Clean Break Chats

Andy’s got man flu, he’s in Spain with no microphone, and five days on from York he still can’t walk properly. But what a day it was.

It nearly didn’t happen. Forty-five minutes stuck in traffic at the park and ride, a bus that backed up coming into York, a pee in a bush on the university campus, and three of them crossing the start line within five minutes of arriving. Lesson one for anyone doing a marathon they don’t know: plan ahead. That stress is the last thing you want.

Then two very different races.

Rich went out with the 3:15 pacer in sight. Felt better at halfway than he did at Valencia - 1:37, two minutes inside PB pace. Went through 30K in 2:17, the fastest he’s ever covered that distance. And then at 32K, the wheels came off. His back, which he’d been carrying for weeks and ignoring, seized up. His hips went. He stopped for water at 21 miles, knew the moment he stopped he’d never get the momentum back, and spent the last five miles run-walking. He looked at a bus stop around mile 24 and seriously considered sitting in it to wait for Andy and Johnny. He finished in 3:27 - his second fastest marathon ever - and then discovered a blister the size of a tangerine on his big toe. New socks. On race day. Don’t.

His verdict on the naked running experiment is honest. The experiment was never about a PB. It was about rediscovering the joy of running after six months of feeling flat, and it did that completely. But if you’re chasing performance, you need data - especially on race day. He went out too fast, carried an injury, and probably ran his long-run marathon pace blocks at half-marathon effort without knowing it. Would he recommend it? Yes if time doesn’t matter. No if it does.

And then Andy and Johnny.

They ran 30K at 5:08 average, a touch quicker than planned. At 37K, Andy’s quads were on the edge of going. At 38K, Johnny overtook him and Andy shouted “wind it in.” At 38.5K, neither of them could speak. Andy went into coach mode - head up, chest out, eyes on the Shell garage, the body achieves what the mind believes - and they turned left into the most evil hill finish in marathon running and went for it. Sprint finish. 3:35. Only the second negative split of Andy’s 15 marathons, and by a distance the best race he’s ever converted. Johnny sobbed on his shoulder over the line.

In the final 500 metres, Andy turned to the crowd and shouted: this is my boy, running his first marathon.

Eight years ago, Andy stopped drinking because of his relationships. Because he wanted to inspire his kids. Because he wanted to be a hero to them. He doesn’t think that moment on Sunday happens if he’s still drinking. He couldn’t have forced it. It had to come from Johnny. And it did.

Valencia in six weeks. Andy thinks it’s finally time to go out at 4:50s and find out.

Marathon eve. Andy’s nerves have finally kicked in. Rich is reading Murakami. And Spencer Matthews has just told the world that a marathon is easy.

That’s where this one starts. Rich and Andy take the comment apart - the context he tried to give it, why it still doesn’t hold up, and what it does to the single mum running three times a week who hears “easy” and wonders why it’s so hard for her. Rich gives it a name: the modern-day influencer ivory tower. Say something polarising, let the algorithm do the rest, and if people take it the wrong way, that’s a them problem.

Then it’s into the real stuff. Andy is running York with Johnny tomorrow - Johnny’s first marathon, Andy’s 15th. They’ve done the gold, silver, bronze conversation like any coaching client: sub 3:40, sub 3:45, sub 4. Going out at 5:15s, seeing what’s in the tank at 30K. Johnny’s head is all over the place - his entire Instagram feed is marathons, gels, contradictions, and a thousand things his dad’s already told him.

Andy lays out what 14 marathons have taught him: the race starts at 30K. Everything before that is about staying calm, not weaving, not accelerating, not spending mental energy on whether you’ve got it today. Get to 30K relaxed and then it’s less than an hour in the office. And the thing nobody tells you - when the pain hits at 33K, it’s a disaster (or isit!!); when it hits at 38K, you can push through. Same pain. Different distance to go. That’s not your body. That’s your brain deciding what’s possible.

Rich brings in Murakami: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. He walks through what he learned at Valencia - shorten the stride, drive the arms, increase the cadence, coach yourself out loud if you have to - versus Paris, where he admits he mentally checked out.

And then Andy turns it on Rich. No watch, no phone, no data, no plan for four months - and now 6,500 runners, a 3:15 pacer, and a course with 160m of elevation. Rich admits it: he’s never felt more relaxed before a marathon. Because for the first time, he’s got an excuse to fail.

Plus: Gary’s first ultra, 57 miles Glasgow to Edinburgh, just under 13 hours. Stacey executing Chelmsford Half. Jane at Blickling this weekend. And the Yorkshire pudding wrap debate that Andy is refusing to lose.

Nine days to York. Andy’s taking nine pills a day - Heights vitamins, magnesium, D3, lion’s mane for his focus, turmeric for his joints - and isn’t entirely sure he hasn’t just been sold to by a podcast ad. Which opens the door to a much bigger conversation about influence, avoidance, and the things we reach for without noticing.

Andy admits he’ll sit in his car for 20 minutes scrolling before a run he actually wants to do. Rich picks up his phone to Google a recipe and loses half an hour to a Runner’s World article. Andy picks his up to get a two-factor authentication code and surfaces 45 minutes later with no idea what he was doing. They both clock it: this is the same mechanism as drinking. Escapism. Avoidance. The thing that closes the tabs in your head.

Then Rich brings in a neuroscience of addiction webinar he attended this week. What makes something an addiction? Three things: compulsion, reduced control, and a negative state when you stop. Andy hears all three and maps them straight onto his ADHD. They walk through the six systems addictive substances act on - dopamine, GABA, glutamate, endogenous opioids, acetylcholine, endocannabinoids - and why blackout drinking isn’t your brain losing memories, it’s your brain never laying them down in the first place. Andy asks the obvious question nobody seems to be asking: what does that do over 30 years?

They get into Professor David Nutt - fired as the UK government’s chief drugs advisor for saying alcohol caused more social harm than any other drug - and his finding that if alcohol came up for approval today, it wouldn’t get past the first round of testing. Alcohol misuse costs England £27.5 billion a year. The tax collected from it is £12.5 billion. The maths doesn’t work, and nobody wants to talk about it.

And then Rich spots something. An influencer on Instagram, two years alcohol-free, now talking about how “it was never about the alcohol, it was about the moment” - and how his relationship with drinking is “different now.” Scroll down: #PernodRicard. One of the biggest alcohol producers on the planet, paying people to sell moderation without ever naming a brand. Grow the pie, not the slice.

Andy’s response is the title of this episode. The moment is always there. Only the liquid in the glass changes.

Also: Rich on finally liking himself again. Andy on eight years alcohol-free and why the gift keeps giving. And RunDot has Andy’s predicted marathon time eight minutes inside his PB.

October's theme in the Clean Break Collective is 'the stories we tell ourselves'. And this week's episode turns into a live example of exactly what that means.

It starts with Rich asking Andy a simple question about the stories that hold him back. What follows is Andy going back to the beginning - a remedial class at 12, dyslexia that was played down as "very minor" while he was having to learn how to write again, failed A-levels, and a decade of job-hopping in his 20s because every time something got hard, the voice said: if you stay here too long, someone's going to find out you're not good enough. So he walked out before they could.

Rich asks what feeling that story is protecting him from. There's a long silence on the podcast. Then Andy gets there.

They dig into how the fear of failure quietly becomes a fear of success - how Andy comes back from running 230K through the Amazon and finds himself saying "anyone could do that," because somewhere underneath, he's still not sure he's allowed to have it. And how Rich recognises the same thing in himself.

Rich brings in the work of psychologist Tara Brach - the trance of unworthiness, that persistent background belief that you're fundamentally not enough, shaped by the things people said to you and the failures you never forgave yourself for, until it stops feeling like a belief and starts feeling like the truth. He walks through her RAIN practice - recognise, allow, investigate, nurture - and the idea of radical acceptance: not lowering your standards, just seeing clearly where you are without the layer of judgment on top.

And then Andy lands the line that gives this episode its title. For years, he thought he was broken. He kept looking for the fix. The moment things changed was when he accepted there was no fix, because there was nothing broken. He was neurodiverse in a neurotypical world. He just needed tools, not repairs.

They also get into why alcohol works so well as the volume control for all of this - not enough at work, have a drink; anxious at the party, have a drink - and why taking a break from it means you can finally look at the thing you've been turning the volume down on.

Then Andy flips it. Two weeks to York, no watch, no data. What's the story Rich is telling himself? The answer is more honest than you'd expect - and his gut says 3:10 to 3:15.

Also: Andy has three marathons in five months, has accidentally entered a 100K walk along the Jurassic Coast, and there's a gaggle heading to Knebworth 10K on November 1st if you want to join them.

Matt Baxter was a middle lane drinker. A few glasses of wine through the week to take the edge off a 12-hour day in financial services, football with the lads at weekends, nothing anyone would have flagged. But there was a moment during the 2022 World Cup Final - Argentina versus France, one of the best finals ever played - when his kids went home to watch it and he stayed at the club drinking with his mates. He doesn't remember much of the game. He does remember getting home and thinking: why did I make that decision?

That was the beginning of the end. Dry January followed. Then his wife Hayley - who'd been through breast cancer and had been told alcohol was a potential contributing factor - went alcohol-free on the same day. Neither of them have gone back. Matt was the one bringing the bottle home. He knew it. He took responsibility for it.

Three months into sobriety, he found himself on a coaching course. Same one Rich was on, same cohort, spring 2023. First day, Andy Ramage walked in to observe his first ever coaching session. Stomach dropped. Pushed through. Came out the other side thinking: that felt terrible and brilliant at the same time.

He's now a youth sports mindset coach in Leeds, working one-to-one with young athletes across football, cricket and beyond - including 8 and 9-year-olds at professional academies who are terrified that a misplaced pass will cost them their contract. Sport is the vehicle. The work is always bigger than the sport. School, friendships, home life, self-worth. And underneath it all, the lesson he keeps coming back to: that voice in your head telling you you're not good enough is your voice. Which means the good voice is yours too. Learn to turn the volume up on the right one.

This week, Matt joins Rich and Andy for a conversation about the midlife chrysalis, the coaching space that most people never get to experience, what it's like to reflect back on your own sporting career and realise you were playing with the handbrake on - and why the parents are as much part of the process as the kids.

Also: Rich crying under a blanket watching an octopus movie and taking it as a sign he needs to start tapering. Andy turning 51. And three weeks to York.

Find Matt on Instagram @EliteMindset_Coaching.

Four weeks out from York. Andy's doing a 3-hour long run this afternoon - on a Friday - because that's what life as a busy parent, business owner, and marathon runner actually looks like. Rich has his 2:45 in the morning. Johnny is 18, 75 kilos, and annoyingly fresh at the end of every long run. The juggle is real, and this week's episode starts right there.

But the conversation quickly moves somewhere sharper.

Rich has been noticing a pattern - influencers, podcasters, and now alcohol brands actively pushing back against sobriety. Not just defending their own drinking, but going further, calling out people who don't drink as over-optimisers, killjoys, lacking in resilience. There's a beer brand called Rolies positioning itself as the healthy athlete's drink - partnered with Hyrox, vitamins added, 4.3% ABV - with ads that say "no longer the boring one at parties" and "tastes like success." There's a guy on Spencer Matthews' podcast who said Stephen Bartlett feeling rough after a couple of glasses of wine represents a lack of resilience. And then there's the podcast Rich watched where two runners laughed about how nobody understands running people who don't run - and then in the same breath called people who don't drink insufferable.

Rich calls all of it what he believes it is: emotional blackmail. The belief that you need alcohol for confidence, connection, relaxation - none of it is innate. It's conditioned. You weren't born with it. And the industry knows that, which is exactly why the marketing works the way it does.

Then there's the moderation question. Is moderation possible? Yes, for some people. Is it possible for everyone? No. And if you've been trying to moderate for years and it hasn't worked - that's not a failure of willpower. That's data. If moderation was possible for you, you'd have done it by now.

Andy talks about sitting on the rim of the jar - that horrible middle place where you haven't decided to drink and you haven't decided to stop, and you're just stuck. The most turmoil lives right there. Make a decision, one way or the other.

And Rich makes the link that underpins everything they do: aligning your actions with your values. When they're misaligned, you feel stuck. When they align, you flourish. Which - as it happens - is exactly what several of their clients are doing right now at 75 to 80 days.

Rich has been running without a watch, without Strava, without data of any kind, since June. Andy checks his Garmin sleep score before he's even properly awake. And somewhere in the middle of this week's conversation, Rich lands the line that stops everything: you need to take a clean break from your data. Same as we'd say to someone who isn't sure if their relationship with alcohol is healthy - try going without it, and see how that feels.

It's a longer conversation than that, though. Rich and Andy get into what data actually does for you - the compass it provides, the ceiling it creates, the anxiety it generates when it contradicts how you actually feel. Andy's Garmin has been telling him his sleep quality is poor for years. He ignored it, felt fine, called it wrong. Then his numbers improved, and suddenly the watch is trustworthy again. Rich clocks exactly what's happening there.

Then there's Johnny. Andy's son ran his longest run ever this week - 28K - smashed it, pushed his dad in the final few kilometres, and came off it saying he doesn't want his watch in the marathon. The countdown was causing him anxiety. The data was getting in his head. He wants to run to feel, stay with his dad, and cross the line together. There's something in that.

Rich has also just entered the Lakeland 50 - 50 miles through the Lake District, 3,000 metres of elevation, July 2027. It came through the ballot with a 48-hour acceptance window. He's in. Andy is confirmed for Kyrgyzstan the same month to complete his BTU Global Race Series with the Mountain Ultra. Both of them heading into the mountains next summer.

And then there's the line from Coach Bennett's Runner's World podcast that Rich references - how do we know the most impressive performance on marathon day wasn't from the person who finished 37,500th? The 45-year-old single mum, two jobs, three kids, can only run three times a week. Her world isn't conditioned for success. The elite's is. So who's actually the most impressive?

The episode closes with Rich's theme for the Clean Break Collective this autumn: show up and stand tall. Good days, bad days, hot, cold, tired, energised, confident, doubting. Just show up.

Big shout out to Kath running the Great North Run this weekend.

The kids are back at school, the summer's officially over, and Rich and Andy are back in a room together - figuratively speaking - for the first time in weeks. Yorkshire Marathon is six weeks away. Autumn race season is here. And this week's episode is one of those ones where a conversation about running quietly becomes a conversation about everything else.

Rich is six weeks out from Yorkshire with no data, no watch, no Strava, and no idea what time he's going to run. He's also having more fun than he's had in any marathon training block he can remember. There's something in that.

Andy is running Yorkshire with his son Johnny - his first marathon - and there's a glass ceiling conversation happening in this episode that's worth the listen alone. Andy's been consistently running 3:33. He wants to go sub-3:30. Five minutes a kilometre, dead on, for 42.2K. He knows he's capable of it. So does Rich. The only thing standing in the way is the bit between his ears.

Which leads to the riff. Rich connects the fear of committing to a marathon goal - fear of failure, fear of what people will think, fear of who you'll become - to the fear that stops people committing to an alcohol-free journey. It's the same fear. Different thing, same mechanism. And the people who get through it aren't the ones who feel less afraid. They're the ones who lean into all of it anyway.

Also in this episode: comparison as the thief of joy, the member of the group who ran their first marathon in their late 60s and is wondering if the running days are ending, and Andy heading off mid-episode for his 3-year post-cancer treatment all-clear. Which arrived. All clear.

Charlotte Hogan has been running for over 20 years. Her mum is in her 70s and still runs 400 metres for Great Britain. She herself has done over 100 half marathons, a handful of trail ultras, and is about to run 40 miles for her 40th birthday along the towpath from Bristol to Gloucester. She's also the founder of Queen Square Run Club - one of Bristol's biggest community run clubs, three runs a week, 30 to 50 people per session, donuts on a Friday morning.

But there was a period where she couldn't get out of bed. Where she'd sit on the tube to work and not recognise the person looking back at her in the window. Where she moved her chair around the corner in an open-plan office so nobody would come and talk to her. Where she switched her phone off because she didn't want people messaging. Where someone in her family eventually had to drive to London to bring her home.

That was at 28. It took five years and multiple attempts to get a formal diagnosis of major recurrent depression. She's been hospitalised. She found the right therapist in 2020. Third medication attempt found something that works. She's still with that therapist now.

In December 2023, she stopped drinking. What started as a quiet New Year turned into a Dry January that turned into April, when her partner went back to drinking on his birthday and she just kept going. Nearly three years later, she hasn't looked back - though she'll tell you honestly that the first holiday sober felt really strange, that the ceremonial airport pint is harder to let go of than people think, and that it took a full year before she noticed the real difference in her body after decades of drinking.

This week, Charlotte joins Rich and Andy to talk about all of it. The binge drinking culture she grew up in. The green hockey jumper at Southampton that smelled of last week's drinks. The Sunday sessions in Clapham starting at 10am. The way depression and alcohol blur into each other until you can't tell which one started first. And the run club that she built from three people in a square to a community that held her when she couldn't hold herself.

She's also just launched the Bristol Wellbeing Guide — a one-stop shop for accessible, free and low-cost wellbeing resources in Bristol, built from her own experience of knowing what she needed but not being able to find it.

Plus: 60 laps of Queen Square in November for Talk Club's men's mental health campaign. And a mum who's just broken her own European record.

Find Charlotte at @QueenSquareRunClub and @BristolWellbeingGuide on Instagram.

After four weeks away, Rich and Andy are back - and they've got a lot to catch up on.

Rich spent the summer at Latitude Festival volunteering as a run lead for Sport in Mind, dragging 100-plus people around a dusty campsite at 10am in 30-degree heat every morning, including a slightly reluctant Bridget. He also had his biggest craving in the best part of two years. Dancing in a tent, saxophone player going, everyone around him with a drink in hand, kids on the dance floor - and a voice in his head saying, why am I denying myself this? It passed. He got a Stella Zero from the alcohol-free bar, felt like part of the group, and never thought about it again. But it was real, and it's worth talking about.

Andy was in Croatia with the family - a neurodiverse household on holiday, which comes with its own particular set of challenges. He had his own moment too: a quiet dinner with Emma, wondering if a glass of wine might deepen the connection. He dismissed it almost immediately. A romantic illusion, he calls it. Not true. But it was there.

Both of them noticed that holidays and festivals have this almost ceremonial relationship with alcohol built into them - the first pint at the airport, the drink that signals you're finally off duty. And both of them came back having genuinely rested and recovered in a way they know they wouldn't have if alcohol had been involved.

There's also a brilliant moment where Andy asks Rich whether he ever gets the urge to put his watch back on during his naked running experiment - and Rich clocks exactly where he's going with it. The urge to check the data is the same urge. It's not the watch. It's not the drink. It's the relationship with the thing.

They also talk about Andy running the Yorkshire Marathon alongside his son Johnny - his first ever marathon - and the conversation they had on a long run about what a good first marathon actually looks like. Plus Paul Derbyshire, who joined their group two years ago in the early weeks of his alcohol-free journey to run Barcelona, is about to run his first Ironman. And Rich jogged past Phil Sessman in Leeds and didn't pluck up the courage to invite him on the podcast.

Yorkshire Marathon is nine weeks away. September feels like a fresh start. They're back.