401
Page 9
But I can’t be completely honest about absolutely everything. Believe it or not, there are people who have pissed me off. Some days, I run with people I can’t wait to get away from. Some people have an attitude and whinge about stuff. I’m pretty good at talking about myself, hence this book, but there are lots of people far better than me, believe me. And I’ve listened to them. For hours. I’ll be running with them and they’ll be chewing my ear off. And there are people who want to challenge me and don’t really get what I’m trying to do. I always try to run with the slowest people in the group, which is good for me, and good in terms of the Challenge’s strategy, but it also helps motivate them and means they don’t feel left out, because I know how it feels to be struggling at the back. But you’ll get people saying: ‘Hurry up! How long is this going to take? Are we really having another break?!’ I feel like punching them. Seriously, who do they think they are? But I can’t exactly post on Facebook saying: ‘Great day today, apart from some idiot I ran with...’
Day 53 in Whitstable is one of the most memorable of the Challenge so far and one of the most memorable of my life. We made the decision early on that we weren’t going to apply for the male world record, which stood at 52 consecutive marathons, for reasons I’ll explain later. But the longer this Challenge goes on, the more I realise it’s not about milestones or records, it’s about meeting new people, inspiring them to achieve things they never thought they’d achieve, helping them build their confidence and self-esteem. This Challenge has a mind of its own.
Today, fellow runner Shirley completes her first marathon, having only ever run two, maybe three miles before. She had no idea how far she was going to run when she turned up, and ends up sprinting the last hill. Being part of making memories with someone like that is really special, and things like that are happening almost every day. Shirley didn’t have that much confidence, but if you give somebody the belief that they can do anything they want to, there’s no stopping them. I don’t have a magic wand but the 401 is starting to cast a bit of a spell. People have started calling me the Pied Piper, and I’m finding it embarrassing to be called inspirational, because I just want to be me, and I’ve only been out running.
I think the project is working because I’m just a normal bloke. It makes people think: ‘If Ben can run 401 marathons, I can surely run one.’ All you need is positivity, it really is that simple. Shirley is the 32nd person to set a new PB so far, and that’s what it’s all about. This Challenge has become so much more than I thought it would be. And I’m just so happy to be living as me. In Crawley on day 60, I’m able to announce that The 401 Challenge has been nominated for two awards. My initial reaction on hearing the news was: ‘Really? Why? I haven’t done anything yet.’ Apparently, I have, and I’m humbled and quite confused. At the same time, it shows that people are standing up and shouting about the Challenge, and the message is starting to get out there. Kidscape is really getting behind me, sharing my tweets and Facebook posts, occasionally sending someone out to meet me on the course and tell me what an amazing job I’m doing for them. I’m interviewed by BBC South East, and discover that almost £11,000 has now been donated. On top of that, three ladies from the Saints and Sinners Running Club complete marathons for the first time, and Tolu, my project manager, pops up out of the blue and runs a new distance PB of 18km.
••••••••••
OCTOBER 2015 IN NUMBERS
Marathons: 31
Miles run: 830.1 (average per day: 26.8)
Running time: 162:08.27 hours (average per day: 5:13.49)
Number of people run with: 349
Distance personal bests: 38
First marathons/ultra-marathons: 22
Pints of cider: 15
Flat whites: 31
••••••••••
Tim Osbourne, ultra-runner: When I heard about Ben, I thought: ‘This guy is insane – I’ve got to run with him and find out more!’ The first marathon I ran with him was on day 80 in Oxford, and when he told me his story, it was quite unsettling. But it also told me that he was doing it for all the right reasons. He involved everybody, regardless of ability, and to see the look on someone’s face when they’d done their first 10k or half-marathon, and the whole group had stopped to applaud them, was wonderful. People would be in tears because they genuinely couldn’t believe what they’d just done. Ben was just such a likeable bloke, and so much fun. I ran 12 marathons with him during the Challenge, and whenever it was someone’s birthday, we’d all stop on a street corner and start singing ‘Happy Birthday’. People must have been walking past, thinking: ‘Who on earth are this lot?’
Ben is a bit of a clown, naturally funny, which I think got him through a lot of dark days. I saw him when he was quite down in the dumps, and I’d send him the odd text message or donate a tank of petrol to pick him up a bit. But he’d sometimes say to me: ‘However down I feel today, it’s not as bad as when I was being bullied in my former life.’ I could relate to that healing side of running. I run a business, supplying and fitting kitchens, and sometimes it’s overwhelming. It’s long hours and my job doesn’t finish when I get home. But when I’m stressed, I go for a run. Like Ben, running is my release, when I can forget about everything and the world really does feel like a better place.
I do ultra-running, where I’m out on the road for over 10 hours, and I’ll sometimes end up in an almost hallucinogenic state. I remember Ben turning around to me during the Challenge and saying: ‘Running that many miles in one go? That’s mad!’ To do what I do, you have to be mentally strong – but not 401 marathons in 401 days strong, that’s completely off the scale. What a guy he is, and I’m proud to call him a friend.
••••••••••
ANTI-BULLYING CAMPAIGNER SET TO TAKE ON 77th CONSECUTIVE MARATHON IN STROUD
STROUD NEWS AND JOURNAL,
11 NOVEMBER 2015
‘…The bullying I had faced at school had stripped me of my ability to accept who I was, but this is no more...’
••••••••••
DAYS 61–83: The weather turns harsh at the beginning of November and I’m beginning to wilt again before a special meeting with a very special woman. I first heard about Mandy when I ran in Bognor Regis with the Tone Zone Runners on day 45. Mandy was training for her first half-Ironman triathlon when she came off her bike and severed her spine in 2015. She was a fit, active woman and she ended up paralysed. Since hearing about her, I’ve wanted to meet her, because she sounds like such an incredible woman. I’m not disappointed.
I meet Mandy at Stoke Mandeville Stadium on day 83, and she does her first 5k in a wheelchair with me, around the track. Vicky Burr takes a great picture of the two of us, and just looking at it fills me with awe. I’ve never met a woman who is so positive, which is remarkable given the amount of shit she’s been through. I find inspiration in her strength and she feels like a kindred spirit. I didn’t go through the physical pain that Mandy went through, but I can empathise with the mental side of things, because we both came out fighting rather than giving up.
I have so many fond memories of the Challenge already, but it’s very lonely at times, because nobody knows what it feels like. I’ve only met a handful of people who have got, 100 per cent, what I was trying to do, and Mandy is one of them. I hope everybody gets to meet someone like Mandy in their lives, somebody truly amazing. She truly is a breathtaking woman.
••••••••••
Mandy Newton, Ben’s heroine: I was going downhill at about 50mph, lost control, hit a metal post and ended up in the middle of this bush. No one could see me from the road because the cars were going past too fast and too noisily. My phone had come out of my pocket (I had a banana, but that wasn’t much use!). So I lay there for about an hour, thinking I was going to die, because I didn’t think there was any way of getting help. And because I was still conscious, I thought God had struck me a pretty mean blow by letting me die so miserably. But I
soon pulled myself together, and thought to myself: ‘I’m not going to die, I’ve got four kids at home who need me. I’m going to get out of this mess.’ Luckily, another cyclist came past, saw me in the bush, and called an ambulance.
That night, I posted a selfie on Facebook, with a big smile and a message that read: ‘Silly old Mandy, she had a little accident, hit a post at 50mph and broke 11 bones. I’m never going to walk again but I’ll race you in a pink wheelchair!’ All I could see was the fact I hadn’t died. Sod the legs, you don’t need legs to live a good life!
It was tragic for my family, and my husband and kids were sobbing in the hospital. But I kept on saying: ‘Look guys, stop! I’m alive, for God’s sake! And I’m still your mum!’ I don’t like people being unhappy, sad or cross, so I just wanted everyone to see I was really happy to be alive. Almost every day, the nurses warned me I was going to crash mentally. But the crash hasn’t happened yet. I have the occasional wobble. But when I’m having a few tears in the shower, I think: ‘I’m actually bloody lucky that I’m able to have a wobble in the shower, on my own, where nobody can see it.’
My life couldn’t be fuller and happier. I do scuba diving, water skiing, skydiving, hand biking. I’m doing the London Marathon, I want to go to Egypt this year, and I’m hoping to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I give talks in schools about the challenges people face. Because we all have challenges in our lives, we mustn’t be frightened of them. Challenges are good, because they help us to learn and grow. On one visit, there was a little boy with spina bifida, and when he wheeled into the classroom and saw me, his face was a picture. You could see him thinking: ‘Oh, somebody on my wavelength.’
After I’d done my talk, another little boy, who must have been eight or nine, said: ‘So, what do you prefer, your life when your legs worked or your life now?’ I looked at this little boy in the wheelchair and thought: ‘He’ll never know what it’s like to have legs.’ And I told the truth: I said I would not change my life for the world, that I have had more fun in my wheelchair than I ever did before. All the able-bodied children were like: ‘Really? Oh my God…’ And you could see the little lad in the wheelchair’s chest puff out like a peacock.
My perspective on life has changed. When I was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, there was a 21-year-old girl in the opposite bed who couldn’t even use her arms. She couldn’t give or receive a hug, couldn’t even feed herself. Quite often, if I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, I’d ask if I could help her, give her a drink or something to eat. I’ve always loved wrapping my hands around a cup of hot chocolate or ginger and lemon tea. But now when I do it, I think: ‘That girl can’t even experience this.’ The really little things mean a lot more to me now, I suppose because the challenges have become a lot bigger.
When I met Ben, we did a lap of the track and he said to everyone else: ‘No, I want it to be just me and Mandy.’ He has this way about him of making you feel very special. It was very humbling, given what he was doing, that he seemed so in awe of me. I was thinking: ‘For God’s sake, I haven’t done anything! You’re the one doing 401 marathons in 401 days, not me, mate!’ The following evening, he came back in again with Kyle. They’d had the pictures Vicky had taken framed. On one of them, he’d written: ‘Amanda, you inspire me’ – that was just lovely.
When you have a spinal injury, you can’t control your wind, so I kept blowing off because we were laughing so much. I couldn’t help it! But I kept thinking: ‘I’ve never even met this guy before and I’m sitting here, blowing off!’ He was like: ‘Hey mate, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to stand on ceremony for me.’ He just had that way about him: it didn’t matter who you were or what you did, he just made you feel at home and very relaxed. He’s not full of himself, he really didn’t seem to think that what he was doing was a massive thing. That’s why he had such a massive impact on me, and I think that’s the appeal for a lot of people. Because he’s just a normal guy, he makes other people believe they can do anything they want to do.
Chapter 8
His Saving Grace
It’s important that people know that the creation of The 401 Challenge was a gradual, organic process – there was no lightbulb moment, and there doesn’t have to be one, you just have to open yourself up to opportunities. I’d learnt to run, was doing all these marathons all over the world and loving the adventure, while figuring out that I didn’t want much to do with my old life. I knew I wanted to do something that had never been done before, for causes important to me, but it involved a lot of trial and error: ‘Maybe I could do this? Maybe I could do that? Oh. My. God. What if I did this? Let’s see where this takes me…’ I changed my way of thinking, stopped saying no and focused on what made me happy: The 401 Challenge was the result.
When I looked up the male Guinness World Record for the most consecutive marathons, it was 52. I thought: ‘That doesn’t actually seem like much.’ It sounds mad written down like that, but that was my mindset at the time, because running had got me thinking that anything was possible. I’d done 16 marathons at that point – although not one after another, day after day – and was signed up to a further 14. I was running all over the world, having some crazy adventures, loving life, so trying to break the world record just seemed like the natural next step. But when I looked at the criteria, there were all these rules, one of which was that you had to run an official marathon every day. I emailed the Guinness World Records team and said:
‘What do you mean by an “official” marathon?’
‘We mean an official marathon. It needs to be timed and measured and ratified by an official body.’
‘But you do know there isn’t an official marathon every day?’
‘Yeah, but that’s part of the challenge.’
It was madness, they effectively expected you to set up your own event every day, sell tickets, promote it, and everything else that goes with organising a marathon. I assumed that was why the official world record was ‘only’ 52, and why it was held by a Japanese guy who ran around a track every day. So that ruled that out. I wanted to raise awareness, and how enthralled would people be by some bloke running around a track? And how bored would I be? It must have sent that poor Japanese guy loopy, and it was just so restrictive, which didn’t sit well with what we were trying to do. So I made the decision to ignore the world record. Anyway, it actually turned out that a few others had done a lot more than 52, unofficially. A Belgian guy, Stefaan Engels, had done 365 in as many days in 2010–2011, and an Australian couple, Alan Murray and Janette Murray-Wakelin, had done 365 in as many days in 2013, before running a 366th on 1 January 2014. There was also a Spanish guy, Ricardo Abad, who had run 607 consecutive marathons, between 2010 and 2012, and some monk had allegedly done 1000, but we couldn’t verify either of them. So I came up with a figure of 400, because I like round numbers. In hindsight, that’s a ridiculous reason to add on 34 marathons, but that’s the way my brain works!
But then, in April 2015, I went to America and did seven marathons in seven days across seven states, from St Louis down to New Orleans, as a kind of trial run, to see if my body would stand up to it. While I was there, I met an amazing guy called Larry Macon, who is in his 70s and has completed almost 2000 marathons, possibly more by now. When I told him my plan, he gave me lots of advice and made a suggestion: ‘Why don’t you have a victory lap?’ Initially, I recoiled at the idea, because the British side of me thought it sounded all a bit American. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I do like even numbers, but when I looked at the number 401, it just felt right. And I liked the idea of celebrating the success, putting it all together into one final event, bringing everybody together who’d organised the whole thing and run with me for the previous 400 days. The problem was, Tolu had already started organising all the branding, and when I got back to the UK, I said to her: ‘Right, we’re going to have to change everything – it’s now going to be called The 401 Challenge.’ She nearly killed me! But she soon got o
ver it, worked her magic, and The 401 Challenge was born.
••••••••••
Beverley Smith, Ben’s mum: I remember we were down visiting once, and Ben looked very stressed when we arrived. He went out for a run and when he came back, he looked fantastic: running was his saving grace. Once his marriage was over and he’d accepted in his head that he was gay, he began to live the life he wanted to live, which included running the world. That was his liberation. He let his mind go free and rediscovered his self-belief. All his life people had trodden on his self-belief. As a result, he’d trodden on any dreams he might have had.
When he first came up with the idea for the 401, he looked at me and said: ‘Do you think I can do it, Mum?’ I said: ‘Do you think you can do it, Ben?’ And he said yes. So I said: ‘Well, then you’ll do it. When you put your mind to something, you always see it through. There will never be another day that is harder than the days you’ve had already in your life.’ If we had poured cold water on the idea, he would have gone out and done it anyway. From a therapeutic standpoint, it was best to just enter his reality, however mad people thought that reality was. I’d just had a settlement for an accident, so we were able to buy him a decent van. As a mother, I just wanted to make sure he had food and somewhere warm to sleep. And I said: ‘Even if I die, you can have a day off to come to the funeral, but that’s it.’
Pete Smith, Ben’s dad: The first I knew he was planning anything was when I was in the flat he’d just moved into, helping him build some furniture. It was when he was having his Beautiful Mind moment and all his walls were wallpapered – top to bottom, wall to wall, not a word of a lie – with scribbled notes and graphs and drawings. Mind mapping, I’d call it. In the middle of all this was written: ‘Do some form of big challenge’. And I knew that would have something to do with running. Before he found running, he’d had to play-act, conform with how the world wanted him to be: go to university, get an office job, earn good money, get married. Like a machine, an automaton. It surprised me, because he’d grown up in a military family, which is the opposite of all that, although I didn’t know he was hiding this secret. It was the running club which helped him build his self-belief, because they never looked at him as anything other than a bloke who’s turned up and wants to go for a run like them. Nobody was judging him and it was maybe the first time he’d been accepted by an open group or club. And running itself just flicked a switch in him. After his first half-marathon, he said: ‘I will never do that again.’ A few days later, he registered for the Brighton Marathon. He realised he didn’t have to be brilliant at it, as long as he enjoyed it.