The new rock n’ roll: Meet the runner who swapped cigarettes and alcohol for trails and Tailwind
Running has seen Andy Goldsby go from overweight and out-of-sorts to parkrun and podcasts
Running is the new rock n’ roll.
At least that’s the case for podcaster, parkrun run director and trail convert Andy Goldsby.
As a run director at Arrow Valley parkrun and co-host on popular running podcast, Marmcast, Andy is fully emersed in the world of running.
But it wasn’t so long ago that he was living the life of a rock and roll star, minus the stardom.
So how did Andy go from cigarettes and alcohol to trails and Tailwind?
From ‘too many beers’ to the London Marathon:
To find the answer to that question, it’s necessary to rewind to a time when he was playing covers in a band, “staying up late, drinking far too many beers, eating completely the wrong food, and smoking a ridiculous amount of cigarettes”.
He told Running Tales: “I used to live and work abroad, in particular in Egypt, and I remember picking up my 200 Marlborough off the shelf of the supermarket, and that would last me probably four or five days, if that.
“I was an unbelievably heavy smoker. And also - I’m quite ashamed of this - I’d actually mock and look down on people who would exercise.
“In retrospect, I got myself into such a state with my own physical and mental health that I was looking for some way to deflect from that. I was almost owning the beer monster, fast food eating individual.”
Things had got so bad that a couple of people had even started listing Andy as ‘Fatty’ on their phones: “I used to pretend I didn’t care, but deep down, I knew I couldn’t go on like that.
“I’ve got two children, but I was at the risk of some very, very poor health. And something needed to change.”
Initially, running hadn’t been the solution that jumped to Andy’s mind. Instead, his mind conjured with the idea of starting walking a bit more or cutting down on the wrong types of food.
Ultimately though it was what he called a “token gesture” that ended up having profound consequences.
“I saw this message saying sign-up for the London Marathon ballot,” he said. “I was 20 stone at the time and I don’t actually remember the act of signing-up.
“This was back when the London Marathon had taken a year off because of Covid and they’d moved it to October 2021.
“When the email [telling him he had got in] came through, I thought it was spam. I remember it came up on my phone. I clicked on it, and then it was just this image of a woman celebrating with the words ‘you’re in’.”
The realisation of what he had done brought both fear and excitement, but it also came with the knowledge this was his “way out”.
He said: “That was the point where I could actually change something for the better. I wasn’t worried at the time about being able to run. It was about ensuring that I was healthy for my kids, and could play some sort of sport with them.
“I certainly wasn’t able to do that. When kicking a football around the back garden, I’d have to have a sit down after five minutes. I was thinking, ‘what sort of a dad am I to my kids?’
“I couldn’t even walk them to school in the morning without having to have a bit of a sit down. So, for me, getting in to London was probably a relief more than anything. I’d been given an opportunity and it was a huge one.
“It was the kick I absolutely needed. I shared it immediately on Facebook, so there was no going back. Once it was public, everybody knew it was happening and I had to commit to it.”
A shocked Andy contacted the only person he knew who ran - the mother of one of his children’s friends - to get some advice. She suggested the Couch to 5k app as a good starting place and before Andy knew it, he was wheezing along with Michael Johnson’s voice in his ear.
The former Olympic champion accompanied him as he headed out at 5am each morning, the early starts constituting an attempt to avoid anyone seeing him trying to run.
He said: “I remember the point where I thought it could be possible. I bundled in the door one day and I’d run for eight minutes without stopping.
“It was the most incredible thing. And I was buzzing off that. From there, I just kept going and by summer I’d started seriously upping the distance.”
By the time the marathon arrived, Andy’s training consisted of running for 25 minutes, before walking for five to recover and starting to run again. This process would be repeated for as long as he could continue moving forward.
On the big day, he was in the final wave to set off but not only did he get underway, he managed to complete the race.
“I remember crossing the start line and just laughing my head off for the first mile at the absolute absurdity of me running the London Marathon,” he said.
“I was the last person on earth who should have been doing that, but there I was, doing it anyway. From that point I knew that was my chance to make a big change.”
He added: “People were having sweepstakes on what mile I would pull out. I don’t think anybody had me down to finish it.
“But I got there and did it. And probably that moment, I don’t want to sound melodramatic when I say it changed my life, but I generally believe it did because it gave me that out.
“It gave me that reason to actually get active, get fit and fall in love with a sport that I genuinely could not live without now.”
After finishing at London, Andy immediately booked himself into the Brighton Marathon and he hasn’t looked back since.
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‘Running is a shared bond over suffering’:
If it sounds as if Andy’s love affair with running was immediate, the reality was it took him some time to see the sport as anything more than a way of getting fitter and healthier, and losing some weight.
Even another of his running loves - parkrun - left him underwhelmed at first. Andy is now a run director at Arrow Valley parkrun in the midlands, one of a vast host of free weekly 5k events that take place at 9am on Saturday morning up and down the country, but his first event was almost his last.
“I remember doing my first parkrun,” he said, “and it took me another eight months to get back into it because I turned up and everybody shot off at the start.
“I was dead last, right at the back, trying to get round and just thinking, ‘no, there’s definitely better ways I’m going to spend Saturday morning than this’.
“I just focused on getting the marathon done, but slowly, the more I ran, the more I suddenly realised that if I had to push my training run a day later, I got a little bit, not angry, but a little bit antsy.
“I realised I was starting to miss running. I realised I needed those training runs and then I suppose the penny dropped. I actually did love running. It was a very, very strange realisation.”
It wasn’t long before Andy was back at parkrun and drawing inspiration from all the other runners tackling the weekly run: “You bond over the shared experience of wanting to get better.
“It’s a shared bonding over suffering. You forge relationships. Runners are probably - 99.9% - some of the most inspirational, loveliest people you’re going to meet and the most supportive as well.
“Everybody celebrates each other’s successes. That’s what I love about it. I slowly got coerced back into parkrun, and the more you show up, the more faces you recognise and you’re finishing with the same people each week because you’ll run roughly the same pace.
“And then you find you’re progressing with those people or you’re suddenly running with somebody and helping them to their fastest parkrun.”
These days, Andy’s running journey has taken him on to the road less travelled - or rather, into the world of trail running.
“I think I did far too many road events, and now my head’s been turned by scenery,” he said. “There’s also the fact that nobody cares about your time on the trails.
“That’s a lovely, lovely way of looking at it. I’m going to get one last thing out of my system before I probably commit myself to the trials forever next year.
“I’ve signed up for the Shakespeare Marathon. I’ve done London, I’ve done the Brighton Marathon, but I haven’t gone back to that distance properly.
“I think I owe myself a proper training block. And I just want to answer the question, ‘how well can I run a marathon?’.
“That’s one thing I feel is missing off my little checklist. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong, that’s fine. But as long as I can turn up at the start line, thinking I’ve got myself as best prepared as I possibly can be, then I’ll be happy.
“Once I’ve done that in April, then, as far as I’m concerned, the Boston 13s can go in the bin. My road shoes will literally just be there for parkrun.
“I’m going to surrender myself to the trials forever, because that’s what I genuinely love doing.”
Andy even has one eye on the possibility of an ultra marathon in the future, although for now he is focused on 10km and half-marathon trail events - along with exploring his local area.
“I like the idea of running with no pressure,” he said. “Of setting yourself the distance, but not too much of a time goal and just enjoying it.
“If you want to walk, have a walk, have a sandwich, have a drink, and maybe even keep these things off Strava as well.
“For me, it’s purely about exploration. I’m always asking myself the question, ‘where’s this going? what’s down there?’ I love my mooches. And sometimes it gets me into trouble. I’ll realise I’ve probably gone a little further than I planned and I’ve still got to get back.
“But other times it works out perfectly and I’ve discovered a whole area that I wouldn’t have come across before.”
Music, running and thunderboxes - welcome to Marmcast:
While running had brought Andy the fitness and happiness he craved, one thing he hadn’t expected to find along the way was a new role as a podcast host.
As one half of Marmcast, he has been talking all things running alongside co-host Tim Stent since June this year. The pair bring a relaxed and occasionally irreverent combination of chat, competition, music and running to the podcasting world.
The podcast is a spin-off from Tim’s Middle Aged Running Man (MARM) YouTube channel, which has recently reached 10,000 subscribers.
Andy told Running Tales he had been a long-term fan of the channel, which he stumbled across while looking for a new race to do.
“I think Tim only had about 30 subscribers then,” he said. “Over the years, after the occasional comment on his channel, Tim - as he put it in his own words - slid into my DMs, or I may have done it the other way around, and we started chatting from there.”
Further reading:
Want to know more about the MARM - read our story on Tim Stent here:
They would occasionally bump into each other at races or parkrun events, but it was music that eventually sowed the podcast seed.
Despite leaving his faux rock n’ roll lifestyle behind, Andy remains part of The Indigo Sunsets - described as two blokes from the West Midlands tapping into their 90s influences.
He said: “I’d found some old recordings of me playing guitar, from probably about five, six years ago when I was writing songs for the Indigo Sunsets.
“I thought it’d be a nice idea to share where these songs started from and then what they became.
“I was posting them on Instagram and Tim started liking them. Within a few weeks, he messaged me and said, ‘I’ve been having this idea to do a podcast but I’ve actually wanted to do a combination of talking about running but also introducing some music as well’.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Tim invited Andy to be his co-host and Marmcast was born.
The podcast features an hour or more of running related chat, including Andy and Tim rating races they have ran on everything from the scenery to the ‘thunderboxes’ (aka toilets), and a quiz where contestants have to guess the TV and movie theme tunes Andy plays on his guitar.
It has also spawned a new Indigo Sunsets song dedicated to Tim’s running, again called ‘Middle Aged Running Man’, while each episode ends with a song from the band or a special guest musician.
“It’s basically two guys who love running, but also have a fairly similar sense of humour,” Andy said.
He told Running Tales that the amount of planning that goes into the podcast is minimal: “We’ve got a vague idea based on what we’ve both been up to over the weekend, but the conversation is purely natural. Nothing is scripted.
“We probably have about five minutes beforehand where we’re literally just catching up with each other very quickly. Then we just hit the record button and go for it.
“We’ve got an idea who we’ve got on as the guest for the week and we generally know we need to be phoning them about 8.20pm, so we’re keeping an eye on the time but everything else is purely off the cuff.
“Then I have to spend about two hours afterwards cutting out all the bits that are highly inappropriate.”
Despite the seemingly haphazard nature of the podcast, Andy believes it has worked - and the reception to it seems to back that up. Marmcast debuted at number one in the UK Running Podcasts charts and, although it hasn’t managed to maintain the top spot, continues to rank highly.
It has also spawned a Strava running group and gathered a community of committed Marmers on Facebook.
“Tim, for people who follow him on YouTube, is just like that in real life. He’s a cracking guy - hilarious, and an absolutely brilliant, unbelievably fast runner,” Andy said.
“I really enjoy making the pods with him.”
Positive steps to mental and physical wellbeing:
Andy’s advice to anyone who feels the need to embrace their own fitness, or running, journey is that they can do it - after all, he was that person and he did it.
He said the first step is to acknowledge that you may need to change something: “You may be getting health signals already, you may be finding it more difficult to do things like go for a very short walk or climb the stairs.
“And you’ll know deep down that things can’t go on that way forever. But then you ask yourself the question, ‘how do I change this?’ It doesn’t necessarily need to be that ridiculous thing [the London Marathon] I did.
“When people say, ‘if I can do it, you can do it,’ I don’t think anybody really believes that phrase, but I have to implore people that I was that person - I genuinely was that person who would walk my daughter to school 400 yards from home and feel I’d done my exercise for the day because I had to sit down.
“I was that unhealthy and it is genuinely possible to change. When we say go for a run, we don’t mean the World Athletics Championship or the London Marathon. That’s not what you’re aspiring to do, you’re aspiring to get moving.
“And that’s the first step. Even if you do a little bit of a shuffle for 30 seconds, then stop. Everything starts to accumulate. And the more you do it, the easier it will become.
“So, when people say, ‘if I can do it, anyone can do it’, we’re not saying if I can do it, run a marathon. What we’re saying is if you can take that step and actually start to improve your health and just look at it as a positive in terms of, ‘I’m moving, I’m getting active, I’m outside’, then you will start to feel the benefits.
“Please, if you’re thinking about it, and if you’ve recognised in yourself that actually there’s something you need to do, make that step, make that positive step.
“Whether it’s Couch to 5k or even just a commitment to start walking, absolutely do it. You owe it to yourself 100% and you will feel better and it will improve your mental health, it will improve your physical health, and you never know where it will lead.”
It doesn’t get more rock and roll than that.
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