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.

The kids are back at school, the summer's officially over, and Rich and Andy are back in a room together - figuratively speaking - for the first time in weeks. Yorkshire Marathon is six weeks away. Autumn race season is here. And this week's episode is one of those ones where a conversation about running quietly becomes a conversation about everything else.

Rich is six weeks out from Yorkshire with no data, no watch, no Strava, and no idea what time he's going to run. He's also having more fun than he's had in any marathon training block he can remember. There's something in that.

Andy is running Yorkshire with his son Johnny - his first marathon - and there's a glass ceiling conversation happening in this episode that's worth the listen alone. Andy's been consistently running 3:33. He wants to go sub-3:30. Five minutes a kilometre, dead on, for 42.2K. He knows he's capable of it. So does Rich. The only thing standing in the way is the bit between his ears.

Which leads to the riff. Rich connects the fear of committing to a marathon goal - fear of failure, fear of what people will think, fear of who you'll become - to the fear that stops people committing to an alcohol-free journey. It's the same fear. Different thing, same mechanism. And the people who get through it aren't the ones who feel less afraid. They're the ones who lean into all of it anyway.

Also in this episode: comparison as the thief of joy, the member of the group who ran their first marathon in their late 60s and is wondering if the running days are ending, and Andy heading off mid-episode for his 3-year post-cancer treatment all-clear. Which arrived. All clear.

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.

Jo Carr grew up in Wigan, worked in pubs and clubs, and drank in the way most people did in the late 90s and early noughties - constantly, and without much question. At 21, absolutely hammered and on her way out for the night, she got off a bus outside a local college where an open day was happening. A lecturer called Alan wouldn't let her walk past. She ended up on a business course, came out with a first class honours, became an accountant, met her husband at work, had two kids, and built a life that looked, by every external measure, like everything was fine.

It wasn't fine.

After having kids, Jo tried to get back to who she was before. But the version of herself before kids drank. A lot. Lockdown made it worse. And then she found running - which she threw herself into with exactly the same all-or-nothing energy she'd always brought to everything. By 2022 she was getting up at 3am to eat, running 20 miles at 4:30am before school drop-off and a full day of work, fuelling marathon training on 1200 to 1500 calories a day, and keeping all her race medals in a drawer because she was never happy with the times. She wasn't running towards anything. She was running away.

Her last drink was the 6th of April 2024 - the night before her wedding anniversary. She doesn't remember getting home. When she woke up, she decided she wasn't going to drink. Again. Like she'd decided hundreds of times before.

Then, at exactly 30 days sober, she got a phone call. Her best friend from school was in hospital with alcohol-related illness. She didn't survive. Joe went to the funeral and realised she wasn't just grieving her friend. She was grieving a life she thought she was supposed to live - all the things she'd never had the courage to do, the version of herself she'd never let exist.

She's now two years sober and has built Find Your Mojo, a fitness and wellbeing space built around one core belief: nourishment, not punishment. Her classes are built around a hexagon of healthy habits - movement, nourishment, rest, connection, mindfulness and purpose - with trauma-sensitive language and the radical idea that rest never has to be earned.

This week, Joe joins Rich and Andy for one of the most honest conversations they've had all year about the relationship between alcohol, exercise, perfectionism and self-worth. And the line that sits at the heart of it all - the one she arrived at two years on the other side: I thought sobriety would teach me how to live without alcohol. It taught me how to build a life I no longer wanted to escape from.

Find Jo on Instagram @findyourmojomindandbody and @findingmymojo2024

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