17/02/2026
A little inspiration, especially with Beat the Couch coming up!!
https://www.facebook.com/share/1B3X5EzH8A/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Beat the couch info: https://www.waterfrontwellness.bm/beat-the-couch
On a Saturday morning in July 2025, Anna Rutherford stood at the foot of Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast and looked toward Scotland. Somewhere 100 miles to the north, Edinburgh Castle was waiting.
So were 600 other runners.
By Sunday morning, not a single one of them would be close.
Rutherford — a 43-year-old lawyer, mother of three, and self-described perimenopausal woman on HRT — set off at 7:00 AM and ran. She ran along the east coast through Berwickshire, across the rolling Borders, and through East Lothian. Around the halfway mark, she overtook the man leading the race. He fell behind. Everyone fell behind.
She spent the final 50 miles completely alone.
Running through the night, she stopped only briefly at checkpoints every 10 miles, where she mixed stock powder with water and ate pretzels — the same fuel strategy she'd used in 2021 when she shattered the women's record on the 212-mile Southern Upland Way. At one point, she came across a man lying flat on his back on a golf course near the town of Gullane. She stopped to check if he was okay. He told her he was just looking at the stars. She cracked on.
She missed one aid station entirely — the one where her young son had left a note of encouragement and some hydration gels she'd stashed earlier. She never saw it. She kept running anyway.
As she neared Edinburgh and the last 17 miles stretched ahead, she put on a playlist her children had made for her — a mix of Disney songs and country music. And when she hit the Royal Mile, the ancient cobblestoned road that climbs toward Edinburgh Castle, she started singing Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" out loud.
The Saturday night crowds on the Royal Mile started singing along with her.
Anna Rutherford crossed the finish line at the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens at 12:23 AM Sunday — 17 hours, 23 minutes, and 11 seconds after she had started. She collected her medal quietly, because the gardens required silence at that hour. Then her parents drove her home to Peebles.
She was in bed, asleep, before second-place finisher Danny Castro arrived — more than two hours later. The next fastest woman wouldn't cross for another five hours.
After the race, Rutherford praised the organizers, Rat Race Adventures, for something most races overlook. She had started her period the day before the race and was wearing light-coloured leggings. At every single checkpoint, the organizers had provided private toilets and period products for women runners. "I think it just shows women do these things too," she said. "Women are not just little men."
She also spoke openly about the realities of being a 43-year-old woman pushing her body to its limits. She is perimenopausal. She takes HRT. During training, she was running 120 miles a week — so much that she ended up in hospital with headaches and fainting spells. None of it stopped her.
When asked what got her through the lowest points, she cited ultra-running legend Jasmine Paris, the first woman to complete the Barkley Marathons. "Someone like Jasmine Paris, her saying 'just watch me' before she did the Barkley Marathons," Rutherford said. "I found that very humbling."
There's one more detail worth knowing. When Anna's parents met her at the finish line in Princes Street Gardens just after midnight, her father had some news:
"Sorry Anna, we couldn't park anywhere else, so the car's about a mile away."
After 100 miles, she walked one more.
