The PKS Running Club – Details, episodes & analysis

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The PKS Running Club

PKSRUNS (Paul Kingsley-Smith)

Sports

Frequency: 1 episode/43d. Total Eps: 15

The PKS Running Club Podcast is real, unscripted conversations with everyday runners — first 5Ks, sub-3 marathons, weight-loss journeys, injury comebacks, and running through grief. Hosted by Paul, each episode trades polished takeaways for honest talk on consistency, motivation, family, and why we really run. Funny, candid, and human. Back-of-the-pack or chasing a PB, there's a seat for you. New episodes weekly. Subscribe and join the club. If you would like to share YOUR running story, please get in contact. Follow us on instagram at @thepksrunningclub

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https://www.strava.com/athletes/7357390
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https://www.strava.com/clubs/pksrunningclub
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https://www.justgiving.com/page/ngv-interconnectors-2
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https://www.youtube.com/@pksruns
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https://www.instagram.com/dannysknight
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JP KING (AGAIN) - What do you call someone running on a treadmill?

Season 2 · Episode 11

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 • Duration 01:13:44

JP is back — this time behind the mic as guest co-host after their planned interview guest (an ultrarunning "legend" JP refuses to fully spoil) had to reschedule. What follows is less structured interview, more unfiltered running-nerd hangout: two grown men trading injury stories, dodgy stats, and increasingly strong opinions about traffic lights.

JP kicks off with a fresh Achilles niggle after switching shoe brands mid-training and a barefoot-adjacent misadventure running sand dunes in 40-degree Morocco heat, which spirals into a genuinely useful conversation about heel-to-toe drop, why you shouldn't mix shoe types without easing in, and Paul's own cautionary tale of a friend who ran 10 miles barefoot and shredded his feet to ribbons. From there it's straight into training science: zone two running, why uphill intervals beat flat sprints for muscle recovery, the phosphocreatine energy system, and why walking back down a hill between reps might be the most underrated recovery trick in running.

The conversation gets properly candid on food and identity — Paul's "treat-free September" after an indulgent trip to France, a full confession of a 900-calorie Saturday-night Pringles binge, and an honest, unflinching discussion of Paul's past disordered eating patterns and how he's rebuilt a healthier relationship with food. JP and Paul also dig into a British Medical Journal study comparing running to antidepressants for depression, with Paul pushing back from 17 years of lived experience on medication — and a genuinely spicy debate about whether someone who only ever runs on a treadmill can really call themselves a runner (spoiler: Paul says no).

Along the way: London Marathon ballot stats (1.3 million applicants, women aged 20–29 the single biggest group), why running clubs aren't for everyone (sorry, Derek), adaptive AI-controlled carbon-plate shoe prototypes, the growing gap between the fittest and the least fit in the UK, and a fully committed pitch for a Strava-linked tax break that somehow turns into "Paul for MP."

Funny, wide-ranging, and unmistakably two mates just talking — this episode is proof that not every conversation about running needs a guest to be worth listening to.The PKS Running Club Podcast is a running motivation podcast for everyday runners — real personal stories, honest conversations about health and fitness, and a growing community built around showing up, not chasing elite times. Hosted by Paul, it's a health & fitness podcast and community sports podcast for anyone running at their own pace, from first 5Ks to ultramarathons.

New episodes every Wednesday. Follow @thepksrunningclub on Instagram, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice, and share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it.

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Marc Harder - He Ran Two Marathons in a Week... One With a Heart Attack

Season 2 · Episode 10

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 • Duration 01:16:58

Paul sits down with Mark, introduced through fellow guest Rebecca after a 25-year friendship forged in their first graduate jobs. Mark's running story starts like so many others on this podcast — nearly 30, a neighbour training after childbirth, and a Sunday-night routine that began with not being able to run to the end of the road without stopping. What follows is a conversation about weight, discipline, and the slow work of learning that fitness isn't just about miles logged but what you actually put into your body — portion control, tracking, and finally understanding his own relationship with food after decades of "treadmill specials" and Christmas-to-Lent cycles.

The heart of the episode is Mark's 2019 challenge: 15 marathons in 15 months, run while working for Sands, a charity supporting families after stillbirth and neonatal death, raising money and awareness one marathon at a time. Inspired by local hero Francis Benali, Mark ran through COVID lockdowns, homemade courses, and socially distanced club laps, eventually smashing his sub-four-hour goal at marathon 13 with a 3:52. Then came marathon 14 — run the week before Christmas, six days after his PB, tracing his own life story from the hospital where he was born to the streets of his childhood. He finished feeling wrong. By that night, his wife and friends were insisting something wasn't right.

What followed was a trip to A&E against COVID-era advice not to go, a blood test showing a troponin level thousands of times above normal, and the discovery that Mark had run his 13th and 14th marathons — including a PB — while having a heart attack. His cardiologist's verdict reframed the entire story: rather than reckless, Mark's fitness had likely kept him alive long enough to get help. The conversation doesn't stop at the medical drama, though — it goes deep into what came after: the identity crisis of no longer being "marathon man," survivor's guilt, counselling, and the slow rebuild of trust in his own body.

Six years on, Mark is back running 10Ks and half marathons, has never ruled out a 15th marathon, and carries with him a line spotted on a stranger's race shirt at a parkrun: the comeback is greater than the setback.

Honest, moving, and full of hard-won perspective — this episode is about fitness, faith, identity, and what it really means to be lucky to be alive.

Yobster Runs - My Son Prayed for me at Mile 20

Season 2 · Episode 9

Wednesday, September 16, 2026 • Duration 01:02:00

Paul welcomes the show's first international guest: Yobster, a Nigerian-born runner now based in Toronto, Ontario, whose running journey started in October 2024 in the middle of a career leap and a genuine mental breakdown. Four months later, with no training plan, no long runs, and a race-day fuel strategy of dates and electrolytes, he lined up for the Lagos City Marathon — went out too fast, hit the wall at halfway, and finished in 4:52 before his immune system gave out entirely for weeks afterward.

What follows is one of the most rapid and well-documented progressions the podcast has covered. Eight weeks of his first proper structured training block brought Milton Keynes down to 3:52, with his wife watching him race for the first time. A full cycle later, Toronto Waterfront dropped him to 3:35, his kids cheering from the course as he stopped at the 40K mark just to hug them. From there, a charity place at the London Marathon — run in memory of friends lost to pancreatic cancer — meant training through a brutal Toronto winter split between treadmill sessions and outdoor long runs, chasing a goal he almost didn't say out loud.

He crossed the London finish line in 3:19:56, four seconds inside his target, despite a tendinitis scare in the taper. But the heart of this conversation isn't the splits — it's what Yobster calls "the journey": a running philosophy built on Galatians 6:9 ("let us not grow weary in doing good"), why he cries at every single race, and how learning to be vulnerable — including a phone call with his young son praying for him mid-marathon — has reshaped his marriage and how his family sees him.

The conversation also gets into the mechanics: training by feel and heart rate rather than fixed paces, letting fitness "come to him" instead of chasing a number, the cost of going out too hard in that first Lagos marathon, and what's next — the Berlin Marathon in two weeks, chasing 3:10, with sub-3 waiting patiently for whenever the journey gets him there.

Emotional, faith-filled, and full of hard-won wisdom — this episode is about patience, purpose, and what running reveals about who you really are.

The PKS Running Club Podcast is a running motivation podcast for everyday runners — real personal stories, honest conversations about health and fitness, and a growing community built around showing up, not chasing elite times. Hosted by Paul, it's a health & fitness podcast and community sports podcast for anyone running at their own pace, from first 5Ks to ultramarathons.

JP King - Running Marathons with a Pistol

Season 2 · Episode 8

Wednesday, September 2, 2026 • Duration 01:05:32

Paul's second conversation with JP King, an ex-army pilot turned serial entrepreneur, is every bit as wide-ranging as the first. JP's running story starts on a school cross-country course in the 1970s and runs straight through the British Army, where his first-ever marathon was run on tour in Bosnia — personal protection weapon stuffed down his trousers, no wicking fabric in sight, and a blister to prove it. He followed it up with London in 2002, and twenty-five years later he's got a place for London 2027, this time chasing sub-four rather than the 3:20 he ran in his prime.

The conversation moves through JP's life as an entrepreneur who's built companies worth millions and watched others collapse, and how that same appetite for risk shows up in his running. He talks candidly about depression, why he calls running the thing that "clears his mind" when nothing else can, and the real reason he wears a running vest on every run — not for gels or a GoPro, but to carry the memory of army friends who died young and can't run anymore. There's a properly moving thread here about mental health, consistency, and why missing a week (or a year) of running is never a reason to quit for good.

And then there's the rest of it: nostalgia for pump-up trainers and leather spikes with six-inch nails, a shared loathing of the London Marathon's new two-day split ("a cash grab," they agree), a rant against sports-nutrition marketing aimed at people running a casual 5K, and the return of PKS Runs' most infamous unit of measurement — miles per shit — which JP confirms has genuinely changed how he calculates a long run. It ends with JP marshaling the Frome Running Festival for the first time and Paul threatening to turn up in a vest with a fake gun for their next event together.

Funny, unfiltered, and unexpectedly tender in places — this episode is about fear, failure, army boots, and why the community around running matters more than the numbers on the watch.

Lucia Goodwin - Doing Hard Things

Season 2 · Episode 7

Wednesday, August 26, 2026 • Duration 01:01:25

Paul catches up with Lucia, a friend from Watergate Studios gym in Bridgwater and fellow veteran of an accountability WhatsApp group that turned into far more than a weight-loss chat.

They open on the eternal struggle of having an unusual name (Lucia has been called everything from Lucinda to, memorably, "Lucifer" by an ex's grandparents) before getting into a genuinely candid conversation about body image — what it actually means to look in the mirror, see excess body fat, and hold that alongside the fact that you can run a marathon, lift heavy, and show up at start lines anyway.

Lucia's running story starts with hating PE at school and dropping out of her first-ever 10K entirely, watching everyone else collect their medal. Over a decade later — after having her son, discovering Couch to 5K with a hand-me-down running buggy, and years of CrossFit — she ran the London Marathon in 6 hours 58 for Parkinson's UK, her dad's condition. The unplanned highlight: spotting her father waiting at mile 4, a surprise he'd arranged himself. What follows is an unflinching account of the parts of marathon day nobody prepares you for — the walk from the finish line to your bag, sitting on a curb in Crocs you can't get back up from, and the brutal admin of getting home afterwards.

The heart of the episode, though, is Lucia's first triathlon: a 750m swim, 20K bike, and 5K run in Clevedon, the town she still calls home. The week before the race, she came off her bike three separate times — including once while stationary — leaving her, by her own account, genuinely afraid she might not survive the bike leg. She talks openly about that fear, the friend from her tri club who talked her through open-water panic in Marine Lake, and the decision to spend ten deliberate minutes in transition just to get her head back in the game before finishing the race smiling.

Funny, honest, and full of hard-earned perspective — this episode is about redefining what an athlete looks like, getting out the door even when you're terrified, and finding the version of exercise you'll actually keep coming back to.

Rebecca Harries - Run-Walking to PB's

Season 2 · Episode 6

Wednesday, August 19, 2026 • Duration 01:00:28

Paul sits down with Rebecca Harries, a market researcher of 20-plus years who's spent her career on the other side of the microphone — and for once finds herself being interviewed instead. Rebecca's running story starts with a first 10K she hated so much she swore off running entirely, until a friend talked her back into it years later. A reluctant Parkrun phase and a "why would we join a running club?" moment followed — and thirteen years on, she's a running club leader, seven marathons deep, and still chasing the next PB.

The conversation centres on the run-walk method that turned Rebecca's running upside down: a precisely tuned nine-minutes-and-seven-seconds run, one-minute walk structure that let her smash a half marathon PB she'd set over a decade earlier — without changing her training at all. She and Paul dig into the mental trick of only ever having to run nine minutes at a time, the men who show up mid-race with unsolicited "encouragement" for women pacing themselves, and why the sweetest revenge is simply overtaking them eight miles later. They also cover her seven marathons (London: euphoric; Brighton: relentless out-and-backs; Worcester: "hell on earth"), the twice-weekly 7am runs with the same three friends she hasn't missed in over four years, and the accidental ultra — Race to the Stones, 50K, signed up ten days before the start line.

The conversation also turns to bigger change: Rebecca was recently made redundant after two decades in market research, and is now launching Conkers and Thread, a business upcycling old denim and shirts into bags and clothing — built, fittingly, around the same make-it-yourself instinct that's carried her through running for over a decade.

Warm, funny, and full of hard-won running wisdom — this episode is about pacing yourself, showing up for the same four people every week, and reinventing what's already there.

New episodes every Wednesday. Follow @thepksrunningclub on Instagram, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice, and share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it.

Dan Humphreys - Surviving the "Pain Cave"

Season 2 · Episode 5

Wednesday, August 12, 2026 • Duration 01:00:07

Paul catches up with Dan, a 19-year-old ultrarunner he first met in the French Alps in February, where Dan was volunteering with Altitude Mission... a Christian charity running free "Beer and Burgers" nights, refuge beds, and mountainside "Ski Angels" support for seasonal workers.

Six days before this conversation, Dan finished the Lakeland 50... 50 miles and 3,000 metres of elevation through his home turf in the Lake District, with barely any structured training behind him, two concussions, a knee injury, and a hip flexor strain picked up days before the start line.

What follows is a wide-ranging, genuinely moving conversation. Dan opens up about years of bullying, crushing social anxiety, and a suicidal crisis at fifteen that he faced almost entirely alone, and the faith journey that pulled him through it, now the foundation for the confidence and warmth Paul witnessed firsthand watching Dan work a ski resort full of strangers.

They talk honestly about the difference between physical pain and a genuine reason to stop, Courtney Dauwalter's "pain cave," and why showing up for people on a mountainside, at a bar, or fifty miles into a race matters more than any finish time.

The conversation also covers the mechanics of ultrarunning: why Dan skipped the marathon altogether and went straight to ultras, the running pedigree of a family where both parents have run the Lakeland 50 twice and his dad's completed the 100, aid station strategy (salty potatoes over gels, four and a half sandwiches, a hard no to sweets by mile 27), and why he's already eyeing the Lakeland 100 next year. Paul, naturally, asks to come suffer alongside him at a future race.

Funny, candid, and unexpectedly profound, this episode is about ultramarathons, faith, mental health, and what happens when you decide to keep going anyway.

Kate Hyland - Saying Yes to Everything

Season 2 · Episode 4

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 • Duration 48:54

Paul sits down with Kate Hyland, a Nottinghamshire-based runner, run leader, and self-confessed extrovert, for a conversation that swings from cereal-mixing psychology to one of the most quietly powerful stories the podcast has covered. Kate started running in January 2023 not for fitness or fun, but to prepare her body for major surgery: donating a kidney to her husband Lee, who lives with end-stage kidney disease. Testing later revealed a rare condition that ruled her out as a donor — but weeks after that news, she was offered a charity place in the London Marathon for Kidney Care UK, and the running habit she'd built for an entirely different reason became the thing that carried her through.

Paul and Kate talk honestly about what marathon training actually looks like around a full-time job, two teenagers, and a husband managing dialysis at home — and how Kate's back-of-the-pack, coffee-after-a-long-run approach to running club life is just as valid as chasing PBs. They compare notes on London Marathon (crowded, overhyped, a hard pass for both of them) versus the low-key charm of a local 10K with a burger van at the finish, and Kate breaks down the 30-minute improvement between her London debut (6:15) and her Brighton follow-up (5:43).

The conversation also covers Kate's leap into triathlon with zero swimming or cycling experience, the run-leader trick that gets her out the door in torrential rain, training through perimenopause and anxiety, and a shared love of trifle-sized post-run treats — including the time Kate ate an entire family trifle solo after a brutal 30K training run.

Honest, funny, and quietly moving — this episode is about running for reasons bigger than a finish line, saying yes before you feel ready, and why community keeps you showing up when motivation won't.

The PKS Running Club – Details, episodes & analysis

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The PKS Running Club – Details, episodes & analysis

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