British trail runners of the year – Tom Evans and Rebecca Flaherty

Adrian Stott speaks to two off-road runners who thrive when tackling a variety of challenges

It has been a difficult end to the year for Tom Evans. He had been due to take on the Ultra-Trail Cape Town 100km last month but withdrew from the race after being ambushed by two men during a training run on Table Mountain.

“I was mugged, beaten up, attacked, held at knifepoint and everything I had with me was taken,” said the 31-year-old, who was forced to hand over his wedding ring, phone and watch. However, he added: “It’s been an awesome year and I won’t let two criminals spoil it.”

The AW readers’ choice for the British male mountain, trail and ultra athlete of the year certainly does have much of which to be proud in 2023. The very clear highlight was his victory at the Western States 100 in June, where he became the first British male athlete to win the race.

It was an achievement which did much to widen what was already an impressively high profile.

A British international at ultra distance trail, mountain running, cross-country and half marathon, Evans is a former British Army captain who left the military in 2019 to become a professional ultra runner.

He has shown perseverance not just in terms of his athletics endeavours but also in being able to fund his change of career. With trail and ultra running not being Olympic disciplines, avenues to funding and British Athletics services are severely limited. Evans’ ability to seek credible sponsorship deals, along with harnessing the power of social media, seems to have worked out, however.

He has amassed over 65,000 Instagram followers – more than world 1500m champions Jake Wightman (58,000) and Josh Kerr (51,000) – and is also approaching 10,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, which documented his training progress towards the Western States.

It is the kind of attention that many track athletes would kill for and indicative of the growth of the global following for ultra trail running. 

Evans is an athlete first and foremost, however, and has had to dedicate himself to some pretty serious training to achieve the results he has so far in his career. When he placed third in the Western States in 2019, he spent two months in Ethiopia at an altitude camp. This year, seeking more specificity, many sessions were conducted in the heat and humidity of the heat chambers at Loughborough University, near his current home base, replicating the conditions to be…