MEET FREEMAN WILLIAMS

Published: 13/04/2026 | By: Freeman Williams

There's a version of this story where Freeman Williams never becomes a runner. Where the hamstring holds, where the football carries on, where the wing back from Portsmouth keeps bombing up and down the flank well into his late twenties. But sport has a funny way of redirecting you, and for Freeman, the detour turned out to be the destination. One that led him to becoming a fast runner – and a Sports Direct ambassador. This is his story.

Growing up in Portsmouth – a city where football isn't so much a pastime as it is a civic religion – there was never really any question of what Freeman Williams would pursue. His father had played professionally across the UK and France, turning out for the likes of Kilmarnock and Shamrock Rovers. His uncles, too, had made careers of the game. "I didn't grow up with him," Freeman says of his dad, "so it made him even more mythical. I knew he'd played for all these clubs. I was like – I need to be like that." For a quick, direct wide player with pace to burn, the dream felt within reach.

He played through school, through college – where his side were linked to the Bournemouth Academy and competed at a serious level – and then into the semi-professional game, where the job of a wing back suited him perfectly. Get up the pitch, cause problems, get back, repeat. "I had to be good at running," he says, laughing. "I had to be able to get up and down. I loved that." But somewhere around 23, something shifted. The hyper-focus that had kept him teetotal and training through his late teens began to loosen. He started going out. He started enjoying himself. The football suffered. And then, quietly, it stopped altogether.

What followed was a few years of reinvention. Freeman moved to London, tried to scratch the itch with five-a-side, and eventually convinced himself to give football one proper last crack. It lasted roughly one game and a half. Chasing a header in his second appearance back, he tore his hamstring. Badly. "I literally pulled up like those Jonah memes," he says. It took months to fully recover, and left a psychological mark that lingered long after the physical one had faded. "I just thought, I can't do that again. That's just me done."

The timing, as it turned out, was almost serendipitous. Running was having a moment. Run clubs were springing up across London, ultras were pulling in unlikely participants, and social media was filling up with people discovering the sport in their mid-twenties. Freeman saw it, joined a local club in May 2024, and thought little more of it than a useful outlet. Then someone in the group mentioned they had a spare Hackney Half spot, owing to an injury of their own. "I hadn't even run 10K at that point," he says, laughing. He took the spot anyway, ran it, reaggravated the hamstring right at the death – and immediately wanted to do it again properly.

That particular strand of thinking – the vendetta, the refusal to leave something unfinished – is a throughline in Freeman's story. He reached out to coach Tommy Trees (yes, that Tommy) shortly after, laid out his previous time, and said he wanted to give it a real go. "He was like, ok, let's get to work." The results were immediate. From 1:56 for the half marathon to 1:33 inside a couple of months. That was it, from then on there was no looking back.

What struck him most was how different the discipline is from anything he'd trained for before. Football demanded that you give everything, every session, all the time. Running, as he quickly discovered, punishes that mentality. "I'd go into it thinking I'm going 110% and then I'd tweak something. That doesn't work." Working with a coach meant learning the language of thresholds and VO2 max sessions, of easy days that genuinely have to be easy, of patience compounding quietly into progress. "Good runners are the ones that can stack up two years of training with minimal injuries. That's what I've been able to do – small niggles I can manage, never a big three-month blowout."

"I'D GO INTO IT THINKING I'M GOING 110% AND THEN I'D TWEAK SOMETHING. THAT DOESN'T WORK."

The race calendar filled up quickly once the bug bit. After that first Hackney Half, he went back and ran it again – this time in 1:30 – before heading to the Great South Run in October 2024, a 10-miler that scratched a different kind of itch. 2025 brought the most ambitious programme yet: a Napoli half, Milan, Oxford for a 10K, and Hackney again for a third time. Someone who wasn't running 10K eighteen months ago is now racing five or six times a year and thinking carefully about which distances to prioritise and when. The current plan is to spend the first half of this year on shorter, faster stuff – 5Ks and 10Ks – before locking into another half marathon block come summer. "I've never really worked on my speed properly," he says, "but speed was my thing when I was younger. I'm tapping into those dormant cells that have just been left alone for a while."

And then, there’s the gym work. In an ideal week, Freeman gets there twice. More realistically, once – but he's consistent about it, and intentional. Where he is in the training block dictates what he does when he gets there. Four weeks out from a race, it's purely maintenance: targeted strength work to stay durable, nothing that's going to leave him fatigued on the track. In the off-season, he gives himself more licence – upper body, compound movements, rebuilding what the mileage quietly takes away. "It's so underlooked," he says. "Especially if you're doing high mileage, you need to be loading your legs outside of running. I've done it loads of times — taken a break, come back, tried to jump straight back to my old mileage, and then it's achilles, hamstrings, hips. All those things." The hamstring history gives that particular point a weight it might not carry coming from someone else.

How he manages the week itself is telling, too. He's not rigid in a brittle way – he's rigid in the way that someone who genuinely understands their body needs to be. If he comes into a Monday feeling wrecked after a long run on Sunday, he doesn't force the session. He moves it. Track is the priority, so everything else gets shuffled around to protect it. "I'll just rejig the week," he says. "No one's going to crucify you for that." He applies a similar logic to illness – neck up, he gets on with it; the moment it drops to his chest, he rests. It sounds simple, but it's the kind of self-awareness that takes most amateur runners years to develop, and even then only after a catalogue of avoidable setbacks.

Away from the roads and the track, Freeman works at an influencer marketing agency, managing accounts across a wonderfully eclectic roster of British brands. He's also been building a running-focused content presence online, picking up where an earlier gaming audience left off and channelling his genuine enthusiasm for the sport into something shareable. So yes, balancing it all is an art – one that wasn’t mastered overnight.

He's candid about having learned this the hard way. He went through a phase – around the height of David Goggins-mania, he notes with a grin – of believing that output should just be relentless. That burning out was something you pushed through rather than anticipated. London, and time, and a few too many crashes, taught him otherwise. "I know my triggers now. I know when I need to pull back." The running, funnily enough, helps. After a full day of client work, heading to the track with music in his ears and a hard session ahead feels less like stress and more like release. The switch flips. The athlete comes back.

The goals are clear and the timeline, roughly sketched. Get the half marathon to somewhere near 1:10 – a mark he believes is genuinely achievable once the speed work starts paying dividends. Then, when the moment feels right, a marathon debut. Ideally London. "I want to feel ready to fully commit to that," he says. "I want to feel like I can get the time I want and then just go for it." He's in no rush. He's learned, at last, that patience is not the enemy of ambition. More often than not, it's what makes ambition possible. That and the fact that he’s got us in his corner now to help him chase his goals.

Welcome to the SD family, Freeman.