Hannah Knights

Happy birthday to Great Britain’s Hannah Knights, who races 400m hurdles in the evenings and spends her working days coaching people whose hearts have given them a scare.

Hannah is a cardiac coach at CP+R, the clinical prevention and rehabilitation practice on Upper Wimpole Street in London. The role is exactly the hybrid it sounds like: part physiotherapist, part clinical exercise specialist, part sport scientist, building individual programmes from clinical assessments for a portfolio of clients. And here is the detail that makes the whole thing sing. CP+R does not call them patients. In its own words, it calls them athletes.

She has a proper competitive season of her own to go with it. Across 2025 she won the 400m at Guildford in 58.94, won the 400m and the 400m hurdles on the same afternoon at Poole, won the 800m at Stevenage, and took a third over the 1500m steeplechase at the same meeting. She has been a British Milers Club member for years, and in April she ran the 5.08km leg at the ERRA National Six-Stage Road Relays at Sutton Park in 19:41, helping Guildford and Godalming to fifth, the best finish in the club’s history. This summer she has been out on the track pacing races, which is a job nobody sees and every meeting depends on.

The range is the point with her. Over one season she scored for her club at 400m, 400m hurdles, 800m, steeplechase, javelin, road 5K and a national road relay. Athletes who can do that are what keeps a club league running, and she has been doing it while holding down a clinical caseload and an MSc in exercise as medicine from Loughborough.

Happy birthday, Hannah! Many happy returns of the day, and here is to every one of those clients you get across the line. And so say all of us. 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇬🇧