We are at the beginning of a 5km trail run, passing through a sun-dappled woodland, when the ultramarathon runner Sabrina Pace-Humphreys says something that almost stops me in my tracks. “The outdoors was a place that, for so many years, I didn’t feel safe in, for fear of being targeted and, as a kid, people jumping out and tying me to a tree and threatening to burn my hair,” she says. Wait, I say, did that happen to you? “Yes,” says Pace-Humphreys. “There’s a lot that I didn’t put in the book, but I do talk about my fear of being in the outdoors. The bullies would just want to get to me, so I was never left alone, therefore I didn’t go out.”
Pace-Humphreys is talking about her memoir, Black Sheep, which documents her experiences of growing up in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in the 1980s and 90s. Though this incident of being attacked doesn’t appear in it, many other instances of what she labels “rural racism” do. They dovetail into a short but punchy memoir that covers pregnancy in her teens, postpartum depression, alcoholism, ultramarathon running and, eventually, her decision to launch the campaigning charity Black Trail Runners.
