The Calm Stream

Cascade Half Marathon, Turner OR - 18th January 2026

The week before this race was a mess, not the training kind of mess (that would be more preferable), the life kind. The sort where things shift just enough to leave you slightly off-balance and never quite settled, personal circumstances moving under my feet and with it that low persistent dread of being unmoored when you’re supposed to be locked in.

On paper everything was fine, I was deep into the Tarawera build which meant ticking off 95–100 mile weeks, with sessions at BTC absorbing well and the numbers stacked up. Fitness was there but there was a disconnect where the body was doing what it should but the mind was lagging behind, I kept waiting for the race to become a mental war.

Cascade Half sits in Turner, a small town in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley, about 20 minutes south of Salem. Flat country roads stretching out between open farmland, no real features to hide behind, it’s the kind of course that removes variables; no climbs, no technical distractions, just rhythm, effort, and honesty.

The race itself has a quiet but meaningful purpose behind it. Put on by the Willamette Valley Road Runners, it helps raise money for the local high school track team and you feel that when you’re there; low-key, community-driven, no frills. Just people who just care about running, and about giving something back to it in their local community.

It starts and finishes at Cascade Junior High, where you can stay warm in the gym right up until the last moment, which in January matters more than people think. Step outside and you’re greeted by sharp, cold air, crunchy frost underfoot, and that blindingly bright, still blue Oregon morning where everything feels slightly paused. The bite of the air reminded me of cold winter mornings on the South Downs back in the UK.

In the weeks leading in I’d been working with my sports psychologist, Nickademus, on a simple visualisation: a rock in a stream, where thoughts come (negative, intrusive, whatever they are) but they’re just debris. Sticks, leaves, carried by the current. They move around you, past you, gone. You don’t engage. You don’t fight the water. You just sit.

I expected a torrent that day; a white-water surge of noise, doubt, distraction, everything that had been building all week, instead I got a calm, still stream.

Standing on the start line something released. Not dramatically, just a quiet unwinding where the noise faded, like someone turning the volume down until click, nothing It’s a feeling I’ve had in races before, but to be honest rarely when I’ve needed it this much. That narrowing of focus where everything external loses its weight and all that’s left is forward motion.

My BTC teammate Anthony was there, we jogged around the frosty track as the sun rose above us, catching up whilst under no elusion of the task ahead, but there was a shared sense we could so something special. We’d done a 4 x 2 mile session together on New Year’s Eve at the Nike HQ campus and found something in that workout, one of those rare alignments where pace stops being something you chase and just becomes something you share.

We settled into that again early in those first few miles. The first 8 miles at completed marathon effort, controlled and unforced; that meant no surges, no posturing, just steady running that was controlled to avoid excessive fatigue. Conversation came and went, just enough to stay relaxed but not enough to break rhythm, it felt simple, the kind of simple that only shows up when things underneath are properly aligned.

Around 8 miles in, the race began to stretch slightly; Anthony had a brief stomach stitch and in a moment of racing mastery, eased off for 10–20 seconds before it become something more sinister (10 seconds in the present can save 10 minutes if kicked down the road and ignored). It would have been easy to react, to lift the pace and turn it into a race right there but I didn’t. I carried on at marathon effort, steady and unchanged, I’d been given a clear instruction from Elliot Heath in the lead-in: 'only race the final miles if you have to'. Not before, and certainly not out of instinct or ego, so I let the gap form briefly but never purposefully pursued it. It wasn’t hesitation, it was intent, the goal wasn’t to win the race at 8 miles, rather, the goal was to execute, Tarawera NZ, not Turner.

I kept the pace controlled by letting things come rather than forcing anything early, holding that same internal stillness, trusting that if I needed to change gears later, I could. ’Smooth not straining’ as I often remind my athletes.

The final miles never became a fight but they were honest, the kind of discomfort that’s expected, one that feels contained not chaotic, not overwhelming. Just the cost of running well.

I crossed the line in 72 minutes. Anthony came in just behind, second on the day with a big PR.

The time itself wasn’t really the point but what it represented mattered more; Mid-build, on accumulated fatigue, with a week that could have easily derailed things mentally, I’d found something steady, something quiet, proof that even when things feel unsettled externally, there’s still a way to access control internally.

Tarawera was 4 weeks away.