Kim Collison breaks Paddy Buckley Round FKT with 16-hour run

British fell runner Kim Collison recently set the FKT (fastest known time) on the Paddy Buckley Round, a 100K route in Wales that features 47 peaks and more than 8,500m of elevation gain. Collison, a former British trail running champion, completed the Paddy Buckley Round in 16 hours, 20 minutes, shaving 17 minutes off the previous record, which Welsh runner Matthew Roberts set in 2020. 

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The Paddy Buckley Round is a brutal challenge, and most people would be happy to simply complete it. Collison is unlike most people, though, and he set out to write his name in the history books with a record-setting run. The route, which was founded in the 1980s, had a longstanding record set in 2009 by a runner named Tim Higginbottom, who covered the hilly 100K trek in 17 hours, 42 minutes. It was 10 years before Damian Hall came along and lowered Higginbottom’s time, running 17 hours, 31 minutes in June 2019. (Hall also owns the winter FKT on the Paddy Buckley Round with a time of 21 hours, 30 minutes that he ran in 2020.) 

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In 2020, Roberts managed to smash all of the times run before him on the Paddy Buckley Round, hammering out a remarkable run in 16 hours, 37 minutes. On the women’s side of the record, Jasmin Paris owns the FKT in 18 hours, 33 minutes, and fell running legend Nicky Spinks has the record for running the round twice in one shot, which she completed in two days, nine hours, 15 minutes. 

While Higginbottom got to enjoy his FKT for a decade, Hall was not so lucky, and Roberts stole it from him just a year after Hall set it. Like Hall, Roberts now knows what it feels like to have an FKT taken away shortly after winning it, and Collison has officially moved to the top of the all-time standings on the Paddy Buckley Round. After his run, Collison took to Instagram to write a bit about the result. 

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“Pure joy reaching the summit of Snowdon yesterday on my way to the new Paddy Buckley Round record in 16:20:40,” he wrote. “The day was perfect, ground conditions excellent and I was ready to push myself to the limit. I loved being in the rugged Welsh mountains of Snowdonia with the best awe-inspiring views on an amazing day.”

The result is the second big FKT of Collison’s fell running career, adding to his record on the Bob Graham Round from 2020. On the Bob Graham Round, which is a fell running challenge in Britain’s Lake District, Collison broke the 24-hour record by summiting 78 peaks in a little less than 24 hours. 

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