Rob Forbes is a pretty good long distance runner. So good, in fact, that if he wins a race – he likes ultra marathons – or sets a course record it doesn’t seem to raise too many eyebrows.

But when he does something out of the ordinary then it’s certainly worth shouting about, and that’s just what the 35-year-old Cirencester AC runner managed in the Cotswold Way Century a couple of months ago.

It was a performance that moved Cirencester AC’s excellent publicity officer Liza Darroch, a lady not given to hyperbole, to say: “His run of 17 hours 34 minutes to complete 100 miles of the Cotswold Way was of a stunning national standard and took almost two whole hours off the previous record. This was only one of his great runs this year.”

High praise indeed and fully merited of course. What makes Forbes’ achievement all the more remarkable is that by his own admission he has no structured training regime, fitting his hobby around his full-on work and family commitments.

The married dad of four children aged five and under, who works as an ecologist, can often be seen going for impromptu training runs around Coln St Aldwyns, the pretty Cotswolds village situated nine miles from Cirencester where he lives with his wife Helen.

While the locals won’t take a second glance as he goes on one of his training runs, visitors to the village may just stop and take another look.

“I have to fit any training runs in when I can,” Forbes chuckled. “We’ve got a single baby buggy and a double baby buggy and I will quite often go out with the kids sitting in them.

“I have to give them incentives like trips out for ice cream or chips at the pub but it does work!”

It certainly does and there’s every chance that the Forbes off-spring will follow in dad’s footsteps, of course, and become decent runners in their own right. If they do it’s likely that they will get into the sport at a far earlier age than he did.

Although Forbes, who hails from Wiltshire, was always sporty as a child, it wasn’t until he reached his 20s that he started to become interested in running.

“My first run was a bit of a joke,” chuckled Forbes. “It was while I was a student in Sheffield and a friend got me to run in the half marathon. I remember feeling like a hero when I crossed the line but I was barely able to walk for the next couple of weeks!”

The next stop for Forbes was Oxford Brookes where he studied for a masters. He also got a taste for the triathlon while there “even though I could barely swim”.

Although he was no Michael Phelps – who is? – Forbes was pretty good at triathlon. “I had a bit of a talent for it,” he said modestly.

With his university days now over, Forbes moved across the county border from the family home in Ham, Wiltshire, to Gloucestershire to work and in 2008 he joined Cirencester AC.

It was a good move and shortly after he was running his first marathon, the Berlin Marathon, finishing in two hours, 45 minutes.

“I discovered that the longer the race the better I did,” he said. “I started to take it a bit more seriously though I kept getting injured.”

Around this time, he developed a special bond with his landlady and now wife Helen. “I couldn’t believe my luck, I moved in with a hot young lady who was also thinking about setting up a cake baking company and needed a guinea pig,” he laughed. “Before I knew it rent negotiations had become a bit more serious!”

This tied in nicely as at the time Forbes was training for an altogether different type of endurance competition, the national mince pie eating contest at Wookey Hole. “My only other talent is being able to eat a lot,” he chuckled. “I won a few quid by eating something like 23 mince pies in 10 minutes and I was also the first person to complete a 2.2kg burger challenge with various sides down in Bristol!”

Clearly Helen wasn’t put off by this unusual talent as according to Forbes “in no time Helen was keen on the idea of marriage and kids”.

“In a last bid for freedom before signing up to family life, or desperate act of escapism, I decided I needed to do a big adventure,” Forbes said. Ironically Helen was the one to get him off the sofa and sort it out.

“That was in 2009,” explained Forbes, “just after I’d been made redundant. I’ve got family in South Africa and I wanted to see the World Cup in 2010, and Helen said, ‘Stop talking about it and just do it!’”

Of course it wasn’t a case of hopping on a plane, having a spot of tea with the relatives and then catching a taxi to watch Wayne Rooney and the like flatter to deceive on football’s biggest stage yet again.

Instead, it was one man’s impersonation of Tarzan as Forbes cycled, swam and ran from Cirencester all the way to South Africa

“It was a triathlon,” he said very matter-of-factly. “I set off from Cirencester on my bicycle – it was my first time on a touring bike – and then caught the ferry across the English Channel.

“I then cycled across France and Spain to Gibraltar.”

Impressed so far? So what happened next?

“I swam across the Strait of Gibraltar, cycled all the way down West Africa and then ran the Comrades Ultra Marathon once I was in South Africa, which was 56 miles, and finished by cycling to England’s first match,” he said.

That, of course, is where the wheels came off as England spluttered to a 1-1 draw with the USA in their opening game, managed to qualify from their group – just – before being unceremoniously dumped out of the competition in the second round by Germany who thumped them 4-1.

That in no way took the gloss off Forbes’ eight-month epic journey, however, as he raised more than £23,000 for the charity Re-Cycle, who provide bicycle aid to Africa.

“It was my final hurrah before getting married and having kids,” he laughed, “it was my last big adventure.”

Not quite as it turned out because Forbes has continued to run for fun despite the arrivals of Heath, 5, Otis, 3, Ophelia, 2, and Heidi, who was born earlier this year.

“I came back and did pretty well in an Ironman in Copenhagen and also completed the Bob Graham Round in the Lake District in 2012,” he said. “It’s a pretty well-known challenge which consists of 48 peaks in 24 hours and I did it with Ben Rosedale, who also runs for Cirencester.

“Since then I’ve started doing quite a lot of trail races and found I’m pretty good at it. The problem was that the better I do the more I want to do.”

But while he wants more his wife Helen wants less.

“She was and is very understanding but not so appreciative,” chuckled Forbes, “especially when I’ve won another bit of ‘tat’ for the mantelpiece – or should I say box in the attic!

“She even threatened to call the whole thing off if I kept doing Ironmans!”

Forbes has gone from strength to strength over the last couple of years, winning trail races and setting course records along the way.

This included taking part in the Race to the Stones, which is a 100km run starting just south of Oxford and finishing in Avebury in Wiltshire. It is billed as the route taken by Romans, Vikings, dragons and kings and sees runners journey from the Chilterns to the North Wessex Downs along the famous Ridgeway.
And Forbes has certainly reigned supreme, breaking the record two years ago in a time of eight hours, 19 minutes.

This year he bettered that time by some 23 minutes although on this occasion he was beaten into second place “by a very talented French runner”.

It’s a pretty impressive running CV that Forbes boasts. He also holds the course records for a number of other local trail races – the Naunton 19, Broadway Marathon and the 33-mile Imber Ultra at Westbury which he won in three hours, 48 minutes.

Earlier this year he also won the Country to Capital 45 ultra race from Wendover to London in four hours, 55 minutes, a couple of minutes outside of the course record.

Throw in the London Marathon which he completed this year in two hours, 37 minutes – “I was pretty chuffed with that given I only decided to run it a few weeks before and hadn’t done any faster training,” he said – and it’s clear that not only is he a very good runner but that the fire still burns brightly within.

“My dream would be to run for the Great Britain trail team,” he said. “The world championships this year clashed with my grandad’s 100th birthday and I couldn’t get time out from the family to make the trial anyway, but I’m aware I’m getting older and it’s now or never.”

He certainly showed that he’s good enough to be considered in such exalted company with that tremendous run across the Cotswold Way at the end of September.

“That was the big one of the year for me,” he admitted. “It starts in Chipping Campden and goes all the way down to Bath. It’s 102-odd miles and there are over 13,000 feet of climbs and a demoralising number of stiles!

“You have to do most of the running at night so you are self-navigating which adds a new dimension.”

While running in the dark obviously presents plenty of challenges, Forbes is able to see a number of opportunities in the future. As well as dreaming of running for his country in trails races he’s got ambitions to break the double buggy half marathon and marathon world records.

So it looks like any shops around Coln St Aldwyns selling flowers or chocolates should do okay in the weeks, months and maybe years to come as he tries to keep his better half onside.

“The trouble is that ultra marathons are not one of those hobbies that take just 20 minutes,” laughed Forbes. “Helen has started a ‘club’ for the wives of Cirencester runners. They meet in a pub on the first Thursday of every month, enjoy plenty of wine, and have a good grumble about their absent running-obsessed husbands!”

It sounds like Helen will remain a fully paid up member of the Thursday Club for a while yet!