In this episode, I sit down with Llinos Proctor — someone whose journey into ultrarunning is anything but typical. She didn’t grow up sporty, she didn’t come from a running background, and she certainly didn’t imagine she’d one day be taking on the Winter Spine Race.

What she did have was a love of wild places, a deep connection to the mountains, and a willingness to keep showing up when life got hard.

We talk about how running first became a lifeline during a difficult time in her life, and how those early half‑mile efforts slowly grew into marathons, ultras, and eventually some of the toughest mountain races in the UK.

Llinos shares how she rebuilt from long COVID, how she learned to trust herself in remote terrain, and how the trail community helped her find confidence she didn’t know she had.

Then we dive into the big one — the Winter Spine Race.

She takes us through the highs, the lows, the hallucinations, the bogs, the admin, the kit chaos, the night sweats, and the moments where she genuinely thought she was done… only to find another gear she didn’t know existed.

We explore:

• How resilience is built through lived experience, not talent
• Why “admin” is the real race, and the runners who finish are the ones who look after themselves early
• The moment she nearly quit at Langdon Beck — and how the community pulled her back
• Why suffering in these events is a privilege
• What it means to run for a cause bigger than yourself
• And what’s next now that she’s completed one of the toughest winter ultras in the world

This is a conversation about grit, identity, motherhood, mountains, and the strange joy of doing really hard things on purpose. If you’re an ultrarunner, a dot‑watcher, or someone who loves stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, you’ll get a lot from this one.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.