Pain, Danger and Lots of Chocolate Milk – Jake Catterall Shares How He Ran the Alps (and 5 Lessons He Learned Along the Way)

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Jake Catterall’s record-breaking run across the Alps this summer began with a joke his mother made at the dinner table. Having already run the 5,000km from northern Norway to southern Spain in 2023, she light-heartedly suggested he cross every mountain in Europe. He thought it was a good idea.

The British runner has now gone from running a 5km in under 16 minutes to becoming the first person to complete the 2,000km Via Alpina red route through Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France and Monaco.

Sure, he found the best trail shoes for success (it’s the Hoka Speedgoat 6 if you’re curious) and he credits his Garmin Enduro 2 with saving him time in navigation, but we wanted to know what the special sauce was that propelled him through this 35-day adventure, so we sat down to find out how he did it and what he learned along the way.

1. Your body knows what’s coming

No one would be surprised if running the equivalent of Everest 12 and a half times in a month caused some strange side effects, but Catterall says that thanks to his training and preparation, there have been no nasty surprises. And that, he attributes, is down to the training and preparation.

“I spent the better part of the last nine months telling my body, ‘For 35 days you’re going to be in hell and you’re not going to have a chance to sit down, rest and take a break afterwards. You’re going to have to get up at 7 a.m. and get back on the horse at 8:30 a.m. and do it all again.'”

Using a progressive overload approach to training, he started with a moderate load and slowly increased the intensity of his workouts by just about two percent each week, so that by the time he arrived in Italy nine months later, he says, his body was able to predict what was coming and recover more quickly.

2. It’s fun to be a little weird

Catterall is originally from Leicester in England but lives in Amsterdam, which, if you don’t know, is pretty flat.

“It’s probably the worst place you could be to train for something like this.”

Making do with what he had, he said he did most of his training running on the roads around Amsterdam and doing a lot of climbing on the Stairmaster.

“There were a lot of really stylish, pretty guys and girls in the gym trying to get a nice butt and then I was just a mess, completely soaked in sweat, carrying this huge military backpack up the Stairmaster.

This isn’t about 10 minutes on the Stairmaster. Catterall worked hard to build up to two-hour sessions of aimlessly climbing stairs while carrying a 16-kilo backpack to prepare his muscles and ligaments for what was to come. Was he embarrassed? Not really.

“You just have to accept the fact that you’re going to look a little weird.”

3. There is pain and then there is pain

Ultramarathon running is synonymous with pain, but Catterall has learned that managing pain comes down to knowing the difference between the kind of pain you can’t overcome (“pain that hurts”) and the kind of pain you can live with.

He calls this last “pain that alters” and it’s the kind of thing you just have to accept and keep enduring.

“If it doesn’t kill you, you can keep going,” he laughed.

In the Alps, any pain and swelling he felt seemed to resolve on its own, and he continued to put one foot in front of the other.

4. A little danger is good for you

Hiking and trail running in alpine environments are inherently risky activities, and for Catterall, that’s exactly the point.

“We spend a lot of time worrying about things we don’t need to worry about.”

“Nowadays, being in stressful environments where you are completely alone for hours and if you twist your ankle you have to crawl up the mountain is a good thing. It helps us sort out what we consider bad in our lives.”

Spending time in true survival mode – although he admits help was always just an SOS call away – taught him how to manage stress and fear in a controlled environment, which can be useful both off the beaten path and on the ground.

“Becoming an adult is hard enough, so it’s best to prepare yourself properly and do things like these to help you manage your daily life.”

5. Chocolate milk is a super fuel

These days, the focus is on athlete nutrition. You might expect to hear that Catterall’s nutrition plan required a precise approach to race gels and salt tablets. In reality, his biggest priority was to get as many calories as possible without getting bogged down in the details.

Catterall weighs only about 145 pounds, making getting the required 4,000 calories a day even more difficult, especially since he had learned from his previous adventure that liquids work best.

Luckily, there is chocolate milk.

“It was my big calorie bomb,” he says, and he means it: by the end of the month, he had consumed no less than 40 litres.

On top of that, he describes his eating plan as “a cross between an Italian restaurant and a kids’ party,” filled with pasta and constant acidic and sugary snacks. Add to that plenty of Coca-Cola (five or six a day) and Red Bull to keep his energy levels up, and after 35 days and 2,000 miles, he had only lost about 6.5 pounds.