I had the pleasure of talking Norwich Road Runner John Hudson recently about his rise to becoming one of Norfolk’s top runners. 

It was fascinating listening to him, and you will struggle to find a more down-to-earth guy who personifies where hard work and consistency can take you when it comes to running.

John has set himself a target of going under 2:30 at the Newport Marathon in April but it wasn’t so long ago that he regarded breaking three hours as his holy grail.

I think we all have targets in mind that we would like to achieve but the reality is that once you’ve hit them then we’ll probably just move the goalposts and keep pushing.

But when I have the chance to speak to runners in my job I try to understand what motivates them and ask them about the lifestyles they lead to continually push themselves – I'm nosey basically and I’m always looking for positive things that I could perhaps introduce into my daily life.

I asked John if he could identify one thing that took his running to the next level.

Here was his reply: “I began to see myself as a runner rather than someone who just occasionally ran. I also took up the habit of running every day, which was quite a big thing for me. It wasn’t in a Neil Featherby way where it’s religious, and I have to run every day. But looking at my Strava from last year, I think I missed only 11 days out of the whole year, so it’s pretty close to daily running. 
I might take one day off a month, and I don’t beat myself up about it. If I’ve got a bad cold, need a rest, or life just gets in the way, I’ll skip a day. So I’m not super strict about it, but I started to think of myself as someone who runs every day and eats healthily, someone who doesn’t have the chips and burgers because I’m a runner. Everything began to get funnelled through the thought process of, ‘What would a runner do?’”

It’s that last question he asks himself that really resonated with me - ‘what would a runner do?’

I think many of us would benefit from looking at our lives through that lens. Whilst undoubtedly it would help people’s running, I think it has the capacity to improve other aspects of our lives as well.

John won’t mind me saying that he isn’t too different to a lot of runners. Clearly, he has got more natural ability than most of us and has been able to get his body into a position to handle a very high running volume – something that I really struggle with personally.

But he’s also determined to extract every last ounce out of himself. This is something that Neil Featherby has spoken about before when he humbly talks about his own running career achievements.

There’s temptation and distraction everywhere and it is often the most disciplined rather than the most talented that rise to the top when it comes to anything in life whether that be a sporting endeavour or professionally.

As a word of caution for anyone who is thinking about following a ‘run every day’ policy like John then just be extremely careful.

It made me laugh when I asked him about his strength and conditioning routine and his reply was that he just seemed to be really lucky and hasn’t really suffered too much with injuries.

He said that he doesn’t really do too much by way of strength work before going on to describe a 30-40 minute workout that he does ‘most days’.

I think we may have found the reason why he’s been ‘lucky’ with injuries.