We caught up with Richard Smyth, our second-year Great North Runner extraordinaire who has already exceeded his £1250 fundraising target! He also happens to be a professional writer, so we’ll let him tell his GNR journey in his own words.

I’ve been a freelance writer since 2008, which means I’ve been sitting on my backside for the better part of twenty years. Running gets me away from my keyboard and my piles of unread books, and aside from the odd game of football – and all the various ways in which my two young children keep me on the move – it’s the only serious exercise I get these days.

I started running in my late twenties. My approach is pretty brainless: pull on my trainers and get going. That’s one of the best things about running for me. No planning, no prep, no complicated kit. I’ve nothing against running tech but I know it would eat into my motivation to run if I had to think about charging devices or logging into a training plan every time. I take the actual running part of running pretty seriously – I like to run hard –  but I can’t be bothered with any faff. I don’t even listen to music (my internal running soundtrack typically consists of my latest musical earworm intercut with snatches of 1980s David Coleman athletics commentary).

Because I’m not very interested in tracking my times and distances, my running goals tend to focus on hills, and whether or not I can run up them. This is just as well, because I live and train in north Bradford, where you’re never more than fifty yards from a precipitous incline. I ran my first half-marathon in 2018, off-road at Harewood in West Yorkshire – I really felt that my hill-heavy training had paid off there. I didn’t do another half til last year’s Great North Run (I’ve since slogged round the Kielder 11 miler).

My friend Pete is a bit of an Action Foundation legend. This is all his fault. Pete’s run the GNR for the charity five or six times, I think – last year he invited me to join him. My wife’s from Whitley Bay and I love Tyneside, so I said OK, why not.

My training was a bit thrown off when I broke my arm playing football at the start of the summer, but it was so heartening when people started sponsoring me.

I always feel a bit cheeky asking people to give money when all I’m doing is going for a run, but everyone was really generous – it does seem like people are just waiting for an excuse to do good.

One of Richard’s Bluesky posts, titled ‘my haggard red running face.’

Richard (top centre-right) pictured with fellow runners last year

Most of my donations came from social media followers – last year, that meant Twitter, but I ditched that for Bluesky after the Musk Revolution, and I wasn’t sure this year that I had the following to match my ffundraising target. But the Blueskyers stepped up, and I’ve ended up beating last year’s total. It’s been amazing. I haven’t even done anything yet.

Action Foundation’s work with refugees and asylum seekers is to me just so fundamentally decent, humane and necessary (it shouldn’t be so necessary, but sadly it is). I’ve been lucky to have had a pretty safe and stable life so far; the idea of that being upended, of finding myself far from home, far from family, facing the prospect of starting again with nothing, is awful to me – I think it would be awful to anyone who thought clearly about it for five minutes. And on top of all that, the charity looks after its GNR runners too. Last year was just an amazing experience. It’s incredible how a city-wide race of 60,000 runners can feel like a community event.

I’ve been scrambling a bit to fit my training runs in this year. We’ve spent most of the summer with my in-laws up on North Tyneside. I like to do my running in the early mornings, if I can – but I also like to be there when the kids wake up, and they wake up stupidly early, so my running schedule has been extra-stupid. The coast here is wonderful for running though (even if it is a bit lacking in hills).

Richard (left) with his close friend Pete, who convinced him to run.

I’m really looking forward to the race-day atmosphere. It’s not often you get to run through streets lined with people cheering you along. Can’t wait for Local Hero to kick in again.

You can donate to Richard’s page here: Action Foundation: Richard’s page

You can follow him on Blue Sky here: @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social‬