2025 was another pretty epic year of ultra running and training for events. A grand total of 5045 miles meant that I smashed last year’s total – which I already thought was a pretty good innings! I was aiming for 100 miles a week on average, however due to injuries and forced rest days from big events, it was just shy at 96.75 miles. Painfully close – so that is a good motivator for this year!
Put Into Perspective…
That’s the distance from London to New York… and back!
One-way from London to New York City is roughly 3,460 miles.
I didn’t just cross the Atlantic… I almost made it most of the way back again!
Around the World (Almost… Kinda)
Over 20% of the way around the Earth
The Earth’s circumference is about 24,901 miles. My total equals just over one-fifth of a full lap around the planet.
Equivalent to crossing the USA coast-to-coast 1.6 times
A coast-to-coast trip (New York → Los Angeles) is ~2,900 miles. I covered that plus another half.
Endurance Comparisons
Nearly 193 marathons
A marathon is 26.2 miles, so my yearly total equals running a marathon every other day… For the entire year! That’s a pretty cool stat.
Over 8 million steps
At an average of ~1,600–1,700 steps per mile, that’s roughly 8 – 8.5 million steps taken with purpose.
Basically a marathon every two days… For a year.
Over these miles, I registered 207103 feet in cumulative elevation…
Putting That Into Perspective…
That’s 39.2 vertical miles
If elevation were distance, i climbed the equivalent of running almost 40 miles straight up. Over 63 kilometres of vertical gain
I climbed Mount Everest more than 7 times
Mount Everest rises about 29,000 feet above sea level. My total elevation equals climbing from sea level to the summit over seven times.
I scaled the Burj Khalifa roughly 76 times
At 2,717 feet tall, the world’s tallest building would barely slow me down, knocking out the equivalent height once every five days.
Sky-High Comparisons
Nearly 6 commercial jet cruising altitudes
Most passenger jets cruise around 35,000 feet. You climbed the equivalent of taking off and reaching cruising altitude almost six times… All without wings!
The Staircase From Hell
About 355,000 stairs climbed
Assuming an average stair height of about 7 inches, that’s well over a third of a million steps upward. My quads deserve their own fan club LOL.
I didn’t just train… I ascended.
Last year was also the year I experienced my first DNF while ultra running. Well, 2 in fact. One was avoidable but a momentary lapse on a backyard ultra (the first time I took part in one) and I lost out to the clock by 6 seconds. Oops. That was a bitter pill to swallow as it was on me. The second came on a 100 miler far from home – where everything that could go wrong did. I was hoping to come away last year needing only 80 miles to earn the coveted ‘Golden Buckle’ – achieved by cumulating 1000 with Pegasus Ultra Running.
Probably not going to earn that now. This year, to keep things fresh, I’m running with different event organisers. I’ve run the Pegasus events to death for the past 9 years, so this year, I’m moving onto pastures new. I’ll be taking part in as many of Running Monks events as they’re more local and Alan is a bit of a legend too – if you haven’t already watched this:
… Please do – immediately!
Anyway, back to the good stuff!
Met some awesome people and achieved a couple of PB’s, including a new Parkrun PB of 22:22. My fastest ever 5k was clocked back in 2015 at 21 minutes something. I’ll never beat that, but there’s life in the old dog yet!
On a completely separate note to ultra running, but vaguely connected lol, this website is closing in on 10,000 unique visits! That’s pretty mad to think that that many people have taken an interest in something I did for a bit of fun. Huge thanks to everyone that has visited – appreciate it loads. It’s due to this that this year I’ll have to revamp my Insta grid after the layout update fucked it all up and it makes no sense anymore. It’s supposed to be a complimentary resource to this blog but it just makes me look like I’ve no idea how Insta works. It was supposed to look like this in case you were wondering!
Another big year of ultra running in the bag – this year has big boots to fill!
Here’s my legacy data from RunKeeper – mostly used as a backup to Coros / Strava these days but I’ve cumulated too much to stop using it completely!
Something else cool that I did in 2025 was put together an album! I was halfway through it when I DNFd on teh SIRONA. I used some bits that ended up on the cutting room floor to make my song about the epic failure here: https://trig-bagging-herefordshire.co.uk/sirona-100-dnf/ If you thought that was OK, check out the rest of my tunes here: https://burn-list.co.uk/ – SoundCloud profile here: https://soundcloud.com/b-u-r-n-l-i-s-t
Thanks.
