In August, while most of us were watching the live stream suffering a shocking case of FOMO, Kay Lewis was running CCC, the 100k race at the UTMB Mont-Blanc World Series Finals.

Kay wasn’t just running, she was excelling, nailing her race plan to finish third in her age category. This was no accident - Kay had prepared meticulously.

She trained her gut. She calculated her fluid and sodium requirements. She spent months slavishly following an event-specific training plan that’s a proven winner. She ran (and hiked the uphills) almost exclusively in heart rate zones one and two. She even decamped to the French Alps six weeks out to run the course and acclimatise.

All that effort stood her in good stead, but it was really only applying the finishing touches. You see, running is in Kay Lewis’s blood. She’s been at it for more or less her entire life.

Kay’s running career started as a nine-year-old, when she was formally admitted to the local Harrier club as a “girls novice”.

Harriers was a family affair for Kay, who grew up in a relatively remote region in the southern part of New Zealand’s North Island. With four kids in the family, the logistics of getting them all to team sports of a weekend was too much to ask.

So the Hawkins family’s sport of choice was running. Everyone could participate at the same venue at the same time. As an added bonus, the local club was in the same town as the grandparents, so that was lunch sorted too.

Kay comes from good running stock. Her father was the district mile champion and Kay remembers he joined her and her three brothers at Harriers for week one of the 1979 season.

The following week Kay’s mum decided she wasn’t just going to watch, so she ran too, wearing Kay’s Dad’s rugby shorts and a pair of the New Zealand equivalent of Dunlop Volleys.

Turns out she was also pretty handy. “I’ve got a little handful of her national medals from veterans [events]. She was really good… really fast,” Kay says.

Harriers was no passing phase for Kay and her family. “While I was at university I’d come back and still go,” she says. She’s been running ever since.

Those early days weren’t always easy. Kay trained on a 12.8k loop at home on the farm, which she ran in bare feet. “I always remember you’d come home and you’d get in the shower and you’d be so cold - it was a miserable climate where I grew up.”

When they were kids, she and her brothers used to help on aid stations when their parents ran marathons. “There would be one aid station that wouldn’t have anything other than water and sponges. We’d have maybe 10 cups and 20 sponges and we’d have to run down the road, rinse them and give them to the next person.” How times have changed!

That experience was enough for her to swear off marathons. Until … when she was 42 years and 2 months old, she broke that pledge and ran the 42.2k for the first time.

“We were going to England with Mum and Dad to show our kids where Mum had grown up and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll do something while I’m there.’ … I came across the inaugural Coniston Marathon around the lake my Mum grew up on.

“It went through my cousin’s farm and different places where Grandad had taken us for walks as kids.” That race was a “trail marathon” but by comparison with what she tackles these days, Kay says it was “pretty tame”. It was also the start of a four-year streak running road marathons.

In part, this was because Kay and her family moved to Malaysia in 2012 and road running was a whole lot easier, and safer, than trail running in Kuala Lumpur. It was also an easy hop from KL to Europe, which made events like the Paris Marathon easier to reach logistically.

She may have been running road marathons in her 40s, but it was the trails that called Kay. It’s hardly surprising. Like running, the outdoors is in Kay’s blood. “We grew up going into the bush. Dad was a deer culler and we’d always go into the bush, tripping along behind him,” she says.

“When I was at university I’d always try to find trails to run on, that was my preference. But there weren’t races.”

This was changing before she moved to KL with trail races starting to emerge. But when she returned to Melbourne in 2015 there were suddenly trail races everywhere. Kay says: “I got a headrush. I did my first 50k in Marysville and I did five in six months. I just thought, ‘This is so good!’”

Along the way Kay’s husband Paul also caught the trail running bug - he’s also a CCC finisher. Nowadays trail running is a lifestyle choice for them. “We go on holiday and we’ll do a run.” It’s taken them all over the world.

Despite this enthusiastic embrace of ultra trail running, Kay says she was never motivated to run a 100k race or longer. “My physio brain always thought, ‘I’m not sure I should be running 100s. I don’t know where the value is in doing that to your body.’

“So I did two 100s and then I started thinking, ‘I don’t think this is healthy.’ And it wasn’t until we moved up here [to Brisbane] and became part of this 'enabling environment’ [The Trailiens] that I thought, ‘Oh, I could do another one!’

“But I thought if I’m going to do it, I have to do it in a way that I don’t feel that I’m abusing my body,” she says.

“I’ve always had this mindset of you don’t need to be busting a gut on every training run. And I always think that’s just because I like to be a little bit lazy out there!” What does this philosophy entail? Training in zones one and two. And that translates to finishing with dignity.

That’s what she did at CCC, and in next week’s newsletter we’ll find out how.

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.