Who's coaching you
I've done the thing I'm selling.
I'm Simon. More than ten ultramarathons raced, and I've never DNF'd one. My own biggest effort: 283km across three races in under five weeks.
I've had the days where it all came together, and I've had the ones where I was walking it in at 4am with a stomach that had quit on me hours earlier, doing sums about cut-offs.
Most of what I coach came out of the second kind.
I'm not going to tell you I've got twenty years of credentials, because I haven't. What I've got is a few years of doing these distances properly, a lot of reading, and the fact that I'll put my own money on you finishing.
Before any of the training
You don't feel like you belong at that start line.
Neither did I.
Not at my first 10km. Not at my first marathon. Not standing at the start line of a hundred miler in the dark, convinced everyone around me had earned their spot and I hadn't.
That feeling doesn't go away through training. It'll be there no matter what. It only goes away once you've said fk it and put yourself there anyway.
My coaching gives you the confidence to believe you can. And if the plan doesn't do it, our weekly calls will. Every single one, I fill with genuine belief in you. That's not extra. That's half the job.
If you sign with me, I've taken a chance on you. I'm willing to do everything in my control to get you to that finish line.
You're not missing something real runners have. You're missing the support of someone who genuinely believes in you.
Why I actually do this.
I love helping people. Anyone who's raced with me knows it. I'm the loudest, most supportive runner out there. I spend entire races hyping other runners up as I pass them, and on an out-and-back, I make a point of encouraging every single one.
I wasn't always good at pushing through hard things. I battled addiction for my entire adult life before I found running.
These distances built something in me I didn't have before. An unbreakable mindset. The self-belief and confidence that comes from finishing a race like this is bigger than running. It carries into every part of life.
My mission is to help people. Running's just the vehicle I use to do it.
That's what I actually want for you. The finish line is just the proof.
About me.
Growing up, I was the overweight kid. By 15 I was nearly 100 kilograms and extremely insecure about my body. That year I had a cancer scare. Doctors found a tumour on one of my testicles and were convinced it was cancer. The safest option was to remove it. Coming into adulthood, that left me feeling like I'd always only ever be half a man.
At 16 I lost the weight. I started to feel more confident. But the insecurity never fully left. So I found other ways to feel like I belonged. I found that through drinking and drugs. Weekends were built around cocaine. Nights that didn't end. A version of myself I'm not proud of, and there's a lot of people I hurt along the way. Especially the people closest to me.
Getting out wasn't a straight line. It started with swapping one habit for another. By this time my weight had climbed back to over 110kg. So I started with better food. Better days strung together. Weight coming back off. Then I found running.
I had never run five kilometres consecutively. I read a book about what the body's actually capable of, and something clicked. Within weeks, I'd run my first 10km. Within months, my first ultramarathon.
I've since run 50s and 100s. One month I raced nearly 283 kilometres and 7,000 metres of climbing across three back-to-back efforts: 170km through the You Yangs, a 63km cutoff-time race two weeks later, then 50km with 2,000m of climbing the week after that.
Running gave me something the old version of "feeling like a man" never did. Nobody applauds the lonely hours on the trail. It's not about being seen. It's just you out there. No one cares if you keep going or stop. That's why I believe it's a measurable way to prove to yourself how far you've come.
If you're carrying something you think makes you the wrong person for this, you're not. I wasn't either.
Book a call.
We'll work out what you actually need. Got a plan already, whether you found it online or built it yourself? Bring it and I'll tell you what's missing.