Sam Kirchin: The bereaved dad who found solace in the running community
When Sam lost his wife Lyndsey, it was runners at Fordy Runs who became his biggest supporters
Sam Kirchin doesn’t like to think about where he’d be without running.
The father-of-five’s world was thrown upside down just over two years ago when his wife Lyndsey tragically died following complications with a long-term illness.
At a time when he was, in his own words, a “complete wreck,” it was running which provided him with the purpose to keep moving forward.
And it was strangers from the running group he was a member of who helped him take on and run the London Marathon in Lyndsey’s memory.
Sam told Running Tales that the backing of “people I’d never even met” and the power of a sport which he once hated enabled him to move away from day’s spent in bed dreading what the future held.
He has now embraced the running community that helped him by volunteering as a pacer at Northampton parkrun.
Of course, there are times when he still struggles with the loss of his ‘soulmate’ and life as a single parent, but Sam’s running support network is there on both the darkest days and during his favourite runs.
The story of Sam’s three marathons:
Like so many other people, Sam started running seriously during the Covid pandemic.
The rugby lover said he had been putting on weight even before lockdown started, despite having ran “on and off” for a few years previously.
“We lived in a flat at the time, with no garden,” he said. “I thought, ‘this is going to be bad,’ so I started running.”
Back then, Sam had no love for the sport. He described himself as a rugby lad who had to stop after 300 metres and would just run from one lamppost to the next.
“Honestly, I hated running,” he said. “It was never fun for me. I struggle with asthma and I’m a bigger guy, but the more consistent I’ve become, the more my asthma has been under control.
“The first time I ran 5km, it blew my mind. I still remember doing it now. It took me four or five months of running to get to doing 5km non-stop.”
By February 2021, he had become a regular runner and it was after one morning half-marathon that Lyndsey revealed she had entered him into that year’s London Marathon - as a birthday present.
That was the year the prestigious race had been postponed from April until October due to the pandemic, giving Sam some extra time to train. Even so, it was to be the first actual race he’d taken part in.
“I’d never even been to parkrun,” he told Running Tales. “I would never have run a marathon if she hadn’t basically told me I had to.
“It was the same thing with the next one. And then, I’ve got my two medals on the wall and she’s going, ‘oh look, you’ve got space, there’s a third one you’ve got to do’.
“That’s pretty much the story of my three marathons.”
Despite being somewhat pressganged into those races, Sam said Lyndsey’s support, which included doing much of the fundraising required to enter them, had been essential.
“I don’t think you realise at the time how much you need that support,” he said. “For the first two, I wasn’t part of a running club.
“I didn’t have any friends in the running world then. It was family who came out and supported me the whole way.
“Lyndsey made everything easy, so I didn’t have to worry about the logistics because it’s so stressful just thinking about running that far without having to deal with everything else like accommodation and food.”
Days spent in bed and the running club that saved him:
Lyndsey and Sam’s happy life together was played out against the background of long-term illness. She had auto-immune liver disease, which meant her immune system didn’t recognise her liver and as a result attacked it as if it was a foreign body.
The condition was there when the couple ran the only race they did together, the London Landmarks Half-Marathon, preventing Lyndsey from training properly and meaning she was constantly tired.
In Sam’s words, preparing fully for the race was “nearly impossible” for her, but she had been determined to finish it.
“We run-walked the first 10k,” Sam said, “and then it got a bit too much, so we walked the rest of it. But it was an incredible experience to do it together.”
But the illness wasn’t finished, and when Lyndsey became pregnant with their fifth child in 2023, it became too much for her and her body started to shut down.
A liver transplant followed and she was able to give birth to baby Koa at Birmingham Women’s Hospital. But, sadly, it wasn’t enough to save her and she died on January 2, 2024.
Sam’s life was unsurprisingly plunged into darkness. He told Running Tales that for the eight or nine months afterwards, he lost his way, spending days in bed and feeling depressed.
It was running - and those connected to the sport - which came to his rescue.
“At first, I wouldn’t say running wasn’t in my mind at all, but it certainly wasn’t a priority. But I knew I needed to do something,” he said. “It was hard, very hard. But I signed up for London again. I needed to do that third one and did it for her.
“You have to be quite selfish when you’re doing a marathon, and at first it was hard to try and do something for myself, to try and put myself first and make time for me.”
He added: “Until I started marathon training in September or October [2024], for that first eight or nine months, I didn’t do a lot of anything. I was in a bad place.
“There were days which I just spent in bed. I knew I was putting weight on and was depressed. But as soon as I started training, I felt ‘I’ve got to do this. Not just for me, for everyone’.
“When you’re in the headspace I was in, it’s no good for anyone really - especially yourself.”
That was when Sam found the support of Fordy Runs, the club he had already been a member of but which now became so much more than a group of fellow runners.
“I think if it wasn’t for them being supportive, I might have disappeared from running for good,” he said. “But club members were there for me, talking to me, and not necessarily about running - just about anything in life.
“People from Fordy Runs have done more for me than some of my really close friends. I’d never even met half of them, but they were messaging me every day, checking in on me.
“Without that, I’d have really struggled. Even to this day, I still get a message from someone in the group every day.”
Sam even met many of the club’s members during a visit to the National Running Show just two or three weeks after losing Lyndsey.
He said at the time he was a “complete wreck,” but had been buoyed by the support he received from “random people” who he said took care of him as if he was a member of their family.
Giving back by pacing at parkrun:
If Fordy Runs has become a second family for Sam, he’s gone on to find a third one through parkrun. These days, he can regularly be found pacing 35 minutes at the Northampton event, which he described as “just incredible”.
“Sometimes, because of the pacing, there are hundreds of people who know my name,” he said. “And I don’t remember half of their names, but I recognise their faces every week.
“Running with people every Saturday morning is great. I look forward to that run most out of all my runs during the week.”
He added that being able to give something back to the running community by pacing others to their goals is hugely uplifting.
“The comments I get afterwards make my day,” he said. “It just makes you happy. We’re lucky to have four or five regular pacers [at Northampton].
“It’s a massive thing. For a lot of people, parkrun is often the one run a week where they can gauge their progress.
“For me, it’s just one of my weekly runs, I’m not going out of my way but I choose to put a vest on and do a certain time - and it becomes a great thing.”
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