Meeting The MARM: How a middle aged running man became a YouTube sensation

Tim Stent's sarcastic running videos won't teach you how to run faster or what trainers to wear - but you will laugh out loud

Sep 23, 2024

‘I don’t stretch. I don’t eat healthily. I’m nearly 46 and I’m knackered.’

As introductions on YouTube running channels go, Tim Stent’s welcome message on his first Middle Aged Running Man (MARM) video has more than a hint of unorthodoxy about it.

But then Tim isn’t your usual running influencer. In fact, he isn’t a running influencer at all.

As his YouTube biography says, ‘Middle Aged Running Man is a running channel with a middle aged man in it. Running.’

It’s not an expert account of the best new trainers, how to stretch properly, running tips and tricks or advice on how to become a great runner.

Nor does it provide a guts and glory recount of mind over matter, the conquest of unenviable odds or a look inside the protagonist’s soul.

Instead, Middle Aged Running Man is a series of often sarcastic, sometimes caustic, occasionally whimsical race reviews and runs.

Tim sits in his car talking about the run to come, looks around the town or area he’ll be running through - “a pigeon eating vomit” was Northampton’s highlight - and waves a phone on a selfie-stick about as he weaves past other runners.

Oh, and it’s brilliant. Funny, honest, beautiful and brutal, and fully embracive of running in all its idiosyncratic glory.

Losing weight and becoming a ‘skulduggerous’ runner:

Long before MARM was conceived, Tim started running in 2014 to counter eating too much and find some calm away from a “very hectic” home life.

“My wife had just had twin girls,” he said. “I've got three daughters and it was all very hectic at home.

“I wasn't going out very much. I was eating quite a lot. And my mate, John, had lost a shed load of weight - which I hated and was frankly furious about.

“I said to him one day, ‘how have you managed to shift all that timber?’ And he said he’d been running.”

Tim said their first run together - around four miles - was a “bit of a struggle,” but he enjoyed it.

The pair chatted away, Tim wearing a pair of old trainers he’d found under the stairs, and before long he had agreed to run the Shakespeare Half-Marathon in Stratford.

At the time entering a half-marathon was “a real leap of faith for both of us,” but Tim told Running Tales he pressed a button in his head that meant he was going to do it whatever happened.

“I remember telling people at work, and they were killing themselves laughing,” he added, “saying ‘you'll never do it’.”

But Tim was quickly becoming hooked and it turned out his friend, John, was “a less keen runner than me” to the point he even started “going on secret runs on my own”.

He said: “I was skulduggerous to be honest with you.

“We started the race and he was tailing off a little bit and I said, ‘mate, can I go for it?’ He was just about to say, yeah, and I'd just gone. I left him.

“And it was great. We finished that race and after that he stopped running completely. He was beaten by a guy who had a washing machine on his back, but I did alright.”

Tim completed the race in a more than respectable one hour 40-something (he can’t remember the exact time), and running had become embedded in his life.

The leap of faith that created the Middle Aged Running Man:

These days the Middle Aged Running Man has attracted more than 3,500 subscribers and was named as one of the ‘running channels you must watch’ on YouTube, but Tim admits to being “a bit hazy” about his decision to launch a channel.

He said a couple of friends suggested he was “a good talker” and should “do a radio broadcast about running”.

“I went out with my phone and just recorded a couple of bits of me chatting as I was running around, edited it together and had to learn how to use YouTube,” he said.

“The early videos are awful, and I remember pressing go on posts and thinking, ‘what am I doing here?’”

An intro video, which dropped on February 5, 2022, consisted of simple white writing on a black background and revealed how in 2018, Tim had ‘decided to run three half-marathons in three weekends. It nearly killed me’.

It goes on to reveal he later - in 2021 - ran a half-marathon every weekend of the year, and was about to try and do the same again in 2022 but this time would be recording his efforts.

And so, the Middle Aged Running Man was born.

Tim called those first videos “a real leap of faith because you are so vulnerable.

“You’re effectively saying, ‘please, please like me, please don't be too cruel about what I'm posting’.

“You are also pretty well saying, ‘l think I've got something to offer here’.”

He said, ultimately, he just “got stubborn” and carried on making videos.

From anti-social outsider to courting the MARMY Army:

One way Tim started to attract attention was by creating videos which embraced the outsider position he found himself in when he entered races.

He said: “Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and everyone had got all the right gear.

“And I was literally just turning up in baggy shorts, a t-shirt, and this awful pair of Nikes that I had just bought.

“I hadn't got a clue what I was doing and I felt a little bit of an outsider. And I thought, that would be quite funny. I'll just do the videos from the point of view of some normal bloke who's quite bewildered by everything that he's seen.”

The result was that Tim, despite being “actually not a bad runner,” began putting the videos together “in a mocking kind of way”.

“I was quite sarcastic, taking the mickey a little bit,” he said. “But people loved it. I'm exaggerating. Let's tone it down a little bit - people seemed to quite like it.”

He said he was lucky enough to develop an “incredibly loyal” audience. And despite his pretence of being a bit anti-social, Tim said he has met scores of interesting people while running and making the videos.

“I play up to this thing where I pretend to be a little bit anti-social,” he said, “and, when I first started running, I think I had become a little bit anti-social.

“I've always had friends and gone out and all that sort of stuff. But when you start having a family and you start having work commitments and stuff, you tend to go out less and less and you tend to see really good friends less and less.

“So, I played up to, at the start, this idea that I'm a bit anti-social. I'd stand at the side and avoid people, but the running community has not let me get away with it.

“The people are amazing. If I go to a race, a lot of people will come over and say they like the videos or shout MARM.

“And I've loved it. Absolutely loved it. I love getting chatting to people. When anyone does come over, I'm overly nice because I don't want people to think I'm an idiot!

“But, as I say, the running community are an incredible bunch of people. They are really supportive.”

Supporters - dubbed by Tim as The MARMY Army - have even turned up at races with banners, something he says is always a huge surprise.

“Someone asked me the other day if I write stuff in advance,” he said, “and, genuinely, I don't at all.

“I've found a little format where I start off by talking in the car and I generally just say where I'm going, what I think about where I'm going, and a little bit about what's happened during the week.

“It’s great because you're in the car and you're on your own and no one can overhear you. And, I can say whatever I like.

“To answer your question, it absolutely surprises me that anyone would watch the car claptrap and any of the other stuff actually.”

Tim said once races are underway there is always plenty to talk about, whether he has done it before, learnt something on the way round or bumped into an interesting fellow runner.

Much of his content comes from the simple joy running, but he does worry his love of the sport doesn’t always come across.

He said: “I am totally addicted to it. If I could, I'd run every single weekend and I’ve filled up this year with races.

“I’m really interested in talking about running. I was chatting to a guy at the end of the Kenilworth race - another YouTuber - and we were talking for about 20 minutes.

“Just about trainers, trainers, trainers, trainers. And, we were both - well, I'd like to think we both were - really into it.

“Genuinely, I'm so into running. It's so addictive - all aspects of it.

“The only thing I can't do, or I don't feel as if I can do, is I just don't know enough about it to be convincing.

“I couldn't do a shoe review channel. I couldn't talk about stretches because I don't do any. I couldn't talk about pacing because I don't know anything about pacing. Basically, I don't know what I'm doing.”

What next for the MARM… you decide:

That self-confessed lack of expertise sometimes plays on Tim’s mind when ruminating on what comes next for the channel.

“I'm not very creative at all,” he said, “essentially I book races so that I can make videos of them.

“And then doing the videos gives me an excuse. I really book races to run them for my own fun and enjoyment.

“But they're great, and they're ready made for content. I'm probably not that good, when I'm not racing, at thinking of little formats for videos.

“I'm starting to watch a lot of other YouTubers and if they're running a race, they'll do six or seven weeks of videos of a training block, for example.

“I watched The Forest of Dean Runner the other day, and he was doing this training block for Abingdon Half-Marathon.

“He’s really good. He knows loads about running. He talks about what trainers he's wearing and how he's pacing and all that sort of stuff.

“It's really interesting. I'm not that good at that. I just kind of go from one race to another race to another race, partly just because I lack confidence talking about running at that level.

“But when you ask me about what's next, I’m thinking, ‘what am I going to do?’

“2024 has been really busy and I've been really chuffed because the channel's grown quite a lot this year.

“But what am I going to do in 2025? I can't really think of anything!”

Tim urged anyone who has any ideas to get in touch, adding: “I could do with a bit of help, really, to be honest with you, because I can't think of anything other than doing exactly the same thing, which is just turning up to races, being sarcastic, talking in the car and going home.”

But in a world where a knackered middle-aged runner has already found thousands of fans, there is, of course, a fairly large chance that’s exactly what everyone wants.