Charlotte Hogan has been running for over 20 years. Her mum is in her 70s and still runs 400 metres for Great Britain. She herself has done over 100 half marathons, a handful of trail ultras, and is about to run 40 miles for her 40th birthday along the towpath from Bristol to Gloucester. She's also the founder of Queen Square Run Club - one of Bristol's biggest community run clubs, three runs a week, 30 to 50 people per session, donuts on a Friday morning.

But there was a period where she couldn't get out of bed. Where she'd sit on the tube to work and not recognise the person looking back at her in the window. Where she moved her chair around the corner in an open-plan office so nobody would come and talk to her. Where she switched her phone off because she didn't want people messaging. Where someone in her family eventually had to drive to London to bring her home.

That was at 28. It took five years and multiple attempts to get a formal diagnosis of major recurrent depression. She's been hospitalised. She found the right therapist in 2020. Third medication attempt found something that works. She's still with that therapist now.

In December 2023, she stopped drinking. What started as a quiet New Year turned into a Dry January that turned into April, when her partner went back to drinking on his birthday and she just kept going. Nearly three years later, she hasn't looked back - though she'll tell you honestly that the first holiday sober felt really strange, that the ceremonial airport pint is harder to let go of than people think, and that it took a full year before she noticed the real difference in her body after decades of drinking.

This week, Charlotte joins Rich and Andy to talk about all of it. The binge drinking culture she grew up in. The green hockey jumper at Southampton that smelled of last week's drinks. The Sunday sessions in Clapham starting at 10am. The way depression and alcohol blur into each other until you can't tell which one started first. And the run club that she built from three people in a square to a community that held her when she couldn't hold herself.

She's also just launched the Bristol Wellbeing Guide — a one-stop shop for accessible, free and low-cost wellbeing resources in Bristol, built from her own experience of knowing what she needed but not being able to find it.

Plus: 60 laps of Queen Square in November for Talk Club's men's mental health campaign. And a mum who's just broken her own European record.

Find Charlotte at @QueenSquareRunClub and @BristolWellbeingGuide on Instagram.

After four weeks away, Rich and Andy are back - and they've got a lot to catch up on.

Rich spent the summer at Latitude Festival volunteering as a run lead for Sport in Mind, dragging 100-plus people around a dusty campsite at 10am in 30-degree heat every morning, including a slightly reluctant Bridget. He also had his biggest craving in the best part of two years. Dancing in a tent, saxophone player going, everyone around him with a drink in hand, kids on the dance floor - and a voice in his head saying, why am I denying myself this? It passed. He got a Stella Zero from the alcohol-free bar, felt like part of the group, and never thought about it again. But it was real, and it's worth talking about.

Andy was in Croatia with the family - a neurodiverse household on holiday, which comes with its own particular set of challenges. He had his own moment too: a quiet dinner with Emma, wondering if a glass of wine might deepen the connection. He dismissed it almost immediately. A romantic illusion, he calls it. Not true. But it was there.

Both of them noticed that holidays and festivals have this almost ceremonial relationship with alcohol built into them - the first pint at the airport, the drink that signals you're finally off duty. And both of them came back having genuinely rested and recovered in a way they know they wouldn't have if alcohol had been involved.

There's also a brilliant moment where Andy asks Rich whether he ever gets the urge to put his watch back on during his naked running experiment - and Rich clocks exactly where he's going with it. The urge to check the data is the same urge. It's not the watch. It's not the drink. It's the relationship with the thing.

They also talk about Andy running the Yorkshire Marathon alongside his son Johnny - his first ever marathon - and the conversation they had on a long run about what a good first marathon actually looks like. Plus Paul Derbyshire, who joined their group two years ago in the early weeks of his alcohol-free journey to run Barcelona, is about to run his first Ironman. And Rich jogged past Phil Sessman in Leeds and didn't pluck up the courage to invite him on the podcast.

Yorkshire Marathon is nine weeks away. September feels like a fresh start. They're back.

Ted Gibson was a certified sommelier, a certified spirit specialist, and was on the verge of becoming a professional spirit taster. He spent 20-plus years in hospitality, drinking enthusiastically, surrounded by people doing the same thing, and never once thought he had a problem. Why would he? Nobody around him was standing out as different, nobody was flagging a concern, and he was good at his job. He was the wine guy in every room he walked into.

He decided to stop - possibly while still drinking, which he laughs about - the night he found out his wife was pregnant with their first child. She'd already been alcohol-free for two years. He knew she wasn't going to give him a free pass when he was hungover and the baby needed changing at 3am. So he committed to a year off, white-knuckled it with no reflective work, no self-inquiry, no coaching - just stubbornness - and by the time the year was up, his life simply didn't involve alcohol anymore.

He'll be six years alcohol-free in October. He's still untangling who he is without it.

This week, Ted joins Rich and Andy from his restaurant in South Carolina, sitting at the bar - alcohol-free - to talk about what it actually means to have a problem with alcohol. Not a DUI, not a relationship falling apart, not some public rock bottom moment. If you're not showing up as the dad you want to be. If you don't have the patience for your kids. If you're not recovering well enough to train, or present enough to connect. That, Ted argues, is a problem. And most of us are waiting for something far worse before we're willing to call it one.

They get into the identity crash of going alcohol-free and becoming a first-time dad simultaneously - two massive blows to who you thought you were, hitting at exactly the same time. The bar moment where a man three drinks in before noon asked Ted if he'd ever had a problem with alcohol, and what that question revealed. Why we scrutinise our diet, our sleep, our training - but always give alcohol a pass. And the coaching exercise Ted now uses with clients that cuts through everything: go stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself, with a straight face, that alcohol makes you a better dad.

There's also the story of his first marathon - concert the night before, beers in hand, headphones in, fell at mile 26.1 with the finish line in sight, calves turned to solid rock. He couldn't get up. The finish line was right there. His response? He took the headphones out. Running became meditative. He did his first 50K last year.

Find Ted on Instagram @TedGibsonCoaching.