Ted Gibson was a certified sommelier, a certified spirit specialist, and was on the verge of becoming a professional spirit taster. He spent 20-plus years in hospitality, drinking enthusiastically, surrounded by people doing the same thing, and never once thought he had a problem. Why would he? Nobody around him was standing out as different, nobody was flagging a concern, and he was good at his job. He was the wine guy in every room he walked into.

He decided to stop - possibly while still drinking, which he laughs about - the night he found out his wife was pregnant with their first child. She'd already been alcohol-free for two years. He knew she wasn't going to give him a free pass when he was hungover and the baby needed changing at 3am. So he committed to a year off, white-knuckled it with no reflective work, no self-inquiry, no coaching - just stubbornness - and by the time the year was up, his life simply didn't involve alcohol anymore.

He'll be six years alcohol-free in October. He's still untangling who he is without it.

This week, Ted joins Rich and Andy from his restaurant in South Carolina, sitting at the bar - alcohol-free - to talk about what it actually means to have a problem with alcohol. Not a DUI, not a relationship falling apart, not some public rock bottom moment. If you're not showing up as the dad you want to be. If you don't have the patience for your kids. If you're not recovering well enough to train, or present enough to connect. That, Ted argues, is a problem. And most of us are waiting for something far worse before we're willing to call it one.

They get into the identity crash of going alcohol-free and becoming a first-time dad simultaneously - two massive blows to who you thought you were, hitting at exactly the same time. The bar moment where a man three drinks in before noon asked Ted if he'd ever had a problem with alcohol, and what that question revealed. Why we scrutinise our diet, our sleep, our training - but always give alcohol a pass. And the coaching exercise Ted now uses with clients that cuts through everything: go stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself, with a straight face, that alcohol makes you a better dad.

There's also the story of his first marathon - concert the night before, beers in hand, headphones in, fell at mile 26.1 with the finish line in sight, calves turned to solid rock. He couldn't get up. The finish line was right there. His response? He took the headphones out. Running became meditative. He did his first 50K last year.

Find Ted on Instagram @TedGibsonCoaching.

Jo Carr grew up in Wigan, worked in pubs and clubs, and drank in the way most people did in the late 90s and early noughties - constantly, and without much question. At 21, absolutely hammered and on her way out for the night, she got off a bus outside a local college where an open day was happening. A lecturer called Alan wouldn't let her walk past. She ended up on a business course, came out with a first class honours, became an accountant, met her husband at work, had two kids, and built a life that looked, by every external measure, like everything was fine.

It wasn't fine.

After having kids, Jo tried to get back to who she was before. But the version of herself before kids drank. A lot. Lockdown made it worse. And then she found running - which she threw herself into with exactly the same all-or-nothing energy she'd always brought to everything. By 2022 she was getting up at 3am to eat, running 20 miles at 4:30am before school drop-off and a full day of work, fuelling marathon training on 1200 to 1500 calories a day, and keeping all her race medals in a drawer because she was never happy with the times. She wasn't running towards anything. She was running away.

Her last drink was the 6th of April 2024 - the night before her wedding anniversary. She doesn't remember getting home. When she woke up, she decided she wasn't going to drink. Again. Like she'd decided hundreds of times before.

Then, at exactly 30 days sober, she got a phone call. Her best friend from school was in hospital with alcohol-related illness. She didn't survive. Joe went to the funeral and realised she wasn't just grieving her friend. She was grieving a life she thought she was supposed to live - all the things she'd never had the courage to do, the version of herself she'd never let exist.

She's now two years sober and has built Find Your Mojo, a fitness and wellbeing space built around one core belief: nourishment, not punishment. Her classes are built around a hexagon of healthy habits - movement, nourishment, rest, connection, mindfulness and purpose - with trauma-sensitive language and the radical idea that rest never has to be earned.

This week, Joe joins Rich and Andy for one of the most honest conversations they've had all year about the relationship between alcohol, exercise, perfectionism and self-worth. And the line that sits at the heart of it all - the one she arrived at two years on the other side: I thought sobriety would teach me how to live without alcohol. It taught me how to build a life I no longer wanted to escape from.

Find Jo on Instagram @findyourmojomindandbody and @findingmymojo2024

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James Lloyd spent 8 years trying to get back to four months of clarity he accidentally stumbled into at 38. He'd read Alan Carr's book on holiday in Abu Dhabi - picked it up because it was called How to Control Alcohol, not how to quit - and by the end of it, floating in a swimming pool, he thought: I don't think I'm going to drink again. He stopped for four months. Then started a new job at Nintendo, convinced himself he could turn it on and off for client events at Christmas. The toothpaste was out of the tube. It didn't work twice.

He finally stopped for good the day his mum died. He had a drink with his dad, went to bed, and woke up knowing that was it. A month later, at her funeral, he stood up to give the eulogy and spontaneously told the entire congregation he was never going to drink alcohol again. He put it out there in front of everyone. He wasn't going back on that.

Two and a half years into sobriety, he was given two separate cancer diagnoses in the space of a month. He processed it in about a week. He credits the emotional resilience that comes from proper sleep - and proper sleep that comes from not drinking - for the fact that it didn't put him in a hole for months.

James now coaches grey area drinkers through 100 days alcohol-free. Not Dry January - 100 days, because you can white-knuckle a month, but you can't white-knuckle 100 days. You have to go to the wedding, the stag do, the birthday party, and find out whether the things you believe about alcohol are actually true. Nine out of ten of his clients come in wanting to get control back. Nine out of ten end up staying alcohol-free.

This week, James, Rich and Andy get into why stopping drinking is probably not as hard as you think - and why the real work, the identity shift, the limiting beliefs, the blank canvas of what comes next - starts after the first month, not before.

Plus: the selective attention experiment that explains exactly why people stay stuck, why the summer is actually the best time to take a break, and the line that stopped the room - it's only ethanol in a glass bottle with a nice label on it. Everything else is a belief.

Find James at AlcoholFreeCoach.com or on Instagram @AlcoholFreeCoach_. His podcast, the Alcohol-Free Revolution, features both Rich and Andy in back episodes.

This week coincides with Alcohol Awareness Week, and this year's theme is Alcohol and Me - an invitation for people to reflect on their own relationship with alcohol and what, if anything, they'd like to do about it.

Rich and Andy use it as a springboard for one of the most honest conversations they've had in a while. Rich reads out real, verbatim messages from people in their community - runners, parents, professionals - describing what their relationship with alcohol actually looks like. Not the sharp end. Not people who'd describe themselves as alcoholics. Just people caught somewhere in the middle, aware that something's not quite right, but not sure what to do about it.

There's the person drinking daily since PTSD and a late ADHD diagnosis. The one who's stopped plenty of times but always comes back because the boredom gets too loud. The one with two drink-driving charges who knows, sober, they'd never get behind the wheel. And the one who just said: nothing good ever comes from it, does it?

Rich also gets into why he now sees the alcohol industry as legal drug cartels - how alcohol got a green pass that no other substance would ever receive today, and how the industry's message of drink responsibly quietly places the blame on you while maximizing their profits.

Andy brings in the ADHD connection - why alcohol is cheap dopamine for a loud brain, and why the single best piece of advice one prominent ADHD expert gives to anyone newly diagnosed is simply: take a break from alcohol.

And underneath it all, there's this: you can't read the label from inside the jar. Most people don't see the full picture until they've stepped outside of it.

Also in this episode: Andy's week of genuine chaos, Rich's take on the Eisenhower Matrix, and why surrendering isn't the same as giving up.

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Most people who drink to help them sleep think it's working. It isn't. What alcohol does is sedate you - and there's a significant difference between sedation and actual sleep. This week, Rich and Andy sit down with Sam Sidiji, one of the UK's leading sleep practitioners, who works with everyone from babies to city traders to motorsport professionals, to talk about what's really going on when your head hits the pillow.

Sam breaks down the science without the scaremongering - what poor sleep actually does to your body over time, why your Garmin's sleep score is probably not telling you the truth, and why the anxiety about not sleeping is often doing more damage than the sleeplessness itself.

They get into alcohol and sleep in real depth. What alcohol does to your REM sleep, why people who stop drinking often find their sleep gets worse before it gets better, what REM rebound actually is and why the vivid dreams aren't a bad sign - and how understanding all of this can be the difference between staying the course or reaching for a drink to take the edge off at 2am.

They also cover the cortisol and melatonin dance that wakes most middle-aged people up at 3am, whether you can train yourself to become an early bird if you're a night owl, what a genuinely useful sleep routine actually looks like for a busy runner, and why sleep might be the single most underrated performance tool that nobody talks about.

Plus Sam's verdict on napping, the 10-minute rule, and why sleep is like a cat.

Find Sam at easysleepsolutions.co.uk or on Instagram @EasySleepSolutionsUK.

Rich has ditched his watch. Not just for one run - for the entire Yorkshire Marathon training block. No Garmin, no heart rate monitor, no Strava, no data of any kind. Just running to feel, a whiteboard on the wall, and 20 years of experience to go on. He's calling it the naked running experiment, and it's already producing results he didn't expect.

Two weeks in, he ran Leeds 10K without a watch and took 90 seconds off his PB. His average pace was 4:02 per kilometre - faster than he believes he would have allowed himself to run if the watch had been telling him otherwise. No data, no limiting belief, no ceiling.

This week, Rich and Andy dig into what that actually means. Why does removing the data feel so uncomfortable to so many people? Why do we use our watches to confirm what we already know, but also to cap what we think we're capable of? Andy's Garmin has been telling him he can run a 4-hour marathon for years. His PB is 3:30-something. At what point does the data stop being useful and start being a ceiling?

And then Andy makes the connection that stops the conversation in its tracks. When Rich says people keep telling him "I couldn't do that" about running without a watch, Andy says: that's exactly what people say about going alcohol-free. And if you genuinely believe you can't go without it - whether it's the watch or the drink - maybe that's the most important reason to try.

Also in this episode: Rich's chaotic Manchester Half Marathon, Andy navigating the post-big-event lull, and what happens when your friends and family are done hearing about the race you just ran.

Yorkshire Marathon training block officially starts June 29th. One Valencia place still available - details in the show notes.

One Valencia spot still available. DM clean.break.coaching on Instagram if that's you.

FRIDAY CONNECTION CALL 1PM EVERY FRIDAY Register here - https://portal.take-a-cleanbreak.com/friday-connection-call-page

Are you interested in training with us towards you Autumn/Winter Goals - On-boarding until the end of July ONLY - Come and join the Clean Break Collective. 

He's back. Andy returned from Peru having completed 230 kilometres through the Amazon rainforest over five days, finishing 17th out of 67 starters, and winning the Simon Small Award for his presence and leadership in camp. This week, he and Rich go through the whole thing.

It starts at Cloud Forest - 3,000 metres above sea level, clouds rising up from the jungle below, temperatures at 3 degrees - and the moment Andy stepped off the bus and all the fear just disappeared. He'd arrived. He was back in his happy place.

Then it's day by day. Day 1 down through five different ecosystems, insoles shifting in his shoes at 20K, running the rest of the day without them. 

Day 2 into proper jungle for the first time - little rivers, bogs, mud, trees to go under and over, and ants. Ants everywhere, in every size and colour, for the entire five days. 

Day 3 - the hardest 25K he's ever done in his life. Three enormous hills in thick humid jungle at 500 metres above sea level, a final 3.7K section that took him two hours to climb in semi-dry conditions, and then it rained for everyone still out there behind him. 

Day 4 brutal but manageable. 

And then Day 5 - up an on it at 4.30am, 70K, a river section with 60-odd crossings, a 7K climb in the afternoon heat, blisters forming in the dark, a torch he couldn't find in his own bag, and local kids grabbing his hands and running him through the town square to a finish line with a live band playing.

He talks about the moment the jungle became a computer game in his head, and what it felt like to find joy not just in the finish, but in the hardest moments of the race itself. And then, quietly and powerfully, he connects it all back to where it started - the decision to go alcohol-free, and the belief system that grew from that one act of courage into everything he's become since.

Rich is week two into his naked marathon training block for York in October - no watch, no data, no Strava. That's a conversation too.

One Valencia spot still available. DM clean.break.coaching if that's you.

David Jacko Jackson played over 300 games for Nottingham Rugby Football Club. In 2013, a month after getting married, he had a seizure on the pitch and a small bleed on the brain. His rugby career was over.

What followed was months of emotional dysregulation, extreme fatigue, sensitivity to light, and a nervous system so disrupted he once burst into tears in a supermarket because he couldn't choose a yogurt. Doctors told him to sit in a dark room and wait. Nobody talked about breathing.

Years into his recovery, Jacko stumbled across research connecting traumatic brain injury with disrupted respiratory patterns, and everything changed. By retraining his breathing mechanics, he knocked a minute off his 5K time in four weeks. He retrained as a strength and conditioning coach, worked with the British Paralympic swim team ahead of Rio, and eventually built an entirely new career around what he'd discovered. His book, Breathe Smarter, Run Stronger, with a foreword by Patrick McKeown of The Oxygen Advantage, came out two months ago.

This week, Rich sits down with Jacko to talk about the brain injury, the recovery, and why breathing might be the most overlooked performance tool in every runner's kit bag. They get into the CO2 science, why your perception of effort is more closely linked to your breathing rate than your heart rate or blood lactate levels, and the three things that should always be in play regardless of whether you breathe through your nose or your mouth.

They also talk about what Jacko is doing next - running 200 marathons in 100 days for two brain injury charities, Headway UK and Head for Change, starting the day after his 44th birthday and taking a clockwise loop of the UK. You can join him for as little as a 5K at 25 locations along the route.

Find Jacko at thebreathrunningcoach.com or on Instagram @TheBreathRunningCoach.

Andy is calling in from Cusco, Peru. He flies into the jungle tomorrow. In 48 hours, he'll be on a start line for 230 kilometres through the Amazon rainforest over five days - four manageable days of 26 to 36K, and then a 75K final stage that starts at 4am and has taken some people 22 hours to complete.

This is the conversation they had the day before all of that.

Rich and Andy talk through what the race actually looks like, the logistics, the terrain, the cut-off times, and why 35K in the jungle can take more than 10 hours. Andy reflects on his desert race - the moment he ran out of water with 4K still to go, his hands swelling up, wedding ring bulging, collapsing into a checkpoint with 45 minutes to spare before the cutoff. And the 10K after that, when the voice telling him he wasn't good enough became the loudest thing in his head.

He talks honestly about fear. Not the fear of the jungle, but the fear of that voice coming back when he's too tired to fight it. About whether, this time, he'll finally be able to prove to himself that the story isn't true.

And then, quietly, he talks about grief. About wishing his dad could be on the end of a phone right now. About wanting to hear him say he's got this.

Rich connects it all back to the people they work with every day - the ones standing at the door, able to see what's on the other side, but not quite ready to step through. The certainty of staying stuck versus the uncertainty of change.

It's one of the most honest episodes they've done.

Follow Andy's dot at BeyondTheUltimate.co.uk from Sunday. All the BTU coverage is on their socials too.

Gab Stone had it all mapped out from the age of 14. Loughborough, sports management, his own agency, 22 athletes at London 2012 - 13 of them medalling. He was 29 years old and at the centre of one of the greatest sporting moments this country has ever seen.

And behind all of it, he was living a double life.

Gab has battled a gambling addiction since university - one that followed him through the highs of his career, took everything he'd built, led to a criminal conviction, and eventually landed him in a prison cell. And it was in that cell, on his first morning inside, that he put his watch on the windowsill, closed his eyes, and ran a 5K around Regent's Park.

This week, Rich and Andy sit down with Gab for one of the most honest, gripping conversations they've had on the podcast. They cover the early warning signs nobody spotted, what online gambling does to remove every last firewall of resistance, the quarter of a million pounds, the Sunday papers, the court case, and the four and a half months inside.

But mostly, they talk about what comes next. Eleven years clean. Running as recovery. And a plan to run 30 marathons in 30 days throughout June to raise awareness around gambling harm - starting in Mayfair on the 1st and making his way up to Newcastle and back.

If you're in Leeds on June 15th, Rich will be running with him.

This one will stay with you.

Follow Gab - https://www.instagram.com/gabstone9/