The Clock Keeps Ticking
by Sharon Gayter

Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-907652-43-1
RRP: £14.99 - Now on sale for £8.99
272 pages with 28 images

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Front cover is a long lonely trek on the last 50 miles of my LEJOG trek (© Alan Young) and inset is shortly after finishing at John O’Groats (Newsquest (Yorkshire and North East) Ltd ©).
Picture on back (shown left) is the last hour of the Commonwealth Championships 24 hours, my gold medal winning performance.

Reviews

“If I could run as well as you can write, then I'd be breaking records too”
Sharon Griffiths, The Northern Echo

“Sharon is a good friend and an amazing athlete, with an incredible dedication and strength of spirit. Her story is a truly inspiring read”
Baroness Grey-Thompson DBE, Paralympian

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Sample the book: Download Chapter 1 (RTF file, 17KB)

Synopsis

Sharon Gayter is one of the world’s top ultra distance runners. On 15th September 2006, Sharon Gayter’s long standing dream to break the Guinness World Record by running from Land’s End to John O’Groats came true; 837 miles in a blistering 12 days, 16 hours and 22 minutes and 3 seconds. In 2009, Sharon ran 140 miles (226km) to win the Commonwealth Championships gold medal. Only three women in the world ran better that year.

This is the story of an extremely shy, skinny, withdrawn child, with a difficult childhood, who needed to find her way forward. After watching the clock tick the days needed turning into life and so her story begins, embarking on life’s long journey. When a friend gave her a first pair of running shoes, she could barely stagger half a mile without collapsing exhausted. But Sharon Gayter was driven to run, running gave her freedom, to discover who she was and to make her own life on her own terms with spectacular success. She describes living life to the full, by setting and achieving goals, from a bus driver to a university lecturer, from barely running a mile without collapsing exhausted to running the length of the country, from remoteness in Libya to the heat across Death Valley, from the mountains of the Alps to the flatness of the track.

The journey started by simply wanting to run the London Marathon. Having had that experience of running beyond what she thought she was capable in that marathon she tried running further. Her love was always the hills, backpacking and living at one with nature. The big move from Cambridge to the North East found the longer events she was to excel at, 50 miles, then 100 miles and then the chance of competing for her country.
After leaving Cambridge at a bus driver, she continued this job in Middlesbrough, where she met and married her true love, Bill, who was the final healing part of her life. It was the trauma of being beaten up by three thugs to steal the bus takings that made her move direction and she returned to education. As a mature student on a Sport Science degree she excelled again, the knowledge she gained was put to use to become a superior athlete, representing her country at 100km events and 24 hours, now in excess of 25 caps for her country. In one lesson at university she learnt about goal setting, something she had been doing all along but not realising it. In that lesson she wrote down what would be her ultimate goal, a dream to achieve. That is when she put in writing her ambition was to break the world record running the longest thing you could in this country – end to end. So the seed was planted to run from Land’s End to John O’Groats. It took 12 years to return to this goal and it was finally achieved.

After setting up her own business she returned to university, studying for her MSc and then as a lecturer. The running became more extreme: along the way she took part in The Flora 1000 Mile Challenge, certainly the most time consuming at 1 mile every hour, 1000 hours is almost 6 weeks; the Moravian Ultra Marathon (7 marathons in 7 days); Gortex Transalpine run, 7 days on high alpine routes from Germany to Austria, Switzerland and Italy; the Verdon Canyon, 4 days of scaling the face of the Europe’s highest canyon with incredible heat; more remote, running across the Libyan desert with only a GPS for navigation; the classic Marathon des Sables, certainly not the toughest by Sharon’s standards, she classes this as the dirtiest (but also great camaraderie); then hotter in the Badwater Ultramarathon, 135 miles across Death Valley, and so what next?

This is an incredibly inspiring journey. You will feel you have run every step and have blisters on your toes, whether you are a runner or not! Having represented her country for 17 years at what has to be the toughest sport in UK Athletics’, she will take you on an amazing journey like no other while the clock continues to tick, tick, tick.....