Like many others from Gloucestershire and beyond, Adrian Williams will be heading for Europe in July.

But while the majority of those flying east will be heading for the sun-kissed beaches of Spain, Italy, the Greek Islands and the like, Williams’ destination will be a little further north.

In fact, quite a lot further north because Williams will be flying to Fyn in Denmark in preparation for the world duathlon championships, which take place in early July.

The 42-year-old Cirencester Athletics and Triathlon Club member qualified for the showpiece event after winning the Anglian Water Duathlon in Huntingdon in February.

He will represent Great Britain in the 40-44 age group category, and his achievement is all the more impressive when you consider that for the first 28 years of his life he did little or no sport at all.

“I started running in August 2004,” said Williams, who runs his own marketing company. “That’s when I first started my own business and I thought I had to do something just to keep fit. I knew I’d have little time available so I thought, ‘I know, I’ll go running’.”

However, just running wasn’t enough for Williams. “I thought that I needed to have a focus so I decided to run the London Marathon in 2005,” he chuckled.

Talk about jumping in at the deep end! That race would concentrate pretty much anybody’s mind, particularly the mind of someone who was a novice runner and “hadn’t even run a mile”.

But once he got his legs moving it was soon clear that Williams had a bit of talent for the sport.

“I entered the Stroud Half Marathon in the October and ran one hour, 44 minutes,” he said with justifiable pride. “I thought that was pretty good for a first effort.”

Indeed it was and he proved that run was no flash in the pan six months later when he completed the London Marathon in three hours, 41 minutes, comfortably inside the “magic four hours”.

Williams had been running for considerably less than a year, but although he was enjoying racing, by his own admission he was not a great trainer in those days.

“I didn’t believe in training back then,” he laughed, “but running has to be a habit if you are to get better.

“I remember running the Bugatti 10K and finishing in 41.47 and thinking this isn’t good. I thought I must be able to break 40 minutes.

“So my friend Paul Barlow set me a challenge. He said train properly for 10 weeks and see if it improves your performance.

“Three weeks later I ran the Angels 10K in 38 minutes, then I ran the Cirencester 10K in 37 something and then the Cricklade 10K in 36 something. I thought, ‘There’s something in this training!’”

Suitably impressed and lesson learned, Williams headed north of the border to the Highlands in Scotland in the winter of 2006 for a training camp, where a chance meeting with Gerard Hartmann helped catapult him to a new level as far as his running was concerned.

“He was Paula Radcliffe’s physio,” explained Williams, “and he convinced me about the importance of doing stretching exercises and core work.

“And at that same time I thought, ‘Instead of running 30 miles a week, why don’t I run 50?’”

And the benefits were almost immediate.

“I smashed all my times in 2007,” recalled Williams. “I ran the Frampton 10k in 33.59 which meant that in 10 months I’d taken almost nine minutes off my time. I ran a sub-16 5K, 26.55 for five miles and the Reading Half in 74 minutes.

“They were nice little times.”

And not only were they nice, the Reading time was good enough to earn him automatic qualification for the London Marathon.

However, Williams had other ideas and instead took a different route, deciding to run the Berlin Marathon in 2009.

“It was a beautiful course and I ran it in two hours, 51,” he said. “It was a brilliant event and really well run, everything went like clockwork.”

Everything was looking good in the Williams world but as we all know, sport has a nasty habit of kicking you in the teeth when things are going well, and Williams’ rapid progress was brought to a shuddering halt when he picked up a back injury.

“It meant I couldn’t run for four months,” he said.

But doing nothing wasn’t an option for Williams. “I needed to keep fit – I was in the mood for it – so I got on the exercise bike and started swimming,” he said.

And, of course, one thing led to another. “I had a few mates who were doing duathlons and triathlons so I took some swimming lessons,” explained Williams, who lives in Stratton in Cirencester.

And by 2012 he felt ready to compete in his first triathlon.

“It was an indoor pool swim at Tewkesbury,” he said. “It was a 400 metres swim, 20K bike and 5K run. My weakest element was the swim but I came 10th out of 500 and I thought, ‘That’s okay’.”

He did a lot better than okay in the Faringdon Triathlon soon after, winning the event in 58 minutes, and by the following year he was starting to think, justifiably, that he could compete on the international stage.

“I wanted to qualify for the World Championships so I took part in the Deva Triathlon in Chester,” he said.

So how did it go?

“Not quite as well as I thought,” he admitted. “I was 50th overall and 21st in my age group and only the top 20 qualified.”

While obviously disappointed, Williams was pleased that his friend Wendy Nicholls was among those who had qualified. And Williams didn’t have long to remain disappointed, because two weeks after the World Championships he was taking part in another open water triathlon, this time to try to qualify for the European Championships in Austria.

This time he did qualify and he certainly did himself proud once he got to Kitzbuhel, finishing fourth in the V35 age group.

“That was fabulous, my first GB vest and I did alright,” said Williams. And yet he knew that had it not been for the swimming – “That was my weakest link,” he said – he would have finished even higher.

And that was when he decided to give duathlon a go. “My biking was pretty good and I knew I could run,” he reasoned.

And he was right on both counts as he and Nicholls qualified for the European Championships in Spain.

Not that he has happy memories of competing in Madrid.

“It rained and rained and I had a shocker,” he said. “I came off my bike twice and didn’t finish the race, nor did Wendy. It was cold as well and I as soon as I got on the bike I knew it wasn’t going to be my day.

“There were 45 starters in the event but only 12 finished.”

So heavy was the rain – Williams felt the event shouldn’t have gone ahead – that there was almost enough water for the competition organisers to have added a swimming leg and turn the event into a triathlon!

And it was triathlon that Williams was to return to over the next couple of years or so, qualifying for the European Championships in both Lisbon and Dusseldorf.

In both events he finished comfortably inside the top 10 in age group, but finding time to train in the three disciplines was becoming more and more difficult.

That’s when he made what turned out to be the best decision of his sporting life at the back end of last summer.

“I decided to ditch the swimming and have another go at duathlon,” he said.

And within a few short months he was qualifying for his first ever world championships after his remarkable performance in Huntingdon, which saw him complete the course in one hour, 55 minutes, 58 seconds.

He was cheered on all the way in Cambridgeshire by his two children, Lottie, 15, and 11-year-old Tom.

Lottie has almost finished her GCSEs and is a pupil at Deer Park School in Cirencester.

Tom, a pupil at Powell’s Primary School in Cirencester, is already following his dad’s footsteps because he is a member of Cirencester AC.

“He runs in the Gloucestershire Cross Country League,” said proud dad, who is also head coach of the club’s junior section.

“He’s also done a few triathlons and duathlons, he’s coming on really well.”

And dad’s doing pretty well, as well, of course!