He has won races in China, Kazakhstan, India, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands and the UK. He’s run in Thailand, Croatia, Russia, France, Italy and the United States of America. Luke Grenfell-Shaw is a globetrotter on trail running shoes. A globetrotter with a special mission.
Hotpot with pig brain, intestines or duck tongue. It’s probably not the meal a lot of trail and ultra runners have before their race, but for Luke Grenfell-Shaw it isn’t the weirdest thing he ever ate. “That has to be centipede”, laughs the 31 year old British trail runner.
Weird food is not something that surprises the Brooks athlete anymore. It’s a cultural experience that comes with his choice of life. Running across the world, wherever the races take him. “I try to pick the most beautiful races. When I plan my season I look at the photos of a race. If I like the photos, I include the race in my schedule. That’s how I ended up running (and winning; jk) Mozart 100 and Hoka Val d’Aran. A friend of mine just moved to Japan. So maybe next year I will go there to race.”
Brooks Trail Runners, his team and sponsor, gives him the freedom to make his own choices. “As long as I’m choosing UTMB races, Brooks is happy. And the UTMB Final is a priority for them.”
At UTMB, the Ultra Trail Mont-Blanc, he will run the CCC; the 101 kilometre long ultra that starts in Courmayeur, passes through Champex-Lac and finishes in Chamonix. To get to the finish line the ultra athletes have to conquer six thousand metres of climbing. “So far I enjoy hundred kilometre ultras. They are intense, but you race for one day. No silly overnight stuff. For shorter races I have to work more on my speed.”
Travelling has always been in Grenfell-Shaw’s blood. “When I was a kid, my family traveled a bit around Europe. Those trips were always an adventure. We cycled along the Rhône. We walked north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. When I was 18 I took a gap year. Friends of my family had set up a hospital in Nigeria and I worked there as an intern. I was probably pretty useless. That experience was draining and exciting at the same time. Intoxicating. Every day was a race to get to the end. Life was so different from what I was used to.”
“When I was at university I took classes in Arabic and Russian and went to the Middle East. Heading to Lebanon in 2015 wasn’t the best year to go, later there were suicide bomber attacks in Beirut. But traveling allows you to see a picture you don’t see in Western media. Yes, there was the bombing, but in the rest of the country people were busy with everyday life. They were kind, lovely, and friendly. I made friends who drove me all around the country. There is a big difference between the images we see in the media and real life. Not all Russians are bad. Not all Iraniens are bad. Life is not black or white.”
The loop around the world on his trail run shoes is the second world trip Luke Grenfell-Shaw is making. The first one, had a less pleasant genesis. It started abroad, of course. In Siberia, of all places. The then 24 years old Brit was teaching English at a local school. For a while he had had a persistent ache in his left shoulder, so he decided to visit the school nurse. 48 hours later he was back in the United Kingdom, where the doctor told him he had cancer; a very rare, aggressive sarcoma. It seemed his lifespan would be measured in months.
“The doctor told me it was stage IV. Metastatic, which means that the primary tumour had spread to my lungs. Chemotherapy would buy me a few more months. When I came home from the hospital full of grief and anger, I tried to block out this news. My father suggested we go for a run, knowing that that always made me feel happy. During the run, he said: ‘You can’t control the cancer. You can only control your response.’ That was the seed of the mindset I developed. I told myself if I only have one percent chance of surviving this, I should give it my best shot to be in that one percent. And even if I only have three months to live, I should make them as worthwhile as possible.”
During his first round of chemotherapy Luke Grenfell-Shaw was dealt another major blow. His brother John, then 25 years old, fell to his death during a run in the Lake District. He dedicated his Val d’Aran victory to him. “That race fell on the anniversary of his death. John was my mate. Sure, when we were young, we fought, like brothers do. But when he moved out of the house, we became friends. Running together. Cycling together. He’s always in my mind when I have a hard time during a race. I can be in pain, but I choose to be. My brother would have given everything to be alive and experience pain during an ultra.”
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In those dark days of chemotherapy an idea popped in his mind. “I promised myself if I survived this, I would cycle from Bristol to Beijing.” But even before that, the Brooks runner decided to embrace life as much as possible. So he kept on studying and finished his Master’s in Water Science, Policy and Management at the University of Oxford, kept on running and kept on travelling. All with the idea you can live richly and fully, even with cancer. “We have to be proactive and create our own opportunities to live our best lives. Every day.”
That message became the theme of his first world trip as he cycled from Bristol to Beijing, fundraising for cancer charities. A trip that’s documented in the movie A Life In Tandem. A trip he undertook on a tandem. “It’s a trip I wanted to do with John. Now he wasn’t there, I asked myself who do I want to have around me? The answer was simple; friends. Other people living with cancer. I call them CanLivers. People who face the challenges and uncertainties of cancer, yet acknowledge that they can live richly and fully.”
Grenfell-Shaw’s idea was that he would do the whole trip. Friends, and people he met on his way, could join parts of it. “Because not everybody can just bring their bike, I decided to go on a tandem. I also wanted to show it’s not just me having this mindset. I’m not an exception. There are other people living a full life, while having cancer.”
The start was slow. “In Western Europe everybody’s life is dictated by their schedule. Everything is planned. From Croatia and onwards people were more flexible. They had time to come along and loved to talk. To spend time together.”
One of the hardest parts of the journey was his leg across Ukraine. “I was battling headwinds of 40 miles per hour (64km; jk) on my way from Odessa to Mariupol. Often I would do only 20 kilometres in two hours. And that on a journey of seven hundred kilometres. Sleeping in a tent on the side of the road, in the freezing cold. But it was worth it. When I arrived I was welcomed by Gennady Mokhnenko, an unorthodox pastor and founder of the largest orphanage in the former Soviet Union. The most remarkable man I’ve ever met. He had heard about my ride and wanted to show me around Mariupol. He had cycled around the world with his sons. To raise money for his orphanage and to promote adoption. He’d adopted thirty seven kids himself.”
On his journey he also experienced some narrow escapes. Like that one day in Kyrgyzstan. “My friend Caroline was on the back. We were riding this long pass. This long descent. The tandem, the trailer and the two of us. Together around 200 kilograms. The road was so steep, that no matter how hard I was braking, we were just speeding up. Going more than sixty kilometres per hour. The brakes were getting hotter and hotter and started to wobble. They stopped working. I knew I had the life of Caroline in my hands. But my hands couldn’t stop the bike. I yelled to her that we had to jump. She did. I didn’t. My limbs refused. But because of her jumping off, I flew over the handlebars and ended up on the road. Just half a metre from a roadside barrier.”
Both of them ended up with deep cuts. “We went to a local hospital. The nurse wanted to help us, but there was a big local guy on the table, who couldn’t move. So with bleeding hands, we had to lift him up and bring him to another room, before we could be treated ourselves. The nurse cleaned my hands, but I spent the rest of the afternoon picking gravel out of my wounds.”
Abroad is also where Grenfell-Shaw started to run ultras. First in Siberia, then in Ireland. “The EcoTrail in Ireland, an eighty kilometre race, was my first more serious race. To my surprise I was running faster than everybody else. When I finished Eoin Flynn, the race announcer said: ‘You can be quite good at this.’ That’s when I started to take running more seriously.”
A year after the EcoTrail Wicklow the Brooks athlete won the 100k at Mozart 100 and the 50k at the Salomon Serpent Trail in the UK. He also finished eighth at UTMB CCC. Last year he won Val d’Aran100k and finished on the podium at the Elephant 100, a UTMB race in Chiangmai, Thailand. This year he started with a victory in Lulworth, a 50k race and won the Great Wall Ultra Trail in Badaling, China in April. (Not to be confused with the UTMB Race in May).
Only at the Chianti Ultra Trail, in Italy in March, racing Kilian Jornet, Jim Walmsley and Vincent Bouillard, he had to step out. He wasn’t ready for the steep, technical and slippery downhills so early in the season. “I wanted to be competitive. It was a gamble. It didn’t pay off. My legs were shot to pieces. After 60 kilometres I couldn’t run anymore.”
That was a bit of a new experience for Grenfell-Shaw, as life has taught him how to deal with the pain cave. “I have two mantras. One, my brother would have done anything to be here. And two 6.5 years ago I would have given anything to be in this much pain. When death is waiting for you, being a couple of hours in pain is nothing.”
