Strength is the reason I’m here. Not just here writing this, but here, starting another training cycle for what I still think of as the Super Bowl of trail running. Strength is what got me through Ultra Trail Snowdonia this year. Strength in my body, in my tendons, in my mind, the kind of strength that lets you carry a heavy pack in the rain when the wind is trying to take you off the mountainside, and lets you lock your core the second your foot skids on a wet stone.

Strength is non-negotiable. For me, as a coach and as a woman, I think it should be non-negotiable for anyone reading this, whether you call yourself a runner or not.

But this isn’t really a post about strength. It’s about nausea. It’s about vomiting so hard at 80 kilometres into Ultra Trail Mont Blanc last year that my watch triggered an emergency alarm, and the only thing I could keep down was flat Coke. It’s about the same thing happening again in May, fifty kilometres into Ultra Trail Snowdonia’s brutal 100K.

It’s about the ninety-nine days, now closer to seventy, between me and the start line of the full UTMB. 174 kilometres. Ten thousand metres of climbing. For context, Everest is 8,849 metres tall. I’ll climb higher than that, on foot, while trying to solve the exact problem that has stopped me twice before.

What Happened at Ultra Trail Snowdonia?

Ultra Trail Snowdonia is part of the UTMB series here in the UK, and the 100K is widely considered one of the hardest hundred-kilometre mountain races in the world. I’d done the 50-miler back in 2019 and DNF’d at Bedugallet, so there was unfinished business there. This year I wanted to test myself over the full distance.

The conditions were atrocious. We knew the weather was going to be bad, which meant the course, already dangerous, with slippery rock and brutal ascents and descents, became even more so, chewed up by the hundred-milers and eighty-K runners who’d gone through before us. What should have been runnable terrain became a war of attrition. Half the field didn’t finish.

I spent a lot of that race alongside a woman I’d only just met at Blaenau Ffestiniog, and we ended up staying together for hours simply because our pace matched and we didn’t annoy each other too much. That mattered more than I can say. And then, just past Llanrwst, at around fifty kilometres, the nausea reared its head again. Here we go, I thought. Because it has become a constant companion. It’s what stopped me making the cut-off at 80 miles at UTMB in 2025, and it showed up at races before that too. But over the last couple of years, as I’ve gone deeper into perimenopause, my body’s ability to be okay with what I used to be able to put into it has simply changed. I finished Snowdonia, and I was so proud of that. But I came out of it knowing that gut training is now priority number one, every single day, in this build.

Dropping the Ego, Going Back to Basics

Here’s the thing about the body changing: we either adapt with it, intelligently and strategically, or we get left behind. I think my nausea has partly been a symptom of my own failure to adapt smartly enough. So the solutions I’m chasing now start with going right back to basics.

I’ve been leaning on people who know far more than I do. My friend Rene McGregor, the sports dietitian I wrote a whole fuelling chapter with in my book, ‘Start Where You Are’. Paul Booth, the sports scientist and nutritionist who’s worked with elite athletes like Tom Evans and Ruth Croft on their UTMB prep. My friend Sophie Grant, a coach, elite athlete and La Sportiva runner. People have been extraordinarily generous with their expertise the moment they’ve heard what I’ve been going through.

The biggest gap I’ve found is that although I know my sodium and electrolyte needs, I’ve never actually tested my sweat rate, how much I’m losing per hour, in different temperatures, different conditions. So on runs now, especially the hour-long ones, I strip off and weigh myself before I leave, then weigh myself again when I get back. I’m keeping a running journal of the temperature, the session, my weight before and after, how I felt. Because my working theory is that I haven’t been getting in enough hydration to properly absorb the carbohydrates I’ve been taking on, and that I’ve possibly been overdoing the carbs altogether. We’re told, over and over, by every sports brand and influencer, that more carbs is always better. A hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty grams an hour. What Paul and the data have shown me is that I may not need anywhere near that.

So I’m dialling it back. Getting the water right first, then working out what the carbohydrate actually needs to look like, drink mix, gel, or something else entirely. I’ve been trialling rice balls. I’ve noticed that the second I start running, I don’t want anything sweet. My body says: savoury, please. So I’m testing everything, from VOOM products to competitors, sweet and savoury, gels against real food, not randomly, but strategically, one variable at a time, so I can actually tell what’s helping and what isn’t. I’m even wearing a stopwatch that reminds me to sip water every ten to fifteen minutes, because forgetting to drink regularly is one of my oldest bad habits.

I’m also trying to replicate race-day conditions as closely as I can, simulating the stop at an aid station, heart rate spiked, stomach uncertain, deciding in real time whether I want noodles or something completely different from what I’ve been eating on course. That’s exactly what a session like tonight’s is for: simulating the climb from Les Contamines up to Col du Bonhomme, the longest climb on the UTMB route, fuelling as I go and paying as much attention to *how* I take a product as *what* the product is.

The Body That Used to Work Doesn’t Work the Same Way Anymore

Earlier this year, after that dreadful early nausea at UTMB, Rene and I were concerned enough that I had blood tests done. They confirmed it: I’m through perimenopause. I’m a menopausal woman, on the other side of it now, young for it, but the women in my family have always gone through it early.

The last two years have made me feel like a completely different athlete. There’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes with perimenopause, that “who the hell am I” feeling. I used to be calm. Now I’m not, some days. What used to work in training, in recovery, in fuelling, simply stopped working, and I felt like a stranger in my own body. I cried more than once thinking “what’s happened to me, I’m not the athlete I was”.

I say this to my own athletes constantly: we can never fairly compare ourselves to who we were even a year ago. If someone tells me they want a PB from ten years ago and refuses to accept anything less, I’ll wish them well and step back, because they are not the same person, and beating yourself up over that is a losing game. Women are especially bad for it, because of everything else we’re expected to juggle. Comparison really is the thief of joy. I wouldn’t move forward at all if I measured myself against my twenty-year-old self.

Support Crew, and Why You Can’t Underestimate Them

My husband Neil and I have been married twenty-three years, together twenty-six. He is my chief crew, and he reads me even when I say nothing. At Snowdonia he was checking my wrappers, asking what I’d actually eaten out there, refusing to let me leave an aid station until I’d eaten ‘something’. He knows the games I can play with myself, and he doesn’t let me get away with them, which matters enormously, because it’s very easy to fool people who don’t know you that well.

The more decision-making I can strip away in training, the easier it is for crew to get me around. And they absolutely do get you around. Turning up at an aid station and just being handed what you need, chilli, cheese, whatever it is, without having to think, is a gift. You don’t want to answer questions when you’re deep in a race. You want your pack refilled and your next move decided for you by someone who already knows.

Strength Is the Secret Source

If you asked me to choose, on any given day, between a run and a strength session, I would choose strength every single time. It’s the reason I’m still doing this. Women in their forties and fifties lose five to eight percent of lean muscle mass, strength training isn’t optional, it’s foundational, for bone density, tendon resilience, everything.

It doesn’t need to look like a hundred-pounds-a-month gym membership or hours of your week. In ‘Start Where You Are’ I’ve got a whole section of bodyweight exercises you can do at home and progress from there. I also talk honestly about the fear a lot of women feel walking into a gym and looking over at the free weights, because gyms genuinely aren’t designed with us in mind.

Those racks are so often tucked at the back, and how you’re approached, or not approached, in that space can be its own small battle. I empower every woman I meet, through coaching, through the book, through what I post, to walk over there anyway. It is the secret sauce. When I’m in the gym, deadlifting, squatting, music turned up loud, I feel like a queen. That feeling follows me into every other part of my life.

Six Years of Black Trail Runners

Black Trail Runners turns six next month, and it still feels wild to think about. We launched it during COVID lockdown, against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black runner killed in America while out running. I remember sitting in a Zoom room with Sunny, Phil, Rachel, Dora, saying: there is nothing in this space that prioritises Black and Brown people. We need somewhere safe. We’d all stood on start lines as the only person of colour there.

It went further than we ever imagined. People messaging from San Francisco, from Brazil, asking to join a community that didn’t yet officially exist outside the UK. We became a campaigning charity as much as a community, our first campaign was an open letter asking UK race organisers why they weren’t even collecting ethnicity data. The fact that it had never occurred to them tells you everything about who they saw as their customer.

Everything we do sits under three pillars: access, skills, representation. Representation, because if you can’t see yourself in a space, some part of you assumes you don’t belong there, or aren’t safe there. We’re at just under two thousand members now, growing fastest in urban centres, and increasingly beyond the southeast, Leeds, Huddersfield, Liverpool, Manchester. There is a genuine hunger for this.

I’ve learned, over six years, how easily brands can try to turn you into a commodity, how many of them want the optics without the substance, because ultimately what they want is to sell trainers. There are a handful, adidas TERREX among them, who’ve understood from day one that this is about social justice, not marketing, and have stayed with us because of it. That understanding is still rare.

We Are Here Documentary

The documentary ‘We Are Here’, which I executive produced, follows a group of us at UTMB last year, the first year seven of us made it into UTMB finals week together. I’d wanted to make something like it for years, but nobody was interested before. I’m not the typical demographic brands invest in. I’m forty-eight, a mum, a grandmother, a proud back-of-the-pack athlete, not an elite. When the ballot came out and I saw seven of us had got in, I knew: if we’re ever going to do this, it has to be this year.

Watch YouTube for documentaries about women in trail running, there’s almost nothing told through a genuinely female lens on UTMB. That gap is the whole reason the film exists. Since it premiered, including a screening in Hebden Bridge this past weekend, people have been in tears, not just Black audiences, but allies, women, little girls. Someone sent me a video of a girl who never runs, running with her dog because the film moved her. It’s not really about seven Black women on the trails. It’s about motherhood, about not seeing yourself represented, about age, ability, circumstance — and that’s why it reaches so far.

Black to the Trails

We created Black to the Trails in 2022, in, where else, a Zoom call, when Sunny said: we have to actually build one of these ourselves. None of us set out to become event organisers. But with early support from Strava, we ran our first event at Dunstable Downs in 2023 (postponed six months after the Queen died days before our original date), and it sold out with a waiting list. It’s grown every year since, and this year we’re adding Bristol, supported by London Marathon Events, with plans to expand to a new city every year and to build a genuine talent pathway for ethnically diverse people into event organising, not just running.

Ten Years Sober

2026 marks ten years since I put down my last drink, in 2016, after hitting rock bottom. I couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol back then. I used it to numb, to deal with trauma I didn’t know how to face any other way. Recovery is a day at a time, I mean that literally, not as a platitude. In early sobriety I couldn’t go anywhere alcohol was present. I joined a fellowship and let people hold my hand through it.

I’ve lost people in the years since, including a woman who got sober alongside me, a mother of five, to cancer. Alcohol steals years, and it steals them quietly, while everything on the outside can still look intact. I had the house, the holidays, the business, the husband, the kids. Underneath, everything was falling apart, and I was the one letting it. I wanted oblivion, and alcohol was the fastest route there.

I could not do what I do now, build a campaigning charity centring Black people in a climate where some of our members genuinely have to ask themselves if it’s safe to show up, with the clarity that sobriety gives me. If you’re struggling with this, personally or in your family, please don’t suffer in silence. Shame is what keeps people trapped in addiction. I was so ashamed I couldn’t tell my own sister; I called an anonymous helpline instead, and it was answered by a woman who understood exactly where I was without me needing to explain much at all. There is another way, and it starts with asking for help, something I have always, always found hard to do.

Start Where You Are Book

After ‘Black Sheep’, my memoir about rural racism, which meant reopening a lot of my past, I always knew the next book, if there was one, had to be for women who don’t yet see themselves as runners. Every question I’ve ever been asked by the women I coach at Mums on the Run on a Friday morning went into it. It was a joyful book to write, in a way *Black Sheep* wasn’t. I fought for every detail, the illustrations, the ponytail height, a woman of colour with big thighs and big hair on the cover, because running books don’t usually look like that, and they should.

It’s aimed at absolute beginners, but ultra runners have told me they learned things from it too, whole sections on perimenopause, menopause, menstruation that nobody had explained to them properly before. I’m genuinely proud of it.

Small Steps, Big Strides

If you’re sitting with your own piece of unfinished business right now, here’s what I’d say: don’t look at the whole thing. Chunk it down. Don’t think about the finish line, think about the next nine kilometres, the next climb, the next aid station. Small steps, consistently taken, lead to the biggest changes you’ll ever see in your life. Bite, bite, bite, never the huge bite that makes you choke.

And when fear shows up, which it will, remember it’s often just False Evidence Appearing Real. Sometimes the fear is warranted. But more often than not, in my own life, it’s simply the voice trying to keep me small and safe. Sometimes you have to push past the edge of that safety net to see the dream actually become real.

Tonight I’m out simulating the climb from Les Contamines to Col du Bonhomme, the longest on the UTMB course. Ten and a half weeks to Chamonix. Unfinished business, still very much in progress.

If you’d like to listen to our VOOM Performance Podcast episode with Sabrina, you can here.