Dawn To Run
The Early Bird Run Crew focuses on physical and mental wellbeing
‘I CAN GET UP AN HOUR EARLIER AND SPEND THAT HOUR ON MYSELF’
RUNNING FIVE KILOMETRES at 6am every weekday probably doesn’t seem that tough to Ben Davis, considering the sporting feat he managed in 2018. Over 18 days that August, he ran just under 500 miles – a full lap of the Yorkshire border, anticlockwise from Scarborough beach. The things you have to do to win Yorkshire Man of the Year.
Davis (33) raised around £30,000 for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably, a suicide-prevention charity for which he is now an ambassador. The experience also led him to set up the Early Bird Run Crew in May 2019. It’s a free, informal running group that meets at 6am to do a 5km loop of central Harrogate, Monday to Friday. There is another at 6:30am and you can do both if you feel so inclined. There’s now a second Crew in nearby Knaresborough.
‘Up until that fundraising run, I’d always run on my own,’ says Davis, who ran six marathons, including Barcelona and Blackpool, in the year before his big challenge. ‘But for Running Yorkshire, I wore a GPS tracker, so people could find me online and run with me. I ran with hundreds of people and really enjoyed it – not racing, just talking and running for the fun of it.’
He had lonely spells on the journey. Hobbling out to Spurn Point, near Hull, with a damaged IT band, he put out a plea for help – a sports therapist drove to find him and spent two hours working on his right leg. In close mist on the Moors, having missed a connection to meet his girlfriend, he was phoned by his sister, who was tracking him and wanted to know why he’d been running in circles for an hour and a half. But when he crossed the Humber Bridge with 80 runners behind him, he felt the boost brought by running in a group.
That’s the ethos behind Early Bird, too: social, not competitive, and with a focus on the mental as well as physical wellbeing that regular exercise brings. The Crew is a CALM Collective, one of a number of community groups that enable people to support one another well before anyone might feel the need to phone the charity’s helpline.
‘You don’t have to be in a crisis with your mental health to make an effort to keep your mind healthy as well as your body,’ says Davis. ‘The Crew is very soft touch. It’s not a support group and you don’t turn up to be counselled, but we do acknowledge that there are benefits from meeting and running and talking together.’
Davis, a video and events producer, experienced what he calls ‘a really shit period of depression’ at the end of 2016, and found that running helped him to climb back out of it. ‘Life is so busy. It runs away from you and you can feel you’re tumbling through it sometimes. I can decide to get up an hour earlier and spend that hour on myself – running, relaxing and talking to other people.’
The 6am option was added after participants who had to commute to Leeds or York for work felt 6:30 was too late. A back runner makes sure no one feels left behind and most runners hang around to welcome in those who finish after them. They never cancel and the lowest turnout they’ve had is two runners – once on Boxing Day and once during particularly stormy weather.
It sets people up positively for the day ahead. Davis draws an unexpected parallel with the Yorkshire bikers’ cafe Squires, which he used to visit on his motorbike. ‘It was totally normal to rock up there on your bike and set off riding with someone you’ve never met before. I like that idea.’
Now, with funding from Sport England, he’s looking to start five more groups across Yorkshire and then expand to the rest of the country. ‘There are so many beautiful stories of how it’s affected people,’ he says. ‘It’s not anything I do or say. It’s what happens when you bring people together.
For more information, visit earlybird.run