Episode 73 | Ross Powell — Jersey, Ketamine & Running Ultras: How £100K, a Van Crash & 18 Hours in a Cell Finally Broke Through

Ross grew up on Jersey — nine miles by five — in a house where his dad drank heavily from Friday to Sunday and family life happened around arguing and alcohol. There was no one kicking a ball about with him, no male figure showing up for things. So Ross found his people outside, got easily led, got into trouble at school, and by 13 was paralytic at a New Year’s Eve party wondering why people kept telling him the next day about a version of himself he didn’t recognise. That version, he’d eventually realise, was his dad.

Through his twenties he worked as a maintenance carpenter, drank every weekend to blackout, and smoked weed daily. Then after COVID he inherited £100,000. Within 16 months it was gone — all of it snorted or drunk, surrounded by people who appeared when the money did and vanished when it didn’t. He had over 30 Monday no-shows at work in a single year. Ketamine became his midweek go-to. He crashed a van while on it with friends in the back, tried to do a runner, got caught, and spent 18 hours crying in a cell. The fine cleared his bank account. He was close to prison.

What pulled him back was running. He went from never running in his life to a sub-four-hour marathon in four months — then an ultra of 100K in Austria. Each time he cleaned up something would bring him back: a funeral wake, a friend saying you’ve done so well, the cogs of the old life turning again. Three pints at a pub and he felt nothing but shame. He left with his mum.

Now approaching a year sober on Jersey, training for ultras, in a relationship with a woman who used to take drugs just to try and fit in around him, Ross talks about what sobriety actually is: not becoming a better person, but stripping back to your raw, honest self with nowhere left to hide. His word for life now: magical.

Ross is on Instagram at:

https://www.instagram.com/rosspowell__?igsh=MWliZHk0aDd5M2N4Mw==

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