Anna Harding "WHEN I DID 14 MILES FOR THE FIRST TIME, I CRIED, BECAUSE I COULDN’T BELIEVE I’D DONE IT!"
You may know Anna from the Running Channel, as well as the pages of this magazine, but we thought it was high time we found out more about this long-distance runner…
Words: Rachel Ifans
WARRIOR
"I love seeing other people doing races because it makes me want to sign up for them too. I did Race to the King as my first ultra because I'd seen somebody else doing it on Instagram and I thought, ‘Oh, that looks really fun, I’ll sign up to that!’
Meet Anna Harding from the Women’s Running gang; she runs ultras and reports back, and she also writes our Running Skills features and specialises in super practical advice. You may think Anna, who’s run 12 marathons and eight ultras and skipped from race to race since her first marathon back in 2017, would have a stack of race dates in the calendar for 2024 and a list of PB ambitions… But something has shifted, she says. “Over the last few years, my goals have changed so it’s not about chasing times anymore. It’s about having fun and doing the things that excite me.”
Anna knows what she wants when it comes to running, but it doesn’t mean she’ll stop taking on big challenges. She loves watching documentaries about runners and she’s the first to admit a girl crush on most of the mad racers she sees on them. “Every year,” she smiles, “I follow races like The Spine, The Arc of Attrition and the Centurion Winter Downs 200, and it’s all incredible. But I don’t think it’s for me – I’ll just stick to the smaller ultras I think.”
One thing’s for certain; you know someone’s a proper runner when they classify an ultra as a ‘small one’!
Be More Bav
Anna’s running journey started in 2017 when her friend Robert Bavington, aka Bav, was killed in a one-punch attack on a night out. The friendship group came up with a fundraiser in his memory called Be More Bav.
Anna explains: “Bav just never said no to things, so we all tried to Be More Bav in our own ways. I decided to run a marathon because I’d never done it before and I thought it would be hard. I booked a place in the Edinburgh Marathon, started training and went from couch to marathon between January and May 2017.”
It was dark and cold when Anna started running and she remembers the bog-standard there-’n’-back road runs at the outset being a bit uninspiring. That said, it didn’t take her long to get bitten by the bug. She loved finding new places to run in th
