From Coast Path Walks to Marathon Miles: Shelley’s Journey of Grit and Determination raises money for the Path

I’ve been walking the South West Coast Path since my midlife ‘awakening’ back in 2023 in the lead-up to turning 40. I have a young family, so walking it in one go wasn’t an option. I have, instead, been walking it or running it in stages ever since, either alone, with friends or with family. I never believed I would be able to run a marathon, but ever since walking the Path I’ve realised that I can, in fact, do hard things.

So, after running a few half marathons, I was looking for the next challenge and found the Tsunami Marathon from Clovelly to Bude; a section of the Coast Path I hadn’t covered yet and it looked like a proper challenge as the book defines this section as one of the most ‘arduous’.

Since the start of the year, I committed to a strict training programme, with weekly running building up to over 50km. In addition to the training was my commitment to giving up alcohol; something I had been considering for a while. Living in Dorset, I have been lucky to be able to train on the Purbeck Hills of the Coast Path as the marathon was advertised to have over 2000m of elevation.

However, the reality of the marathon was not what I had trained for; when going for a run, you’d always choose to have the wind behind you but for this event we had no choice. Despite being at the start of June and a week or so after the first heatwave, on the day of the marathon there was a yellow warning for wind with gusts of up to 55mph. This sadly was our fate and relentlessly affected us throughout the marathon. We were battered by the winds on the exposed cliff faces, and it was quite scary at times.

Expecting to finish the event between 6 and 7 hours but the reality was you couldn’t run into the wind; it was pointless and you couldn’t move forward at times; we ended up finishing in 7:44 hours and with our watches registering nearly 3000m of elevation. It was quite the experience! I ran with my husband Mike, who is an experienced marathon runner though this was his first trail marathon; he was recovering from planter fasciitis, so we met in the middle when it came to ability on the day. We laughed when the wind threw us into the kissing gates or gusted around us and the option was either fall towards barbed wire or the cliff edge. I had a few tears after a hairy cliff edge at Duckpool where I was scrambling on my hands and knees grabbing gorse or anything I could see in the hope that the wind gusts didn’t blow me off the path. But looking back, I am so grateful for the experience and I’m even prouder to have completed this challenge in such challenging circumstances.

The week before the event I decided to fundraise because I had received the South West Coast Path Association’s ‘Trailblazing’ magazine and it had said how much more it costs each year to maintain the path; over 1 million pounds.

I wanted to give back to the path that had given me so much joy and purpose.

I wanted to think that I had paid for an acorn to be stamped somewhere and that I could contribute somehow to the legacy of this important path.

I set the target of £369 as that was how many miles of the Coast Path I had already covered. With the generosity of my friends, family and work colleagues who all kindly donated, I have managed to raise over £570 which I’m really proud of. I’m not sure what’s next; I’ve still got around 235 miles of the path to cover and would like to complete it by the end of next year, although equally I don’t want it to be over.

Unfortunately, I hurt my foot during the marathon and am still recovering but I have just started to run again, a month later, so hoping to be back out there on the path again racking up the miles.