Sneers - Origin Story

January 2024. Me and Lee decided to start winter sea dipping partly to break some shit habits, partly because we were sick of waking up feeling like beige versions of ourselves. And yeah, we’d been neck-deep in all the podcasts everyone was banging on about — Huberman, High Performance, all those health cult leaders telling us cold water would fix our lives. So we thought, fuck it, let’s see what the fuss is about.

Now imagine this, early morning, pitch black, high tide smashing into the Porthcawl seafront. Waves roaring. Wind slicing through us. Lee — a Rhondda rugby boy with only one dodgy cauliflower ear and enough stubbornness to head butt a mountain — and me, a Porthcawl tech/data nerd with the athleticism of a hungover dad and a body so soft like blancmange it matches my temperament. To be fair, Lee never misses a training session and often reminds me to "not be a minge!" Our kids go to school together. Our lives are intertwined in the best kind of way.. 

Back to it…The sea. 6 degrees. The air? Fucking colder. No wetsuits. Just two blokes standing there, absolutely shitting ourselves. But we walked in, screaming like a couple of vee jay-jays, and came out buzzing. It was fucking awful. And somehow, completely brilliant. That was Day 1 of the Sneers — even though we didn’t know it yet.

Soon enough, we were running before sunrise and dipping after. Then we threw together a mixture of borrowed running plans. Next thing, we’d dragged a few mates into the madness. People were turning up before work for a jog and then freeze their bollocks off, It was chaos.

And then came the moment. One of us (no names) emerged from the sea, his piece so cold it looked like it had evacuated. Skin left flapping in the wind like a deflated windsock. It was haunting. And hilarious. And it looked exactly like the nose of Cyril Sneer from the old cartoon. That was it. The Sneers were officially born.

We made a WhatsApp group — a band of painfully average idiots, all trying to get a bit fitter, scare ourselves a little, and live like elite athletes… just shitter.

Now we show up to 5Ks, 10Ks, halves, ultras, triathlons, Hyrox events — basically anything that sounds like it might break us. We don’t win. We don’t care. We just want to prove that being a bit shit is no excuse. We’re not where we want to be but we’re better than yesterday. And that’s the point.

Luckily for us and for you - through our day jobs we’ve got access to some elite level coaching, and we’re not cock blocking a thing. We’ll share our training schedules, review the latest tech/gear as well as lay bare our mistakes, the fuck-ups, and the golden nuggets we wish someone told us before we got nipple-deep in freezing water.

We are the Sneers. Average as fuck. Obsessed with getting better. Because suffering is fun when you’re with mates