In Memoriam: Ed White 1949-2026
In July 2026, we sadly and unexpectedly lost our leader and founder, Ed White. This page contains our memories and tributes to him.
Wasif’s Town Moor parkrun tribute
On 25th July 2026, three days after Ed passed, the Benchies turned out to walk at the back of Town Moor parkrun in memory of Ed. Ed’s family were also in attendance. Wasif gave a wonderful speech in tribute at the start of the parkrun, which is printed below.
Good morning everyone.
Before we begin today’s parkrun, I’d just like to take a few moments to remember our friend, Ed White.
Our thoughts are with Ed’s family and friends at this incredibly difficult time.
Many of you knew Ed personally. Some of you ran with him every week. Others may simply have recognised him as one of the familiar faces here at Town Moor.
Ed was a true legend of the North East running community, and especially here at Town Moor parkrun.
He completed an incredible 352 parkruns, including 265 here at Town Moor. He volunteered on 76 occasions and was one of our pacers 41 times, helping countless runners achieve personal bests and milestone times.
But Ed wasn’t just a parkrunner.
He loved running in all its forms. Whether it was a 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon, ultra marathon, the Blaydon Race or The Wall, if there was a challenge, Ed was there.
He completed every Great North Run since 1981, earning membership of the All Runs Club, and at one stage he ran every single day for 1,694 consecutive days.
Ed was also a proud and active member of the North East Marathon Club, where he was well known and highly respected.
During the pandemic, when running was all many of us had, Ed helped keep people motivated through virtual challenges and was instrumental in bringing together what became the Town Moor Bench Runners.
For me, Ed was always the runner just ahead.
I used to joke that if I could catch Ed during parkrun, I was probably on for a personal best.
Eventually I did start catching him… and even passing him… but by then Ed had already inspired me to become a better runner.
More importantly, he inspired so many people to realise that getting older didn’t mean slowing down.
Everyone who knew Ed has an “Ed story”…
And that’s because Ed had a way of turning ordinary moments into memorable ones.
One of my favourites came after the 2023 London Marathon.
Ed had hours to wait for his train home, so he did what Ed always did after a race—he found a pub, had a pint of Guinness and something to eat.
On the journey home he collapsed on the train.
Two doctors rushed to help, the train declared a medical emergency, and they were preparing to make an unscheduled stop at Stevenage.
But by then… Ed had decided he felt much better and wanted to carry on home.
He even rang his wife and said…
“Someone’s had a funny turn on the train, so I’ll be about half an hour late.”
Typical Ed…
The “someone” was him.
Ed also loved reminding me that I didn’t volunteer enough at parkrun.
When I finally became one of the First Timers Welcome volunteers, he would tell me that standing chatting to people wasn’t “proper volunteering”…
…I was just “gabbing.”
Well, thanks to Ed’s constant reminders, I’ve now earned over 100 volunteer credits…
…so perhaps he got the last laugh.
I visited Ed in hospital just last week.
Even then, he wasn’t talking about slowing down.
He was already planning how he was going to complete this year’s Great North Run.
If he had to Jeff it, he’d Jeff it.
If he needed pushing in a wheelchair…
…he was already looking for volunteers.
That determination…
That optimism…
And that refusal to give up…
That was Ed.
He always reminded me of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
No matter what life threw at him, his attitude was always…
“I’ve had worse.”
He was determined.
Competitive.
Stubborn…
Perhaps just a little bit mad…
But above all, he was kind, encouraging and a great friend to so many people.
Ed leaves behind an incredible legacy.
Not just in the number of miles he ran…
…but in the lives he touched…
…the friendships he built…
…and the encouragement he gave so freely.
Whether through Town Moor parkrun, the North East Marathon Club, the Town Moor Bench Runners, the social runs, or the wider North East running community…
…his influence will be felt for many years to come.
Ed will always be part of this parkrun.
And every runner whose life he inspired carries a little of his spirit with them.
Run in peace, Ed.
Could you all please join me in a round of applause to celebrate the life of our friend, Ed White.
RED for Ed Stories
For the month of August 2026, the North East Marathon Club held a Strava event to encourage people to do an activity every day of the month in memory of Ed (who was a run streaker for many years) and to raise some money for charity.
Dee already runs every day, so opted to share a brief memory of Ed every day in addition to a run. Those memories are posted below.
RED for Ed day #1: Ed and parkrun inaugurals
I’m not a parkrun inaugural chaser but, despite the fact that inaugural attendance was already discouraged by 2019 and such events were being kept hush-hush, I was keen to run the first Jesmond Dene parkrun that autumn. So keen, in fact, that following a duff lead from another running community, I spent a bit of time vainly bushwhacking around the Dene early one Saturday morning, looking for something resembling a parkrun, before giving it up as a bad job and making my way to the Moor as usual.
By the time I arrived, Geth had tracked down Ed. ‘Listen to this man,’ he said.
‘Jesmond Dene parkrun starts on the 19th of October,’ said Ed confidently. Because he always knew these things. He had ears everywhere.
Jesmond Dene wasn’t the only inaugural Ed attended in 2019. He had also made it to the first Leazes parkrun a few months earlier, when they had a special ‘Leazes #1’ sign for attendees to take pictures with. Later on, in 2023, he was a bit annoyed that he couldn’t do the inaugural Denton Dene parkrun, as it was the first parkrun on what he called his ‘patch’. The reason he couldn’t do it was that it clashed with The Wall; as such, he did end up running through Denton Dene that day – just a bit later. (He did make it to event #2.)
RED for Ed day #2: Saturn in the rain
Ed always liked the Saturn Running events in Durham because they gave him a lot of good opportunities to get his monthly marathon done. It’s a tough-ish course lap of four and a bit miles (my personal ‘favourite’ bit is a narrow uphill path through a forested bit where you have to avoid falling into a hole by the side of the course) and you have to run the lap six times for a marathon. The August event is billed as a GNR training run, and so Ed managed to recruit a few Benchies to join him in August 2023.
While the rest of us had a range of distance plans, we all ended up doing a half, which turned out to be a good idea as the rain was starting to set in by the time we’d all done three laps. As we huddled under a large wooden canopy to shelter from the worsening weather, Ed continued on. We amused ourselves for a while by trying to spot a small purple-clad white-hatted figure across the river at the turnaround point. I think we managed it once before the rain started to seep into the backs of our hoodies and we had to retreat inside.
Clare and I did eventually manage to see Ed finish! (From under a very wet gazebo.) We started commiserating with him about finishing his marathon in the wet weather, but he wasn’t particularly bothered by it. One of the things he often said to us on the run around that time was ‘footballers don’t wear coats’, meaning you shouldn’t bother with a waterproof when running in the rain. This was one of those pieces of Ed advice that we didn’t always follow.
RED for Ed day #3: Wordle
A longstanding corollary to the TMBR WhatsApp group chat has been the Benchies Wordle WhatsApp. This was set up because Ed wanted somewhere to post his Wordle result (I remember prior to the Wordle WhatsApp he used to post them on Strava if he was particularly proud of a result) without taking over the main group chat.
I don’t know why it was always the Friday run we ended up talking about Wordle, but it was always the Friday run. Perhaps because most of the Friday Benchies were Wordle players. Anyway, a large part of Ed’s Wordle strategy, as he described it, was to wait for other people to post their grids and work it out from there (he had worked out the regular starting words of all of his friends and family). This used to annoy me no end, especially as for a long time his regular starting word was only one letter different from mine. After a particularly egregious occasion when he got a hole in one off the back of my obvious grid (ARISE/RAISE), I started posting my result as late at night as I could. I did this for years and don’t think I’ll ever be able to break the habit!
Ed’s regular starting word was AROSE. If it ever comes up in Wordle (it still hasn’t to this day), we’ll know he’s celebrating somewhere.
RED for Ed day #4: The GNR bus race home
Ed was never very impressed by the length of time it took us mere mortals to get home from South Shields after the GNR. Due to starting in the All Runs Club pen, he was usually one of the first Benchies over the line in Shields and always went straight to the bus queue, no stopping for freebies or the baggage buses or anything.
In 2023, the year of the biblical floods, Ed still managed to make it home by 3pm as usual. He reported that the rain had started just after he got in the door. Many of us were still in Shields at that point, got stranded by the flooding and didn’t make it home until 8pm as a result. Ed told us not to hang around so long next time 😆
Last year was the only time I ever managed to overtake Ed during the race, as he’d had to shift to run-walking by then. I passed him at mile eight, finished the race, got my bag ASAP, got on the bus ASAP and he STILL managed to get home half an hour before me. I swear he had a magic portal somewhere!
RED for Ed day #5: Owing a round
Ed and I were both supposed to run the London Marathon in April 2020. It got postponed due to COVID-19; I remember discussing the logistics with him the following day at the final pre-hiatus parkrun (‘I never take out hotel cancellation insurance because I always go!’ he said), I remember us both running the virtual in October 2020 and comparing plans beforehand, and most of all I remember meeting up in London a few times during the weekend when we finally got to run it in October 2021.
We had a good morning out together at Southwark parkrun on the Saturday, but before that, on the Friday evening, Ed and Chris came down to the Tower Hotel, where Geth and I were staying, and we all had a drink in the bar. Geth bought the first round, because he always likes to get in there and buy the first round. By the time we finished it, we’d been chatting so long that there was no time for a second.
‘We’ll go out in Newcastle and get the round next time,’ promised Ed.
‘Ah, don’t worry!’ said Geth, and he and I promptly forgot all about it.
The following summer, I started running with the Benchies again, but conked out pretty badly around Gateshead Stadium on one of the Sunday GNR long training runs. The group ran me to the nearby metro, but I realised I didn’t have money on me. Ed paid for my metro ticket. I told him I’d bring the cash to the Monday run the next day.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I still owe you for that drink in London!’
Geth and I thought that was the end of it, but we should have known better. In December 2024, after we all attended the Benchies Christmas Circuits at Jesmond Gym courtesy of Carol D, everyone trooped down to the Lonsdale afterwards on the insistence of Geth. Ed hadn’t attended the circuits (he’d sworn ‘never again’ after the previous year’s event, which he claimed was more taxing on the body than a marathon), but he was already waiting in the pub for us. He jumped to his feet at the sight of Geth.
‘I can finally get you that round back from London!’ he said triumphantly. ‘What are you having?’
It had been over three years. But Ed had remembered that whole time!
(And so had Chris, who thanked Geth again for the drink at the Town Moor tribute parkrun last week 🥲)
Ed, you already paid us back in so many ways. Hope there’s a good pint of Guinness wherever you are now.
RED for Ed day #6: ‘You must know Ed’
Thank you to those at the funeral today who said they’d been enjoying these memory posts. I am finding it really comforting to write them up every day.
Fellow Town Moor Bench Runners have likely experienced the same questions I have when wearing Benchie kit out and about (especially in further flung places):
‘What is a “bench runner”? Do you run from bench to bench? Do you sit on benches and watch people run?’
Sometimes people focus more on the first part of the club name. ‘Oh, the Town Moor!’ they say. ‘In Newcastle? That’s where the GNR starts, isn’t it?’
I had all of these comments and more when I was running Amsterdam Marathon in my Benchie vest last year. But then there was the guy at mile ten:
‘Thought I recognised “Town Moor Bench Runners”,’ he said. ‘You must know Ed then!’
I had to laugh. I’d gone all the way to Amsterdam and I was still running with people who knew Ed! He really was a legendary figure.
But to our little group, he was also a wonderful friend. We were lucky to know him well.
RED for Ed day #7: The parkrun prediction competition
We were talking about this with Pierre at the Friday run this morning so I thought I’d make it today’s memory!
While Ed was very much of the opinion (and proved over and over) that age is not the barrier we think it is when it comes to the longer distances, he was also aware in recent years that his parkrun times were slowing a bit. Ed loved to be competitive (as we all knew well) and so he found other ways to measure himself against others on a Saturday morning. Age category placing was a big one (he was always keeping an eye on other runners in his category) and he also made things a bit more interesting by initiating the Benchie parkrun prediction competition, based on something he had been doing with other online running communities.
The idea was that you would predict your own parkrun finishing time (or that of the first finisher at a specific parkrun, although this was discouraged by Ed as he considered it to be ‘taking the easy option’). Predictions were compared against results and all participants were ranked for the week, earning points. Ed maintained a league and posted it after each parkrun so we could see what the standings were. Several Benchies (naming no names) got really serious about it towards the end of each league and I do recall at least one exchange of ‘ha, I beat you’ / ‘no, I let you win!’ shouted across the bench at the Monday night run!
It got a bit silly towards the end as many of us were doing a lot of slow sandbagging while looking at our watches on parkrun finish straights! Eventually Ed put the competition on ‘summer hiatus’ and we never brought it back, but it was a good laugh while it lasted 😃
RED for Ed day #8: Cruise spirals
There were very few times that Ed was ever absent from the thrice-weekly TMBR social runs, but once a year we had to spend a week or so managing ourselves as he was off on his annual cruise. (This usually happened just before the GNR, which was the reason he ended up running it with COVID in 2023, but that’s a whole other story.)
Cruise ships, as I understand it, do carry treadmills, but Ed liked to run on the deck, doing circular laps of the ship. The movement of the boat was such that at full speed, the Strava trace just looked like a straight line (with a very inaccurate pace calculation!), but at slower speeds close to port, it was more of a spiral effect.
Of the many, many running sub-interests in which Ed involved himself, Strava art was not generally one of them – but he did enjoy trying to get those spirals on the Strava trace!
RED for Ed day #9: Milestone combos and luck
At the funeral on Thursday there was a photo in the slideshow of me and Ed celebrating something at Town Moor parkrun. I couldn’t remember what it was, but I have worked it out now. This is the story.
In 2024 I combined my 200th overall parkrun with my 100th Town Moor parkrun. A tricky starting point meant that this took nearly a year of planning to make sure they would line up exactly, and it was so much faff that I will NEVER deliberately line up milestones again. I did mention this project often on the run, but it tended to get lost in the hubbub. Five or six weeks in advance, I started talking about it more often, as I hoped that people might come along to Town Moor for my double milestone.
A fortnight before the event, Ed casually mentioned that he was doing a double milestone parkrun. His 250th overall and 200th at Town Moor. On the exact same day as mine!
‘I just looked the other day and realised they’ll line up,’ he said.
‘That’s my double milestone day,’ I said in astonishment. ‘You know, my 200th/100th?’
‘Is it?’ he said innocently, like I hadn’t been talking about it at every Benchie run for weeks.
I was SPEECHLESS. What had taken months of planning for me had happened for Ed just by chance, and both of his milestones were bigger than mine! I wanted to tell him off (an understatement) for stealing my thunder.
But I didn’t. I just smiled and said through gritted teeth, ‘Well, Ed, it’ll be nice to celebrate them together.’
And, of course, it was.
(But I still can’t believe the incredible jamminess of it all.)
RED for Ed day #10: Having a fall
Ed was far from the only Benchie who ever fell over on social runs, but I would say he was the most frequent faller (and cheerfully added this skill to his pool of running expertise, meaning that when other Benchies fell over he would give them advice about how to land in order to avoid the worst of the cuts and scrapes).
I remember one particular occasion when we were helping him up from a fall towards the end of a Friday run. Ed wasn’t bothered by the fall at all and told us not to make a fuss. He was very proud of the fact that it was the first time he’d fallen all year!
Ian did point out that it was only January.
But Ed was still proud. One of those ways in which he showed us all how to take the small wins in running.
RED for Ed day #11: The GFA strategy
Let’s face it, nobody you know gets a London Marathon ballot place these days. Now that entering has become a TikTok trend and over a million people are throwing their hat in, your chances are slim to none.
This is why many Benchies are now banking long-term on the Ed strategy: Get Old and Keep Running.
A London GFA place is somewhere under four hours if you’re anywhere under 60 (possibly even under three hours if you’re exceptionally young and male). Good for age means what it means, and those are tough times to achieve for most.
However, if you’re in your 70s, it’s more like five hours, and that’s much more achievable, right? Ed was getting GFA with an hour’s buffer every single year! He came 10th in the VM70 category with a 3:49 in 2023! (And was cross about it because he felt he should have placed higher.)
So… all we need to do is keep running, right? Those London places will be ours eventually!
(Or alternatively Ed was even more legendary and elite than we thought, and it’s actually insanely hard for mere mortals to run sub-5s in their 70s… nah, that can’t be it. Let’s crack on with the plan, team.)
RED for Ed day #12: Ed the TV star!
I expect most of you will remember Ed’s appearance in the BBC programme ‘A Great North Run Celebration’ (2020), shown the year we ran the race virtually due to the pandemic. He could be seen leading the All Runs Club out on a group run along the beach, showing off his 40-year t-shirt collection, and telling interviewer Jeanette Kwakye that he was still beating people half his age.
This experience provided Ed with some good stories to tell us after the fact. He was very pleased that he’d been able to lead the All Runs Club beach run and help work out how it would look best on TV. He also liked the fact that he’d been able to get his t-shirt collection out. From what I remember, he stored all the older ones in a large suitcase most of the time.
As for the comment about beating people half his age, it certainly landed with the audience he intended (see screenshot)… but FWIW, I was exactly half Ed’s age at that time (35 and a half to his 71) and I think he beat me in the Virtual GNR by a good 45 minutes, so he wasn’t wrong!
RED for Ed day #13: The Bridges to Boundaries hole
There is a point along the Bridges to Boundaries route, on the outward westbound section following the Tyne from Wylam to Stocksfield, where there is a hole in the path so giant it cannot be easily sidestepped. When I ran the inaugural event with Ed in 2024, I was relying on his local knowledge for this bit, as I had only recced as far as Wylam prior to the event. We stopped dead and studied it carefully as other (braver/more foolhardy/delete as appropriate) runners took a running leap and just about made it over the chasm.
‘This is why they should always let you run on the road,’ said Ed, nodding towards the nice runnable tarmac road that ran parallel to us over a fence a few yards away, and launched into a series of stories about all the bits of The Wall where he thought they should let you run on the road.
‘Do we just jump over it?’ I asked uncertainly, not having planned on any steeplechase-type heroics during my first ultra.
‘I’m not jumping over that!’ said Ed. ‘Let’s go round it.’
We went round it. It took a while, because you have to clamber along a tight edge while clinging to the non-barbed bits of a barbed wire fence. But it was almost certainly the safer option.
‘That probably won’t be the last thing like that today,’ said Ed, and he turned out to be right. Ultras are interesting events to run.
‘Don’t risk jumping over chasms’ was not something I expected to be added to the pool of Ed running wisdom, but I have certainly kept it in mind ever since.
RED for Ed day #14: We very nearly had the jump
There has been a bit of a tradition to have a Benchie group photo at the end of the North Tyneside 10k once finisher shirts have been received and donned. This tradition involves jumping. I suspect this was originally the idea of Chelsea or Alice and most definitely not Ed.
I don’t remember exactly how many attempts we made at the jumping photo in 2024, but it was a lot. Getting multiple people who have just run a 10k race to jump for a photo at the exact same time is hard. Getting the photographer to capture the exact split second it happens is harder. Chelsea’s tip is to bend your knees, but not everybody listens.
After god knows how many attempts, we got one where everyone was perfect… except Ed.
‘I can’t jump,’ said Ed, without much concern, as he did not consider jumping to be an essential running skill.
I believe that was the point where we said ‘good enough’.
RED for Ed day #15: Ed the parkrun pacer
I was a pacer at Town Moor parkrun this morning, pacing Ed’s old 27 minute slot. It brought up a lot of memories.
Ed was a big fan of pacing at parkrun and was constantly trying to encourage the rest of us to give it a go. He was always pleased when a significant proportion of the pacer team were Benchies, as was often the case and still is usually the case as of this morning.
He also had fairly high standards and would tell people off if their pacing performance hadn’t fallen into his acceptable zone (generally between ten seconds fast and five seconds slow). ‘You were a bit fast,’ he’d say on the Sunday run (and the less said the better about Carol D being seven minutes out on one occasion!).
It only occurred to me this morning that the pace for a 27 minute parkrun (8:40ish min miles) was also roughly Ed’s marathon pace when he was getting all his PBs. It was probably really good training for him.
RED for Ed day #16: Tourist stuff on the run
The thrice-weekly TMBR social runs are fairly fixed in terms of route (this is helpful for when Benchies show up late to the meeting point and need to catch up with the rest of us); the Sunday run is especially so, with the only regular deviation being whether we go up Northumberland Street or through the uni in order to get from Monument to Exhibition Park. Nevertheless, Ed was always finding new sights for us to look at on the run.
Sometimes these were things that had always been there and we just hadn’t noticed, such as the Lowping-On Stone next to the Castle Keep just before you cross the High Level Bridge into Gateshead, or the Vampire Rabbit (just a short detour away from our weekly Dean Street climb). Other times it was temporary features similar to the Peter Rabbit statues that are currently all over town. (Side note: whoever is responsible for the Peter Rabbit statues massively missed a trick by not having a ‘Vampire Peter Rabbit’ next to the Vampire Rabbit.)
Ed just found all of this stuff so interesting and was always really keen to see it and take Benchie group photos with it. He really had a genuine love for the area and never got bored of the routes he ran. A real inspiration to us all to take an interest in the small changes in the places we know well.
RED for Ed day #17: Squids in
Last summer, we arrived at the Quayside one Sunday run to find giant inflatables either side of the Millennium Bridge. They were advertising the ‘Squid Games’ TV series apparently. The people in hi-vis who were supervising the barriers around the inflatables didn’t seem to know much about the show, but it was okay, because Ed did. Ed had watched the whole series so far.
‘Have you watched it?’ he asked, and not many of us had, from what I remember.
But by the time we were heading back up to Monument, we all might as well have watched it, because Ed had recounted the first few episodes in detail. Better than any internet summary you’ll find!
RED for Ed day #18: Mispronouncing Geth
For the first five years that we knew him, Ed was always pronouncing Geth’s name as ‘Geeth’. By the time we realised he was doing it, it was a bit too late/awkward to correct him. Or just not quite the right moment, like the time after the final pre-pandemic parkrun in March 2020 when Ed asked me ‘what’s happened to Geeth?’ and I was too busy explaining this whole mad story about Geth being hospitalised in Stevenage to be able to say ‘by the way, it actually rhymes with death 💀’).
In 2022, Ian was talking to Geth at Leazes parkrun and asked him how to pronounce his name.
‘Geth,’ said Geth.
‘Ah,’ said Ian. ‘He’s been calling you Keith!’ He pointed to Ed, who wasn’t listening, so we thought that was the end of it.
The following week at Town Moor, Ed came up to Geth after the run.
‘I want to apologise,’ he said. ‘I’ve been pronouncing your name wrong for five years!’
‘Well, you’ve only seen it written down!’ said Geth.
‘I know, but you never corrected us. And I had to apologise to Alice as well because I was correcting her and I was the one saying it wrong!’
Geth was never bothered by it at all, I don’t think. But Ed did pronounce it right from that point on!
RED for Ed day #19: The heart shaped route
The Monday night TMBR social is probably our most ‘adventurous’ in terms of route. Shall we go down to Blue House roundabout or through the back streets? Shall we push the boat out and go round the Moor past the Dog and Cat Shelter? Infinite possibilities!
I think it was sometime in 2024 when, on longer ‘Dog and Cat Shelter’ runs, Ed started leading us back across the Claremont Road bridge over the A167, up the Moor to the crossroads and then southwest back onto our usual route. We were a bit confused, as we’d typically always stayed on Claremont Road and re-entered the Moor area via the skatepark into Exhibition Park. I think most of us assumed he was doing it to get a tiny bit of extra mileage in.
‘It makes a heart shape on Strava,’ he said after a few weeks of doing this route, and we were all like ‘oh, okay then’.
I’m not sure if the heart shape was the initial reason for the route change (as I have mentioned previously, Strava art was not generally one of Ed’s running sub-interests), and you have to turn it upside down and squint a bit to see it, but Ed seemed to find it satisfying!
RED for Ed day #20: The London he didn’t do
One of the ways in which I related to Ed was that we were probably both a little too far along the determined-stubborn-slightly mad spectrum. I have definitely run a lot of races I shouldn’t have run due to illness/injury, and so did he (his GNR finishes with a broken ankle and COVID-19 in 2017 and 2023 respectively are particularly memorable).
As such, when he spent the week leading up to London Marathon 2025 ‘not ruling it out – I’ll go down and see how I am’ – despite the fact that he’d spent a few days the week before being too dizzy to stand up – I couldn’t really say anything, because frankly I’d probably have done exactly the same in his position. I left it to the more sensible Benchies to persuade him to give it a miss!
Eventually Ed did decide on the Saturday night not to go ahead with the marathon, much to everyone’s relief. Luckily, that was the year that London started giving out the t-shirts at the expo beforehand rather than in the goody bags at the end, so he was still able to get his t-shirt! I think he earned it that year by making the right decision, which is sometimes harder to do than running a marathon.
RED for Ed day #21: Ed and barriers
Ed was not a big believer in following the pedestrian instructions on temporary road signs. When they did the Exhibition Park works last year (redoing the gravel path round the back of the lake to Wylam Brewery with tarmac), he decided the big ‘Keep Out’ sign didn’t apply to us and we could run our usual route. This was possibly because he was keen to find out whether the surface was an improvement to run on (it was). We didn’t get into any trouble on that occasion, but there were other times we did get shouted at by council workers for running right through their worksites.
Earlier this summer we spent a few weeks crossing the Swing Bridge instead of the Millennium Bridge on the Sunday run because the stretch on the Gateshead side under the Tyne Bridge past the Sage/Glasshouse was closed for roadworks. I did wonder at the time if Ed would have insisted on sticking with the normal route if he’d still been out leading the runs…
RED for Ed day #22: Running the Hoppings
Being Town Moor Bench Runners, we do tend to run on the Moor fairly often during our social runs. I don’t recall Ed ever mentioning having visited the Hoppings fair in the traditional sense, but he certainly got excited whenever the fairground vehicles started to show up in early June, because it meant there would be something interesting for us to run through.
Hoppings setup takes a while and the Moor is accessible throughout, so we were always able to go and have a good look at all the rides and stalls before the barriers were put up. Ed had typically scoped it out in advance and would say ‘right, we’ll go have a look at this, this and this’. We have so many photos with Hoppings attractions as a result!
I’ve still never paid to visit the Hoppings when it’s actually open (I keep saying ‘one of these years’) but I’m not sure it would be any more fun than running through the setup with Ed.
RED for Ed day #23: Detective Ed and his rightful age category win
Up until the last year or so, Ed was still a very competitive age category athlete and would comb through race results to keep an eye on the performance of other people in his category. As a result, he uncovered a lot of illegal transfers – race numbers of VM70 athletes being worn by people who (based on the photos) were clearly not VM70 athletes themselves!
I’m not sure that big races are that interested in disqualifying illegal transfers (I think in the GNR’s case, they’d have to disqualify about a third of the field) but Ed was able to take his findings to the authorities for smaller local races. North Tyneside 10k 2023 was a particularly memorable one – Ed was able to use evidence from the finish line video to contact the club of the athletes in question, the race organisers and the timing company and get the guilty athlete disqualified so he could claim his win! (Pretty sure the age cat prize was a £20 Start Fitness voucher or something like that, but Ed would have been doing it for the principle of the thing!)
RED for Ed day #24: Vaporfly loyalty
Ed’s carbon shoes of choice were Nike Vaporflys (and it was incredibly emotional to see a pair atop his coffin at the funeral). He was an early adopter and stayed loyal to them, even when all the other brands started bringing out their own carbons and Adidas started to get the edge on Nike in the elite field.
What Ed always said was that Vaporflys worked better for the masses and Alphaflys for the fast elites, so he stuck with Vaporflys on race day. He used to post news about sales of old models so that we all had a chance of getting a pair. This was how I got my first Vaporflys, and I’ve been trying to pay this forward in recent years by keeping an eye on the sales myself and sharing the news.
Whenever someone got a non-Nike pair of carbons or TPUs and found they didn’t make them go quite as fast as expected, Ed would always say ‘well, they should have got Vaporflys instead!’ 😀
RED for Ed day #25: Christmas sights and lights
When I first moved to Newcastle, I was told Fenwick’s Christmas window was a big tradition. In recent years an additional tradition was going to see it on the Sunday Benchie runs, as our route goes past it if we run up the Northumberland Street way, and Ed was always keen to see what it was from year to year.
Closer to Christmas, Ed would always dedicate one of the Monday night runs to going up Gosforth to see the Christmas lights at Daft as a Brush. Last year, some of us missed the lights run as we were away, so Ed decreed that we’d do it a second week running so that everyone would have the chance. He never wanted anyone to miss out.
It was hard to miss him in his Christmas parkrun outfit too!
RED for Ed day #26: A lighter shade of orange
We sometimes wondered how Ed managed to run in the same pair of running shoes two days in a row when the first day had been so wet. He always said he put them out in the sun to dry. This seemed to work even when there wasn’t much sun (maybe it’s a bit sunnier over in west Newcastle), and I remembered the advice while on holiday earlier this month. Shoes in the sun, bone dry in twenty minutes. A useful tip!
He also dried his Benchie t-shirt in the sun after washing, which meant that his t-shirt was actually a slightly lighter shade of orange than everyone else’s t-shirt. You can’t see it in photos but you absolutely could in real life.
RED for Ed day #27: The Bridges to Boundaries stepping stones
Another notable landmark during the Bridges to Boundaries course is the stepping stones. Ed knew them well (having crossed them on various NEMC runs, occasional Benchie exploration runs and other events I believe) and didn’t like them. He talked about them a lot leading up to the race. I didn’t know them and so was expecting something highly treacherous!
They were better than I expected, but Ed was not keen. He was a bit worried he’d fall in the water. However, he made it across fine and on we went!
RED for Ed day #28: ‘Ed’s doing a marathon’
I mentioned before about Ed keeping up the habit of a marathon every month for many years. It was helpful for him to do these at events, but if there weren’t any events on, he would just run marathon distance by himself. Typically he’d chunk it up by running before and after the Sunday run, or sometimes running to Gateshead with us and then running on to get the mileage in. As such, regulars on the run would casually explain to newbies that ‘Ed’s doing a marathon’ like it was a perfectly normal distance to do on a Sunday training run.
Generally you didn’t even have to ask him. If he’d shown up to the run with his hydration vest on then that was a fairly reliable sign that it was monthly marathon day!
RED for Ed day #29: Howay then
Before I moved to Newcastle, I didn’t believe that people round here actually said ‘howay’.
Then I met Ed.
Benchie runs are designed to be social and to suit a wide range of paces. Faster runners loop back (if they remember!) and we have a lot of scheduled stops to let everyone catch up. Because we’re a chatty bunch, we generally take the opportunity to have a good yak/yap/gabble/blether/(insert your regional phrase of choice) while we’re stopped, and often forget to start running again.
‘Howay then,’ Ed would always say when he thought we’d been stationary for too long (usually after about twenty minutes or so), and would do a big sweeping motion with his arm. This never failed to get us back on the move. There were some runs where, I suspect, if it hadn’t been for Ed chivvying us along, we’d probably still be standing there chatting now.
RED for Ed day #30: I could ask Ed
For years, every time I’ve heard something or wondered something about local running ‘back in the day’ (especially pertaining to the GNR), my first thought has been ‘I could ask Ed’. Ed was an absolute fountain of knowledge about the history of it all, so whenever I wanted to know about how race results worked before chip timing, or when they brought in technical finishers’ shirts instead of cotton ones, or what year they started putting the sign on the Tyne Bridge, I could ask Ed, and he would tell me.
Earlier this month, I heard someone say that it was Big Pink Dress who initiated the ‘oggy oggy oggy’ tradition when going under the tunnels down towards the river. I hadn’t heard this story before, and of course my immediate thought was ‘I could ask Ed’ 😢.
I can’t ask Ed anymore. I’m sure someone knows (in fact, I’m pretty sure someone will tell me in the comments), but there’ll be few people who know everything. Ed had seen it all, and so he knew it all, and I will forever miss being able to talk to him about all of that.
RED for Ed day #31: Ed’s streak
Ed ran a 1,694 day run streak (that’s four years, seven months and two weeks), which is currently in the top 1,000 on the Streak Runners Association list of retired streaks. It was his habit to go out for at least three or four miles every morning, even on Mondays (when he would also attend the TMBR social in the evening and hence run a double day).
When I started my own streak in January 2020, Ed had already been streaking for seven or eight months, so he had lots of advice to give (as ever!) but he was mostly just really interested in why I was doing it and how I was getting on with keeping it going. There are lots of people all over the world doing daily run streaks (and various online communities around it) but it’s not often you meet them in real life. Ed was the only other person I knew who was doing a long-term streak.
His streak encompassed 58 marathons (including four Londons) and three ultras (all The Wall). Most run streakers (me included) do ‘streak savers’ once or twice a week; a streak saver is one gentle mile, as a mile is the daily minimum set by the SRA, and allows the streaker to get some recovery in. Ed only ever did this when he was ill or injured, as he didn’t see the need otherwise!
I’ve written once or twice this month about the determined-stubborn-slightly mad spectrum and the balance of knowing when to be sensible. I will say emphatically that nobody ever achieved a long-term daily run streak by being entirely sensible (I am not always entirely sensible, and neither was Ed). Streaks either end due to a sudden dramatic circumstance that renders it completely impossible for the streaker to perform anything remotely resembling a run (serious car accidents are a common report on the run streak Facebook groups) or because the streaker finally makes the hard decision to be sensible.
In Ed’s case, it was the latter. He had a bad bout of norovirus that made him very ill for the whole day. He did consider getting on the treadmill for a mile but decided in the end that he was just too unwell that day. It was the right time for his streak to end, as it meant he could now properly recover from some injuries that had been plaguing him, but it’s far from easy to end a run streak. I know very well what must have been going through his head that day.
I celebrated day 1,000 of my streak with Ed (when he was still streaking too) and day 2,000 with Ed (after he’d stopped). He wasn’t a big celebrator of his own streak milestones (just liked ticking the numbers off day by day) but was always proud of mine. When day 3,000 arrives for me (barring, touch wood, the aforementioned sudden dramatic circumstance or a severely out-of-character sensible decision), I will think of him. His advice and encouragement will always be a part of my own streak story, and part of many people’s running stories in general.
Ed’s streak will live forever on the Streak Runners Association’s list of retired streaks.
More tributes from Benchies
From Clare:
Some valuable advice (I think) he gave to us regarding Ultras… drink before you’re thirsty, eat before you get hungry and walk before you have to 👍.
Also an amusing story about the time we were at Leazes parkrun and heading to the finish line, he looked back to see who was behind him, saw me and speeded up so I couldn’t catch him 🤣🤣🤣🏃🏃♀️🌟.
Creative works inspired by Ed
Dee took part in a hobby game development challenge during the last week of August 2026, and made a text adventure game that paid tribute to Ed. A Bonded Harvester can be played here.