Ally Beaven - Broken: 2020: the year running records were rewritten

James Elson is the man behind Centurion Running, a company that organises 50- and 100-mile races in the south of England. If runners thought Covid was tough on them, it was far worse for the people trying to make a living putting on events.

Our first event is the first weekend in April; we then have half our season in April, May and June. In the middle of March we were still a go for the South Downs Way in April, but very quickly that became untenable, so we postponed that. I postponed the first three at the same time, in fact, and cancelled the Track 100.

The Track 100 was, as the name suggests, a 100-mile race on a track. Making its full debut in 2020, entry was by invitation only and some of the sports biggest names, twenty-four-hour world champions Aleksandr Sorokin and Camille Herron among them, were due to race in pursuit of world records. As James put it, Organising races is my job, but the reason we do it is because we love the races. I was so, so excited to be part of the Track 100 and then it got snatched away from us. That was really, really shit.

Although most runners agonising about cancelled races came from the point of view of participants, fans of the sport were also missing out on the opportunity to see some much anticipated match-ups: Sorokin and Herron versus the world records at the Track 100, Eliud Kipchoge and Kenenisa Bekele at the London Marathon, Finlay Wild and Andrew Douglas at Cioch Mhor.

It turns out that postponing and cancelling races involves as much work as if not more work than putting them on in the first place: transferring entries to new race dates, processing refunds, renegotiating with landowners. From the outside looking in, the world of events had ground to a halt, but James found himself busier than ever.

With all racing cancelled, and unlikely to be making a return any time soon, runners had to find new ways to get their kicks. Originating in countries with more restrictive lockdowns, for a while stay-at-home training challenges were the in thing. The man who started it all was Pan Shancu, a Chinese marathon runner who ran fifty kilometres in his living room, 6,250 laps of two tables pushed together. (He also claimed to have run thirty kilometres on the spot in his bathroom. I have no idea how that works.) The concept caught on. There were balcony marathons, garden hundred-milers, people climbing the height of Everest on their stairs. Even in the UK, where outdoor exercise was never off-limits, people were drawn to these challenges by the novelty value and, in many cases, the sweet, sweet dopamine of social media approval.

But these things can only be taken so far. Once a guy knocking on for 100 years old has pushed his Zimmer frame round hundreds of laps of his garden, raised countless thousands of pounds for the NHS (seemingly now a charity), become a national icon and been knighted, few people are likely to be impressed with your 50k Allotment Challenge.

And so the world moved on and virtual racing became the thing to do. Although nothing new, these events came into their own in an increasingly physically distanced world. Organisers specify a time frame to cover a certain distance; runners then submit evidence in the form of screenshots from their phone or photos of their watch, and their medal gets popped in the post. Many runners are cynical about virtual racing. It has all the downsides of racing, like entry fees and race T-shirts that will survive long after mankinds rapaciousness has destroyed the planet; and none of the upsides: the race-day buzz, the thrill of competition and the opportunity to post verifiable times. Some race directors shared this cynicism, including James Elson.