You don't get through 243km by feeling strong the whole way. You get through it by removing the option to stop.

Everyone who lines up from Coast to Coast has a plan. Fewer people have a plan for the moment that plan falls to pieces.

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Mine completely fell apart on the Mountain Run.

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I hadn't run past the Goat Pass. Ever. The river crossing was waist high and moving fast, and I watched the 6-foot guy in front of me go under and swim the rest of the way across. I stayed on my feet, but only just. From there it was hours of scrambling up a riverbank, missing the course markers, climbing goat tracks I'd assumed would be runnable trails and clambering over boulders I assumed would be a fun downhill gallop. What was meant to take 4 hours ended up taking an hour longer than I'd planned for. By the time I reached the top of Goat Pass, the volunteer there was more shocked than I was that I'd made it, announcing on the

mic “we weren’t sure the Dubai training would have got you here!”

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That was the point where the choice showed up. Not "can I finish" but "do I want to."

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Before the race, I'd heard Tom Otton talk about this exact moment. He called it ‘removing the choice.'

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"When you hit a wall, you say to yourself: what am I going to do, pull it out? After all the prep and build up? Or will you say f**k it, I'm going to absolutely break myself before I stop."

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It doesn't make the moment easier. It just takes the option off the table. And when stopping isn't a real option anymore, you stop negotiating with yourself and start dealing with what's actually in front of you.

The negotiation in your mind is the danger, not the difficulty of the task.

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Everybody gets negative talks. Everybody gets the logical, reasonable case for pulling out. That's not weakness, it's just how a tired brain works - it starts building you an exit strategy.

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The difference isn't who avoids that thought. It's who recognises it, and who lets it take over.

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Tom's advice was to treat those moments by training themselves. We want to seek out situations tough enough to trigger that voice, on purpose, so we can build a process for dealing with it before it matters. Recognise it. Have a plan for it. Do it again. The more times you've been there, the more tools you've got sitting in the toolbox next time you need them. Somewhere on that riverbed, three kilometres from Klondyke Corner with sore feet and a stage that had already cost me an hour extra I didn't have to give, I wasn't thinking about the finish line. I was just working through the process. One more marker. One more climb. I didn't think about the whole thing, just the next bit in front of me.

Break it down so it's not one impossible thing…

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Coast to Coast is 243km. Said like that, it's hugely overwhelming. So, you don't say it like that.

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You break it into pieces:

● 2km run and a 55km bike

● 33km mountain run, into a 15km bike, and a 1km run

● 70km kayak

● 70km bike

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Four separate events, not one enormous one. The kayak, on its own, was hard enough - a headwind the whole way down, one gust that pinned me against a cliff and cost fifteen minutes just getting the boat back into the flow, and hands too cold to easily grab food. But it was still just a kayak. Not the whole race. Just the leg in front of me.

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That's the other half of removing the choice. You're not asking yourself to survive the whole distance. You're asking yourself to finish the piece you're currently in.

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There's one image from that day I still think about, and it isn't from the race itself.

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It's the idea Tom shared about envisioning yourself after the event: picture yourself at home afterwards, explaining to your family or your mates why you pulled out. Giving them the reasonable, logical version of the story. And noticing how that would actually feel - not righteous, not fine. Just hollow. As you know, it's an excuse even as you're saying it.

If you can see that version of yourself clearly enough, most people don't want to go and become that.

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I didn't want to be the person telling that story. So, I wasn't. I'd put in more than a year of training in the desert for a race on the other side of the world, on terrain nothing like what I trained on - I wasn't about to let a river crossing or a bad hour on the mountain be the reason it ended.

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Sixteen hours and six minutes after I started, I dropped my bike and ran up the sand to the finish - about an hour and a half longer than I'd aimed for, and I didn't care. My wrists were wrecked for five hours of essentially bouldering. My feet and knees were bruised from the rocks. My shoulders were cooked from the kayak. The post-race blues took a good week to shake.

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None of that mattered on the day, though. What mattered was the one thing I said to myself that day and still tell athletes now as a coach: push past what you think your breaking point is, and you'll find you're stronger than you thought. Don't think you're done until you're actually done - until you're over that finish line.

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Quitting isn't one big decision. It's a hundred small ones, one per kilometre, each one sounding completely reasonable at the time. Coast to Coast didn't teach me to be tougher than that voice. It taught me to stop listening to it - by making sure, long before race day, that quitting was never going to be an option.

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