by Ben Smith
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I had no advice from medical people beforehand, simply because I couldn’t afford it. We contacted universities and health professionals and there were a couple of people who took an initial interest, but they soon went off the idea. The 401 team and I got a bit sick of people letting us down, so decided we’d just work it out ourselves as we went along. The lack of interest was probably a blessing in disguise. If I’d had a medical advisor following me around all the time, I don’t think I would have done it, because they would have told me to stop at the first sign of danger. And I’m not sure a nutritionist could have helped anyway, because nobody in the UK had ever done anything on this scale before, at least not to our knowledge. Therefore, there were no rules.
For the first 50 days, I stuck to what I thought were the basics, as laid out in magazines I’d read, in terms of eating the recommended number of calories a day for an endurance runner and loading up on carbohydrates and supplements. I’d eat a bowl of porridge for breakfast, snack on nuts, and consume lots of rice and potatoes for energy. I’m not a massive fan of pasta, but I didn’t really have a choice, because whenever I stayed with people I ate whatever was put in front of me, and pasta was almost always what I was given. They’d been kind enough to cook for me and put me up for the night, so it’s not like I was going to complain! But because I was eating mainly carbs, I felt full, but I was actually not eating enough and running on a calorie deficit a lot of the time. I lost 17kg over those first 50 days, dropped to 70kg, and my body fat was as low as 7 per cent at one point. My insides felt cold and achy, as if somebody was punching me, because the visceral fat around my organs had wasted away to almost nothing. I felt sick and low on energy, my body was absolutely shot after every marathon. And because I had no energy and my brain wasn’t being fed either, my motivation was dwindling.
So eventually I decided I was going to do what I wanted to do and stop doing the ‘right’ thing. I love food and I love coffee, so I worked it into my daily planning. I’d run eight miles, stop off at a café and have a flat white, because that was what motivated me. I started eating higher-fat, higher-protein food, because that was what I craved. The first time I stopped for a burger, it sent pure, fatty energy coursing through my veins. That felt so good! I’d stop off for fish and chips, roast dinners, whatever I could get into me, because that’s what I felt like eating at that time. My breakfasts became famous, huge portions of eggs, bacon, hash browns – complete madness in some people’s eyes. I’d also have a pint of cider almost every day. Imagine Paula Radcliffe or Mo Farah stopping off for a pint halfway round a marathon! Any nutritionist worth their salt would have been telling me: ‘You’ve got to eat this, you’ve got to eat that, you can’t be eating this.’ But I’m not an elite athlete, I was just an ordinary bloke, doing something out of the ordinary, so maybe the rules were different for me. As one leading nutritionist pointed out to me after the Challenge, what I was doing was probably beyond elite, in that it had never really been done before.
I’d been sold this idea of needing to eat ‘healthy’ food, until I worked out that my body was constantly in fight mode, just trying to survive, so it just needed anything I could get my hands on, in whatever quantity. So when my intuition told me I needed a burger, I stopped and had one. My energy levels shot right up, my body fat increased, my weight stabilised and my injuries stopped. As a result of all that, I got my motivation back. So, if anyone out there is thinking of running 401 marathons, my first piece of advice would be: ‘Bacon and egg sandwiches all the way!’
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After a few experiences with men, I decided to tell my friend Susan that I was gay. We were in the front room of my flat and it took me about 15 minutes to get it out. When I finally did, she said: ‘Oh, is that it? I thought you were going to tell me you had cancer.’ And she carried on eating her risotto. What she didn’t say was: ‘Yeah, I already knew that.’ Nobody seemed to know. I was like: ‘Seriously? Come on! Really?’ And they’d say: ‘Not a fucking clue.’ I hid it well, then. The fact that Susan was so blasé about it gave me the strength to tell another friend, so we broke it to Laura together on a flight to Seville. Laura, who has an incredibly dry sense of humour, was like: ‘Oh, OK. Happy days!’ And then the jokes started coming out. It was their way of saying: ‘You know what? We really don’t give a shit.’ It was amazing!
Telling Mum and Dad was a little bit different. It normally takes three and a half hours to drive up from Bristol to Lincoln, but this time it took me eight. I stopped at every service station along the way and must have got through at least 40 fags (I was still smoking, despite running marathons). I was sitting in my car, dragging on a cigarette, rehearsing my speech, wondering what the reaction would be. When I finally arrived, Dad was on the phone to my brother, Dan, who had just got his first job after retiring as a professional rugby player, selling beer for Peroni. That was a big deal for him, but I was sitting on the kitchen table, swinging my legs, thinking: ‘Please just get off the phone…’
When Dad was done, I took them through to the lounge and said: ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’ Fifteen minutes later, I still hadn’t told them. It was just so big, it got stuck on the way out. Eventually it came: ‘I think I might be gay.’ I didn’t say ‘I was gay’, I said ‘I might be gay’, because that gave me a way out. Dad looked at me and said, in his usual Dad way: ‘Are you happy?’ ‘Yeah, I really am,’ I said. And he said: ‘Well, alright then.’ Mum burst into tears, gave me a big hug and said: ‘We’ll love you no matter what.’ She and Dad should write a manual on how to react when your son or daughter comes out, it was pretty much perfect. The next words out of Dad’s mouth were: ‘Shall we go and get some fish and chips?’ The biggest thing I will ever tell my parents and that was his reaction! After telling me, in a joking way of course, that I wasn’t allowed to wear her shoes, Mum texted my brother, and he texted back saying: ‘You’ve gone and topped me again, you bastard. I get a bloody job and you come out with that!’ A minute later he texted again: ‘I’m proud of you and love you.’
That was that. You build these things up so that they seem monumentally important, because you’ve been ashamed of who you really are for so long, and there will be millions of people all over the world right now stuck in the same situation as I was. It might not be the same for everyone, but when I came out, I discovered that nobody really gave a shit. That was probably the best night’s sleep I ever had. But even better was waking up the following morning, looking in the mirror and knowing I didn’t need to put that fake face on ever again.
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Pete Smith, Ben’s dad: When he told us he was gay, I said: ‘So, what’s the important thing you’ve come to tell us about? It doesn’t bloody matter!’ He’s our Ben, he’ll always be our Ben. I was just upset that he’d been trapped in that other world for so long, because of what he thought other people expected of him. Isn’t it awful that society can drive a person down a route that’s just not for them?
Beverley Smith, Ben’s mum: The first thing we knew about him being gay was when he was sat on the settee after his marriage had broken down and he finally decided to tell us. We had no inkling, none whatsoever. He’d had girlfriends, he’d been married and lived with her for years before that. We were disappointed he felt he couldn’t tell us, but what really hurt us was that someone we loved and cared for so preciously had been forced to live a life he didn’t want to be living.
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I don’t know why I had worried about it so much – I think it was more about whether I was ready to tell them, rather than being worried about how they would react. My relationship with Mum and Dad was always strong, other than when I was with my wife. So while I don’t think coming out necessarily made our relationship stronger, it meant they got to know the real me for the first time.
Dad is military through and through, but he’s not a classic, butto
ned-up type. He’ll talk at me sometimes rather than to me, but that’s what dads do, and he’s been barking orders for 40 years. But he managed through respect rather than fear, and he wouldn’t ask you to do something he wouldn’t do himself. Like most dads he thinks he knows everything and is a man of specifics. I could say: ‘This cup is green.’ And he’d say: ‘No, it’s not. I think you’ll find it’s luminous green.’ I love the fact that, even if he gets the specifics completely wrong, he has the audacity to stand his ground, at the same time as I’m thinking: ‘You’re talking bollocks, Dad.’ He’s a loving father, very wise, very open-minded, would do anything for anybody, and I love him to death.
Dad has seen things not many people have seen and that must put life into perspective. He doesn’t talk much about his time in the RAF. He’s a proud man and wants to be the person with all the problems, so that nobody else has any. I can see how much some of what he experienced troubles him sometimes, but he loved his job all the same. It’s ironic, because if I had just taken more notice of him when I was younger, I would have learned that finding what makes you happy is what life should be about. Dad wanted to be in the RAF from when he was a kid and that’s what he ended up doing. But when you’re young you don’t necessarily want to see your Mum and Dad for who they really are, and I didn’t live with them anyway for many years. Maybe because of that, I didn’t have a great relationship with Dad until my late teens. Now, we’re closer than ever. He’s one of the most wonderful people I know.
Mum is a mother hen and the person who held the household together. Dad would turn up and say: ‘Sorry, I’m disappearing for three months, I can’t really tell you where I’m going.’ When I lived at home after leaving university, Dad was in the Falklands, and Mum and I would watch CSI together when she couldn’t sleep, with a plate of chicken wings. It was our quality time and I think she cherished those times as much as I did. Mum knew the score with Dad’s job, because she was a nurse in the RAF when she met him. She would do anything for her family and is very loyal and honest. She’ll also tell her whole life story to strangers, which is obviously where I get it from. After finishing nursing, she set up her own counselling business, and after Grandma died, she set up a bereavement counselling charity. She believes in a more spiritual plan, something I always respected but struggled to understand. One day she announced that she wanted to be a medium and me and Dad just looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
Mum and Dad are opposite ends of the scale in some ways – Mum is very holistic, Dad is very black and white and logical, and I’m both of them mixed up together. Maybe this is the secret to running 401 marathons in 401 days?! They are absolute soulmates, more in love now than they’ve ever been, and I’m so lucky to have them as parents.
My relationship with my brother suffered when I went away to boarding school, when I was 10 and he was six. Because Mum had been told she couldn’t have kids, when I came along they maybe coddled me a little too much, because they wanted to protect me. And because I wasn’t strong enough to deal with my own bullying, when Dan joined me at secondary school I couldn’t protect him and be the big brother he was used to. I don’t know if he blames me, but I know he had a shit time at school. I’m sure there was an element of embarrassment that his older brother was being bullied, and because he was my younger brother, he got tarred with the same brush and started taking flak himself. Once he was taken out of school, he flourished. He was always sportier than me, grew into a big unit of a man and became a professional rugby player. But, looking back, I don’t think we were as different as it seemed at the time. I remember wanting to do GCSE PE, but my parents said to me: ‘No, that’s what your brother does.’ That’s almost the way it had to be: Dan was the sporty one, I was the sensitive one. But we both could have been sporty – if I’d kept up swimming, I reckon I could have been pretty good at it – and it’s taken us all these years to realise that we’re a lot more similar than we ever thought we were.
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Dan Smith, Ben’s brother: Ben and I were really close as children. We’d always be out on our bikes, or spending hours together on our pedal go-karts, adventuring and exploring. I have vivid memories of our time in Germany. I remember playing in the front garden, wearing matching outfits, and these massive army tanks coming down our road and parking outside our house. We would climb this big cherry tree after dinner, sit in the branches, eat cherries, spit the pips out and chat. I also remember him throwing a firecracker at my head at one of Mum and Dad’s New Year’s Eve parties, and me being the one who got in trouble. He was a mischievous little shit at times, although, truth be told, we were both as bad as each other. But we were also best mates.
Before he went off to boarding school, I remember him packing his bags with Mum, and I could see he was nervous. I cried in my bedroom, because I was worried for him and didn’t want to be without my best mate. Things were never the same from that point on. Not long after Ben left for boarding school, I followed, because I wouldn’t stop pestering my poor mum and dad to send me. I just wanted to be with my big brother. Ben helped me through the early weeks, but he was having a challenging time himself, and wasn’t the same brother I knew from home. I couldn’t do anything to help because I was only nine, and although it wasn’t his fault and there was nothing he could have done, I became guilty by association. I ended up being bullied myself, although nowhere near as badly as Ben, and this put a strain on our relationship. We both needed each other, but because we were young and didn’t really understand what was happening, we grew further and further apart.
When I followed him to secondary school, Ben was having a particularly bad time of things. But I didn’t really appreciate how bad it was, because we only saw each other every now and again in passing. I was getting bullied as well, mainly verbally, although there was one time I had my shirt super-glued to my back. But for Ben, the bullying was on another level. Some Sundays, when things were really bad for me, I would go to Ben’s room and play on the computer for hours. It was a safe haven, but we never really talked about what was happening. We were just trying to survive. Bullying changed Ben, it changed me, and it changed our relationship completely.
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DAY 48: In Eastbourne, after a shot of muscle activation therapy, which is basically doing an awful lot of stretching, I feel like I can run and run and never stop running. I almost feel guilty because I’m having a whale of a time, doing what I want to be doing and absolutely loving it. I feel like it should be more difficult, and sometimes I think: ‘Does this look too easy? Do I need to make it look tougher?!’
Chapter 7
The Perfect Partner
Having had my fill of Grindr, I registered for another dating app called Plenty of Fish, which seemed a bit more my style. One night in December 2014, I was sitting on my sofa with a friend, absent-mindedly swiping through profiles, when I first came across Kyle’s profile. As soon as I saw him, I thought: ‘Hello…’ I just knew. He was stocky and masculine and covered in tattoos, all of which I find attractive. I read his profile – which you don’t tend to do on Grindr – and we had the same morals and values. I’d been compiling lists of things I wanted in a partner, and he pretty much ticked off all of them. So I thought: ‘Hey, let’s give this a go.’ I liked his picture and he sent a message straight back saying: ‘Let’s go on a date.’ I was shitting myself, thinking: ‘Fuck! What have I done? I’m not good enough for you. How the hell do you like me? This must be some kind of mistake!’
When he told me he was moving from Bournemouth, where he was doing his PhD, to Bristol the very next day, it just felt like everything had suddenly aligned. For our first date, I picked him up from his flat and took him out for breakfast in Portishead, before we went for a walk on Sandy Bay, just north of Weston-super-Mare. He’d recently had an operation on his feet and was still recovering, so I chose the beach as it would be easier for him to walk. What a gentleman! After I’d dropped him
off at his flat, I immediately wanted to see him again. I’d fallen for him, big style. He was all I could think about. When I told him about The 401 Challenge on our first date, he just said: ‘That sounds quite good.’ That made me like him even more, because it was the craziest possible thing I could come up with and it didn’t faze him one bit.
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Kyle Waters, Ben’s partner: Ben viewed my profile a couple of times online so in the end I sent him a message. I just said: ‘I don’t want to waste time messaging back and forth, here’s my number.’ What attracted me to him was the fact he was a typical bloke, and I mean that in a nice way. He was just a normal guy doing normal things, at least that’s what I thought! I’d just had some metal pins taken out of my feet, so we went for a little walk on the beach. He told me about the Challenge, and it became clear that on top of being a normal guy doing normal things, he was an amazing person who wanted to do amazing things. You can be both. I didn’t think he was crazy, I wasn’t fazed by it at all. It’s great to have goals, great to have unwavering belief. So I just said: ‘OK, that’s amazing, I hope you do it.’ And I knew he would, I believed in him from the very start.