Gillingham runner Matt Evans knocked more than 10 hours off the previous best time to complete the Welsh Three Peak Challenge.

Evans previously set the fastest time to navigate the North Downs Way, southern route, a 126-mile journey that his wife Carly also recently completed - the first female runner to do so.

The Welsh Three Peaks feature Snowdon at 1,058m in the north, Cadair Idris (893m) in mid-Wales and Pen y Fan (886m) in the south. It’s a challenge that’s usually completed with transportation between mountains.

Evans ran the complete distance, starting at 6am on the Saturday, covering around 131.5 miles and over 6,500m of elevation, finishing at the foot of Pen y Fan in a record time of 36hrs47min. The previous best known time was 47:17, set a year earlier.

“It was an absolutely insane challenge!” said Evans. “It’s the hardest challenge I have done.

“The Welsh Three Peak challenge is to do the mountain up and down, get in the car and drive to the next one and do that but someone silly came up with the idea of running between them! I saw it and it got me excited.

“Running between them was the hardest bit and I think I quite underestimated how tough those between bits would be - there were mountain ranges between and the elevation was just insane.

“The previous people took four hours to get to the bottom of Pen y Fan because their legs were a mess.

“I was worried it would be the same for me but once I got to Pen y Fan I knew that was it and my mindset changed and I just wanted to get down and finish, I just sprinted to the bottom. I think the adrenalin had taken over.”

Evans had company throughout his North Downs challenge but because of the logistics of the Welsh Three Peaks he ended up doing the first 90 miles alone, with only Carly on hand occasionally in the support vehicle.

Thanks to a facebook friend in Rhayader they were able to get his running mate Ali Curtis, also from Kent, to help him complete the last 40 miles.

Evans said: “For him to run the final 40 miles was a massive shift in everything, including morale. I felt better having someone with me running.

“That was brilliant. To have a friend to come out and just casually run 40 miles is a challenge on it’s own. He was just like ‘yeah, yeah, I’ll be there’. That was epic.”

Evans managed to complete the challenge despite the weather doing its best to disrupt things.

“There were some really tough moments,” he said.

“Lots of people offered to help run the North Downs with me at different stages but with this, because of where it was, logistically it was an absolute nightmare. Nobody came!

“The first 90 miles I was on my own. Carly drove around crew points.

“We recced everything for the North Downs and knew exactly where the crew points were but with this we were going off someone else’s route.

“On Saturday night there was a torrential storm, the rain was insane, there was thunder and lightning and at one point we thought we might have to call it. I had to go full waterproofs and we had to see how it went.

“It pretty much rained for the rest of the duration, which caused some unpleasant chafing and blisters and then the last final climb up to Pen y Fan is probably the worst weather I have ever climbed a mountain in.

“If it was any other day I wouldn’t have done it. There was the rain and side winds that took me off my feet and I was crawling up the mountain at times. We had a quick photo at the top and then ran down to the bottom.

“I finished other big challenges and felt absolutely epic at the end but I didn’t feel the same after this one.

“It was amazing but I was still in la la land, like, what’s happened!?”

Evans has registered the challenge with the Fastest Known Time website. They scrutinise the times and validate them.

He has entered a 300k challenge next year but is planning some time off now to recover.