An A Level student from Truro College has broken the British record for fastest under 20s marathon run.

Floyd Ratcliffe posted the record time at the Valencia Marathon in December, clocking up a time of 2 hours and 44 minutes for the 26.2 mile course.

He said: “I’m really pleased with my performance at Valencia. It was much hotter than racing here in Cornwall, so I had to plan my hydration carefully. To have recorded 2018’s fastest under 20’s marathon time is amazing.”

Floyd, who is in his second year of studying A Level maths, physics and chemistry at Truro College, has been running for a number of years, with success at several distances. He recently started being coached by the college’s health, wellbeing and sport project lead Julian Wills, who, in addition to his college role, works with a number of high performance athletes from across the region.

Though Floyd had competed over 26 miles before, the Valencia Marathon was his first major road event at this distance, and expectations for the event were significantly exceeded with his junior category winning time, and top 500 placing out of a field of over 20,000 athletes.

Since working with Julian, Floyd has changed the way he trains and has actually reduced the weekly mileage he runs, now focusing on quality specific sessions rather than volume.

Floyd is now targeting a number of races at regional and national level, and has aspirations to continue his running when he gets to university, where he plans to study engineering. As a lover of mountains and fells, Floyd also plans to undertake some of the more challenging ultra-marathons that form part of the international sky running programme.