Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
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The PhD student who mapped Kevin Sinfield's Extra Mile Challenge
As a research student, you might not expect to have the chance to support a legendary sportsman on a challenge that has captured the imagination of the country.
But for Dr Tom Hughes, it’s been his reality over the past few months, as he worked on mapping the route for Kevin Sinfield’s Extra Mile Challenge.
Tom, whose research focuses on injury prevention, took on the role of route planner to ensure the Leeds Rhinos legend took the most hazard-free route possible as he raised money for those impacted by motor neurone disease (MND).
Read how he first became involved in the challenge, the biggest barriers he has faced and how he devised the route below.
Find out more about Kevin, the challenge and how you can donate here.
How did you first become involved in the challenge?
It was through a conversation with my research supervisor. He knew that I had an endurance background having competed for years in Ironman Triathlon. He said they were looking for someone to help on the challenge who had a bit of knowledge of endurance sports, particularly of longer events and planning routes.
What was your first reaction when you found out more details about Kevin’s plans?
My first reaction was that it was a really long way! Obviously, I’d heard all about Kevin’s challenge in 2020, but I knew that this would be something completely different for him and for those of us involved, particularly with Kevin’s idea of doing it over 24 hours. My initial thought was that it was going to be a challenge to plan the route, but I was also thinking about all the other elements that go into a challenge like this.
How did you go about planning the route?
We went about planning the route firstly by looking at the straight-line distance. That gave us an idea of the distance we were trying to cover from Leicester to Leeds. Using software like Google Maps gave us a good idea of the approximate distance, and then we started looking at it in more detail. We had to take into consideration that the route that Google gave us might not make the most logistic sense as a route for Kevin.
What were the biggest challenges that you faced?
The biggest challenge was trying to keep the distance to 100 miles. We had that straight line distance that was approximately 100 miles, trying to avoid certain places and making sure that there were roads that Kevin could run created a big challenge, particularly trying to avoid tracks or off-road sections.
