MERRY MILLERS ARE ON THE RUN

ODDLY enough, Stephen Gilpin was slumped on his couch when he decided to run 10k every day for a month.

- Chris Dunlavy

“I was watching a programme called Iron Cowboy,” explains Gilpin, head of the medical department at Rotherham United.

“It’s about a guy called James Lawrence, who did 50 Iron Man triathlons, on 50 consecutive days, in all 50 states of the USA. He was literally putting his body through hell, getting in an RV, then driving hundreds of miles to do the next one.

“I thought ‘If he can do that, what can I do?’. It was then that I thought ‘What about 10k a day throughout November?’. It all went from there.”

That was in 2017, when Gilpin, with help from fellow physio Ross Burberry, manager Paul Warne and celebrity backers like boxer Tony Bellew, raised over £7,500 for Prostate Cancer the UK.

“We’d go on different routes, run around different towns and cities whenever we had an away game,” says Gilpin. “On the face of it, 10k a day sounds a lot. But your mind will, always, always quit before your body does. Because the body is an incredible thing. Complex. Multifunctional. Resilient. It’s designed to adapt and develop.