Matt Baxter was a middle lane drinker. A few glasses of wine through the week to take the edge off a 12-hour day in financial services, football with the lads at weekends, nothing anyone would have flagged. But there was a moment during the 2022 World Cup Final - Argentina versus France, one of the best finals ever played - when his kids went home to watch it and he stayed at the club drinking with his mates. He doesn't remember much of the game. He does remember getting home and thinking: why did I make that decision?

That was the beginning of the end. Dry January followed. Then his wife Hayley - who'd been through breast cancer and had been told alcohol was a potential contributing factor - went alcohol-free on the same day. Neither of them have gone back. Matt was the one bringing the bottle home. He knew it. He took responsibility for it.

Three months into sobriety, he found himself on a coaching course. Same one Rich was on, same cohort, spring 2023. First day, Andy Ramage walked in to observe his first ever coaching session. Stomach dropped. Pushed through. Came out the other side thinking: that felt terrible and brilliant at the same time.

He's now a youth sports mindset coach in Leeds, working one-to-one with young athletes across football, cricket and beyond - including 8 and 9-year-olds at professional academies who are terrified that a misplaced pass will cost them their contract. Sport is the vehicle. The work is always bigger than the sport. School, friendships, home life, self-worth. And underneath it all, the lesson he keeps coming back to: that voice in your head telling you you're not good enough is your voice. Which means the good voice is yours too. Learn to turn the volume up on the right one.

This week, Matt joins Rich and Andy for a conversation about the midlife chrysalis, the coaching space that most people never get to experience, what it's like to reflect back on your own sporting career and realise you were playing with the handbrake on - and why the parents are as much part of the process as the kids.

Also: Rich crying under a blanket watching an octopus movie and taking it as a sign he needs to start tapering. Andy turning 51. And three weeks to York.

Find Matt on Instagram @EliteMindset_Coaching.

Four weeks out from York. Andy's doing a 3-hour long run this afternoon - on a Friday - because that's what life as a busy parent, business owner, and marathon runner actually looks like. Rich has his 2:45 in the morning. Johnny is 18, 75 kilos, and annoyingly fresh at the end of every long run. The juggle is real, and this week's episode starts right there.

But the conversation quickly moves somewhere sharper.

Rich has been noticing a pattern - influencers, podcasters, and now alcohol brands actively pushing back against sobriety. Not just defending their own drinking, but going further, calling out people who don't drink as over-optimisers, killjoys, lacking in resilience. There's a beer brand called Rolies positioning itself as the healthy athlete's drink - partnered with Hyrox, vitamins added, 4.3% ABV - with ads that say "no longer the boring one at parties" and "tastes like success." There's a guy on Spencer Matthews' podcast who said Stephen Bartlett feeling rough after a couple of glasses of wine represents a lack of resilience. And then there's the podcast Rich watched where two runners laughed about how nobody understands running people who don't run - and then in the same breath called people who don't drink insufferable.

Rich calls all of it what he believes it is: emotional blackmail. The belief that you need alcohol for confidence, connection, relaxation - none of it is innate. It's conditioned. You weren't born with it. And the industry knows that, which is exactly why the marketing works the way it does.

Then there's the moderation question. Is moderation possible? Yes, for some people. Is it possible for everyone? No. And if you've been trying to moderate for years and it hasn't worked - that's not a failure of willpower. That's data. If moderation was possible for you, you'd have done it by now.

Andy talks about sitting on the rim of the jar - that horrible middle place where you haven't decided to drink and you haven't decided to stop, and you're just stuck. The most turmoil lives right there. Make a decision, one way or the other.

And Rich makes the link that underpins everything they do: aligning your actions with your values. When they're misaligned, you feel stuck. When they align, you flourish. Which - as it happens - is exactly what several of their clients are doing right now at 75 to 80 days.

Rich has been running without a watch, without Strava, without data of any kind, since June. Andy checks his Garmin sleep score before he's even properly awake. And somewhere in the middle of this week's conversation, Rich lands the line that stops everything: you need to take a clean break from your data. Same as we'd say to someone who isn't sure if their relationship with alcohol is healthy - try going without it, and see how that feels.

It's a longer conversation than that, though. Rich and Andy get into what data actually does for you - the compass it provides, the ceiling it creates, the anxiety it generates when it contradicts how you actually feel. Andy's Garmin has been telling him his sleep quality is poor for years. He ignored it, felt fine, called it wrong. Then his numbers improved, and suddenly the watch is trustworthy again. Rich clocks exactly what's happening there.

Then there's Johnny. Andy's son ran his longest run ever this week - 28K - smashed it, pushed his dad in the final few kilometres, and came off it saying he doesn't want his watch in the marathon. The countdown was causing him anxiety. The data was getting in his head. He wants to run to feel, stay with his dad, and cross the line together. There's something in that.

Rich has also just entered the Lakeland 50 - 50 miles through the Lake District, 3,000 metres of elevation, July 2027. It came through the ballot with a 48-hour acceptance window. He's in. Andy is confirmed for Kyrgyzstan the same month to complete his BTU Global Race Series with the Mountain Ultra. Both of them heading into the mountains next summer.

And then there's the line from Coach Bennett's Runner's World podcast that Rich references - how do we know the most impressive performance on marathon day wasn't from the person who finished 37,500th? The 45-year-old single mum, two jobs, three kids, can only run three times a week. Her world isn't conditioned for success. The elite's is. So who's actually the most impressive?

The episode closes with Rich's theme for the Clean Break Collective this autumn: show up and stand tall. Good days, bad days, hot, cold, tired, energised, confident, doubting. Just show up.

Big shout out to Kath running the Great North Run this weekend.