The Tiptree man who ran home from Liverpool Street!

Tom Payn makes his debut as a runner, alongside dad in the Tiptree Road Runners 
fun-run of nearly 30 years ago.  This year he became one of the world's fastest
100-mile runners,  shortly before his 40th birthday.

 ULTRA-runners rarely seem to make the headlines. So it’s a fair guess that even my running clubmates from Tiptree are probably unaware a 39-year-old man from our village recently produced one of the quickest 100-mile runs in history.

The feat took place on a track in Kent just a few weeks ago, and was described by one astonished race official as “One of the truly great all-time performances”.

Tom Payn covered the 100 miles in 12hrs 25mins 30secs – lapping the Ashford track all day long for a place in the record books as the second-fastest Briton of the last 35 years, and the 8^th fastest of all time!

Tom grew up in Keeble Close, Tiptree, where mum Jane still lives, and (like your Clapped-Out Runner) went to St.Luke’s Primary School in Church Road. His first steps as a runner were as a tiny nipper in the 1980s, bombing up and down the cul-de-sac where he lived while mum stood at the front door timing him. Nowadays his running tends to be scrutinised by highly-qualified officials with sophisticated equipment!

Tom’s running achievements since those salad days are many and varied, but my favourite tale about him concerns the day he decided to test his legs for the first time over a really long distance.

Stepping out the front door of his flat at London’s Barbican - not far from Liverpool Street station - he made a big decision: Why not make that morning’s training session a run all the way to his home village of Tiptree?

It was a frightening commitment for an ultra ‘virgin’ - but running nearly 60 miles to Tiptree at least enabled him to avoid the troubles of the Greater Anglia train-line!

Tom told me this week: “I’m trying to remember when that run from the Barbican to Tiptree was. It must have been early 2012 as I did my first ultra in September of that year. If I remember correctly I jumped on the canal path over to Stratford, then shadowed the A12 through Romford and went past Gallows Corner, crossing underneath the M25 before running up to Brentwood.

“There were plenty of wrong turns along the route and this added quite a bit of distance, but I always thought I was heading roughly in the right direction. From Brentwood I again began shadowing the A12 all the way to Chelmsford, where unfortunately once again I got a bit lost.

“Once I’d finally found my way through Chelmsford I was able to get up to Hatfield Peverel. From there I took the country roads through Wickham Bishops and Great Braxted before finally arriving in Tiptree! I think my Garmin recorded it at 50-something-miles in 7-something-hours.”

Tom’s story reminds me of my early days as a novice runner, training for the inaugural Ipswich Marathon in 1983. I recall leaving Ipswich town centre and heading for West Bergholt, a mere 18 miles away. My route involved shadowing the A12 just like Tom, and getting lost just like him. But I suspect the similarities probably end there.

These days Tom is a full-time runner and has conjured up superb times at a ridiculous range of distances, from 800 metres up to 100 miles. He’s run a 2:17 marathon, has gone sub-30 for 10k and won the Tiptree 10-miler in 2011. He gets hired to pace top stars in big marathons, and is a buddy of writer Adharanand Finn, who mentions Tom in his acclaimed books ‘Running with the Kenyans’ and ‘The Rise of the Ultra-Runners’.

He’s come a long way since those hectic sprints up and down Keeble Close!