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17 May 2025. UTA 50 start line. After a less-than-optimal training campaign, I felt a mix of achievement and trepidation.

Twelve months prior, I’d found myself on the side of a mountain bike trail, then in hospital for a week, contemplating a few things and reassessing my appetite for certain types of risk.

While I’d done a good job on my rib cage, something wasn’t right in my hips and sacroiliac joints (also known as the SI joints - those that connect the spine to the hip bones).

I just couldn’t get back into regular running. I’d start building, then end up with persistent hip, glute and lower back pain. Or worse - a spasm in my middle ribs that would put me on the floor and out of action for a couple of weeks.

I’d been managing this issue on and off for 30 years. But this time, it just wouldn’t clear up.

So I headed out, letting my start group go, then the next. I’d take it easy. Just click through the Ks. As readers may have experienced, ego had other ideas, and I pushed it a bit too hard.

I finished the race in a respectable 8 hours 15 minutes. I was happy with that. However, my body, and its deep gluteal musculature, was far from impressed. The message was: “You’re gonna pay for this son!”

Things worsened after that.

Any running became problematic. So I decided to see if stopping altogether was the answer. Apart from the odd attempt, I didn’t run for six months. But I kept moving. And I threw everything at it - yoga, gym, cold/hot pool work, sound wave therapy, hypnotherapy, weekly chiro adjustments. More beer. Less beer. You name it.

Long runs became fast hikes, then walks. I kept trying to restart, but the same tightness always returned. At the same time, I was dealing with a high degree of stress from life generally.

It was disheartening. In a year when I needed it most, I’d lost my “thing”.

I hadn’t realised until it was gone how much I needed to run. No matter how bad things were, how crappy Monday had been, I always had Wednesday night trail running club to look forward to.

Running around in the dark with strangers, then a beer and a yarn in a dirt car park. Or a trot with the dog after work, clearing the head and thinking about the long run plan for the weekend.

Alongside the exercise and its benefits, trail running had become a kind of buoyancy vest in my life, keeping me afloat. It’s built strength and resilience within me that I’ve not experienced before, and a better connection to myself.

And there’s this feeling when you’re trail running when fit. The feeling when you run, dialled in on the trail ahead, or with friends. It’s confidence. And it’s yours. You’ve done the work. You’ve nurtured it. No-one and nothing can take it away.

You know what I mean? You certainly know it when it’s gone.

I became lost. Frustrated. Desperate. My other passion - MTB and gravel riding - wasn’t much better. The same tightening pain would creep into my glutes. Long distance rides became a distant memory.

But I had to keep trying. I set myself a deadline of sorts - I entered UTA again in 2026. If I had to, I’d hike the whole thing and come last. I really didn’t care, but I needed a goal.

Around this time, my GP referred me to a sports medical specialist. He took a few measurements, prodded around, and found my right hip sitting forward, along with indications of ligament degeneration deep in the SI joint.

His take was blunt, but honest: “You can go to any number of sports health practitioners and get different answers. I gave up making up stories yonks ago. Often, we professionals just don’t know why things stick around. The body is bloody complicated - especially where you’ve got your issues and what you have put your rig through over the years.

“It could be any number of things. Sometimes shit happens. And it just takes a lot of [expletive deleted] time to recover.” I liked this doc.

Putting a PEP in your step

He recommended a round of platelet enriched plasma (PEP) injections, which he said might, or might not, work. Essentially, blood is drawn and spun in a centrifuge to concentrate out the healing platelet cells in blood plasma.

Around 10 million platelet cells are then injected into the site of ligament weakness. And your platelets go to work. At $900 a pop though, I hesitated. After a week, I called and booked in. I liked the odds it would help me.

I kept working the exercises that had been prescribed over the years, either in the gym or at home each morning with resistance bands. Getting odd looks at the office, at the desk, periodically spreading my legs apart back and forward with a thick rubber band around my knees.

Slowly, things started to shift. The pain in my deep and upper glutes began to ease.

January came and went. I really needed to start running, like a month ago. I had a plan on the whiteboard: 500m, then 1km, building up every second day. That’s where I was at.

The clincher came unexpectedly, through a high-intensity training class at the local gym a few months out from UTA. After sessions twice a week for a couple of weeks, I suddenly felt like I could run (and fast hike) properly again. My deep core and glute muscles felt different - sore, but a good kind of sore. I felt things “switching on”.

The trainer turned out to be a sports science and performance coach, with experience training professional teams, including a stint with the Broncos. And here he was, at The Gap Snap Fitness. I couldn't believe it. It felt like a gift.

Get moving

I did some private PT with him, focusing on my core weaknesses - fairly common ones for middle-aged guys stuck behind a desk. His explanation of why things were improving made complete sense: “It’s about all-body movement and variation mate. What you’ve gone through is fairly common for guys like yourself stuck behind a desk. You’ve just needed something to bring it all together.”

While targeted physio exercises have their place, my takeaway was that interval-based training - short stints of weighted exercise using legs, glutes and core on opposing sides, single-leg work or getting down and back up off the floor forces the body and brain to move the way they’re meant to.

My body needed that. Maybe it always will.

Classes were also fun. Unsurprisingly, habit research shows that if something’s fun, we’re 10 times more likely to drag ourselves out of bed for a 6am session.

And the platelet injections, did they work? I think so, although it’s hard to say. About a month afterwards I felt like my SI joint area was sublty “tighter” and my pelvic tilt had subsided a tad. But, in light of everything else I was doing, how much of that was down to the PEP injections is really hard to say.

I found I was running again. First 1k then 1.5k. I made it back to Wednesday night runs, coming in at the back. I didn’t give a hoot. I was moving!

In the end, I sold my UTA 50 entry and picked up a 22k ticket. I ran it with a mate who wanted to give this trail running thing a go. We had a funny adventure getting to Katoomba the night before, and a great run in the drizzle the next morning.

It was fun.

And that feeling was back. 

Upcoming Events

There are way too many events for me to list everything that’s happening around the country, but here is a selection of upcoming races (with a bias towards South East Queensland).

The Running Calendar website is a great source if you want a comprehensive understanding of what’s available around the country.