen to condone something with obvious insurance and safety risks, and I didn't want my name attached to it as a director.
Mostly, though, I'm in my sixties and I believe in making way. The Germans have a new young team director in Norman, a veteran of the race and the beer mile. There's nothing worse than an old man insisting things be done the way he wants. The team is in capable hands and they will take it somewhere I couldn't. I'm proud of what we built: free runner and crew kit, crew shirts that carry the sponsors, trackers for every runner, a team culture that helps anyone on the road to Sparta without fear or favour, and a CIC that can talk to serious sponsors.
Over the years I have met some great people and seen teams change. They deserve a post of their own.
Most of it started with a handful of us begging for favours. I'll still be at the finishing straight, crewing, probably with a beer mile trophy in my bag.
As Bill Shankly said, the socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. That's how I've tried to see Spartathlon.
Further reading
- My race reports: Spartathlon 2012, Girly Bullshit (2013), I beat Jon Steele (2014), Endlich (2015), No more heroes (2016), Good enough (2017), Spartathlon 2019, 2022–2024: Years of not training, An open letter to the ISA, ISA response, Sparta for All, 10 years have past
- British Spartathlon Team: Hall of Fame, Team news, July 2015, Team news, September 2015, 2025 sponsors
