MEET BEN FELTON

Published 14/04/2026 | By: Ben Felton

For most people, running doesn't start as a calling. It starts as a means to an end. For Ben Felton, that end was a Sunday five-a-side football match. Long gone are those days. Now, Ben’s one of our new running ambassadors and he gets to run for a living – and he’s pretty good at it. This is his story.

Ben Felton grew up in Colchester, Essex, a self-described sporty kid who dabbled in everything but excelled at nothing in particular. Netball, football, basketball, dodgeball – he'd give anything a go without ever finding the thing that truly clicked. It was only when he laced up for that first parkrun at the University of East Anglia, purely in the hope of keeping up with his mates on a football pitch, that something shifted. "I quickly got into the habit of trying to get faster and beat the previous week's time," he says. And just like that, the competitive instinct that had been lurking beneath the surface had somewhere to go.

Running turned out to be the first sport Ben was naturally good at. Once he clocked that, football didn't stand a chance. "Football's quite physical, especially at uni five-a-side level. Your body was always recovering from something." So he made a clean break, and running became his thing entirely.

Life then took a detour that would prove surprisingly formative. After graduating, Ben followed his girlfriend Meg to Stockholm, where she'd landed a job at H&M's headquarters straight out of the University of the Arts Norwich. Ben picked up work in a French restaurant – "probably a story for another day" – and somehow ended up becoming a chef. Nine months later, when the pandemic hit and both were made redundant, they headed back to the UK. Ben found a new cheffing role as a breakfast chef in Colchester, but it was the strange, suspended quiet of lockdown that would change everything.

"It was either play Xbox all day or start a structured running plan," he says, with the matter-of-fact pragmatism that seems to run through everything he does. He chose the latter. Within weeks of lockdown, he ran his first 100-kilometre week – a milestone he'd been quietly fixating on since discovering Strava. "I don't know why, but just to try and get to three digits felt like something I wanted to do." He did it once, then it became the norm, and his times began tumbling across every distance.

The trouble was, cheffing and serious training are not natural bedfellows. On your feet all day, exhausted by the time you'd normally be heading out for an evening session, always recovering from the job before you'd even started recovering from the run. The equation didn't add up. And there was something else pulling at Ben's attention: his camera.

Since university, he'd been quietly making videos for a YouTube channel called Ben Felton Vlog – holiday clips, bits of student life, nothing too serious. During lockdown, he picked the camera back up and started documenting his training. The early videos gathered modest audiences, but then he made one about how to improve your 5K time, drawing on everything he'd taught himself over two years of training. It struck a nerve. Views rolled in. People started following his journey. "It went kind of not viral," he says, smiling, "but for the channel size, it got some momentum."

The maths started to look different. The YouTube channel was generating a little money – £100, maybe £200 a month – and one particularly brutal Saturday service, involving a tomato that exploded out of the oven and burnt his forehead mid-rush, made him see red and brought things into sharp focus. "This is really not worth it." He recalls thinking at the time. So, he finished his shift, handed in his notice, moved into his girlfriend's parents' house to keep costs low, and went all in.

"I never really went out of my way to make running content," he's keen to point out. "I was just sharing the process of what I was doing, in the hope that it would generate enough money for me to train like an elite athlete." That clarity of purpose – the channel as a vehicle for the running, not the other way around – has shaped everything since. As the audience grew, so did the opportunities. A trip to Jamaica with Puma where he met Usain Bolt. The Boston Marathon with adidas. Moments that still feel slightly surreal. "This is now my life, my job," he says. "It's still very strange."

What has never been strange to Ben is the discipline behind the training. Goals, he'll tell you, are everything. From those first parkruns – where the only target was shaving a minute off last week's time – to the races he's chasing now, the principle has always been the same. "As long as I've got my next race, my next goal, I won't skip training. I won't miss anything.” Why? Because he knows what it takes to run after your dreams.

His first marathon, in Copenhagen in 2022, yielded a jaw-dropping 2:28 debut – a time he puts down partly to the naivety of not really knowing what he was getting himself into, and partly to the stroke of fortune that saw him tuck in behind a well-paced elite women's pack and just... go with it. "On the day, I just thought, I'm going to go for it." He did, and it worked. Subsequent marathons were rather more humbling, but also more instructive, and Boston brought the next breakthrough: a 2:24 on one of the world's most demanding courses.

Since then, though, Ben has pulled back from the marathon and is directing his energy at the distances that suit him best: the 10K and the half marathon. His coach – Victor Schmangs, a Swedish elite runner he met during those nine months in his forever second home of Stockholm – has helped him understand his profile as an athlete. "I'm a lot more competitive over the 10K and half marathon than I am the marathon," he says. Right now, two numbers are pinned to the front of his mind: sub-30 for the 10K, and sub-65 for the half. At the Newcastle 10K in January, he ran 30:06. At the Barcelona Half a few weeks ago, he clocked 65:30. The margins are tight. The targets are close.

To pursue them, Ben has just returned from a month-long training camp in Spain with his coach and two elite runners, averaging around 150 kilometres per week (yes, you read that right). It was an education in more ways than one. "Before the camp, I was like, these guys are elite runners, I can't keep up with them." By week three, he was keeping up – and taking notes. The daily structure was almost ceremonially consistent: up at 7:45, breakfast at 8, out the door at 9 on the dot, then essentially nothing until the second session at 5pm. Train hard. Recover harder. "That was probably one of the big factors that allowed me to take things to the next level," he says. "Having the time to prioritise recovery, sleep, nutrition – things I once couldn't."

For those who can't live that kind of athlete's existence – working nine to five, squeezing runs around real life – Ben is thoughtful and practical. Don't cram training into your most stressful days, he says. Structure sessions around your schedule, not someone else's ideal plan. And rethink the conventional 80/20 split between easy and hard running. "If you're tight for time, you don't have the hours to build that easy base. Maybe it's more like 60/40. A couple of easy runs, an interval session, a long run – that's a really good recipe. Just be flexible."

There's one more thread to Ben's story that comes full circle in a rather pleasing way. When he talks about joining Sports Direct as an ambassador, his mind goes back to the Sports Direct in Colchester where, as a kid, he'd stand in front of the rows of football boots – the expensive ones all the pros wore, and the almost-replicas just within reach. "I always went for the cheaper option," he says, "but trying to look like the pro footballer." The Sondico shinpad, he recalls, was a badge of honour in his circle. That shop was where it all started.

Now, the kit comes to him. We’re thrilled to welcome Ben as one of our ambassadors and can’t wait to see what the future has in store for him. As for you, keep your eyes peeled – Ben will be sharing his knowledge every month.