Shwmae! Sean dw i. Hello! I’m Sean.
I’m a British South African, now living in Wales. The journey getting to where I am is an interesting one, but here we are. This is my personal site and blog dedicated to my hobby and passion for trail and endurance / ultra running.
Trail Running for Life is a website dedicated to trail running and it’s benefits. From this focal point, you’ll see branches out to all sorts of sub-topics, from the highs and lows of running trails, to gear, locations, and more.
Follow me on Strava! I enjoy seeing runs posted by others. It’s all fuel and motivation to get out there myself and keep going. You can also find my other social profiles in the side bar to the right.
Where Trail Running For Life Started
I currently live in the heart of Pembrokeshire, Wales. I am lucky enough to have a multitude of trails right on my doorstep, and the Wales Coast Path just a few miles away. Over the years I’ve built a steadily increasing map of interconnected paths and trails. When heading out for trail runs I randomly connect these route segments to work out interesting new courses.
With family and work life coming first to pay the bills, I spend a fairly large portion of my personal time running the hills and coast path of Pembrokeshire. I’m well into enjoying long distance endurance and tough, challenging runs now too. Occasionally I’ll head further out into South or North Wales to enjoy the mountains.
Trail running is an enjoyable and meditative experience for me. I love the feeling during and after a long run out in nature.
I don’t tend to run many official races, preferring rather to run my own courses and trail maps. My goals are to generally strive for the odd personal distance record here and there. I don’t take it too seriously though. My primary achievement related goal for trail running is to keep pushing my distance record further. With this comes the benefit of finding new and interesting locations, sights, and scenery.
Where It Started
I first started “trail running” as a kid in school (back in South Africa). For a short period of time, I was in the school cross country club. I ran short off-road runs once or twice a week during school cross country sessions. The seed must have been planted during this time at the age of 10 or 11 years old.
Many years passed until my late twenties when I picked up running again in 2012. Since then I’ve been hooked, keeping up the routine (for the most part), slowly pushing myself further and further.
At the moment, trail running allows me to clear my mind and relax from a busy life as a contractor in the world of software development and the life-cycles around that (DevOps). There is nothing better than working on a challenging project, feeling like I’m hitting a brick wall on a particularly difficult problem, heading out for a run on the trails, and then getting back and almost instantly finding the solution. This is an excellent example of how trail running can help clear my mind.
Striving on the experience and discovery of new trails, and reaping the health benefits, I plan to continue trail running as long as I can, recruiting those whom I can convince to join me in Trail Running for Life.