The run can be even more difficult when it lasts a year and is complicated by theft, disease and men with machetes.
Russ Cook, a 27-year-old Englishman, completed his south-to-north run across the African continent on Sunday in Cape Angela, Tunisia. She departed from Cape Agulhas, South Africa, on April 22, 2023.
Along the way, he faces difficulties not often seen in an easy meander around a suburban park.
In Angola, he was robbed at gunpoint. In Namibia, he got food poisoning. In the Republic of Congo, he was attacked by men with machetes. In Algeria, he had visa issues.
In the end, he went through 16 countries. After his start in South Africa, he mostly skirted the western side of the continent, relatively close to the ocean. He said he chose the West African route mainly for safety reasons, although he nevertheless ran into dangerous situations.
In June in Angola, Cook was resting with his crew in the team’s support van when a man with a gun opened the door. The man made off with money, phones and a camera, but no one was hurt.
“He will take things; we have to allow it,” Cook later said in a YouTube video.
The incident in the Republic of Congo was even more frightening, he said. In August, running away from his team over impassable roads, Cook encountered several men with machetes demanding money, though his entire inventory at the time was a half-eaten cookie.
“I gave it to them and ran,” he said.
Later that day, still far from his team, he met two men on motorcycles who motioned for him to ride. Without money, food, water, signals, data or knowledge of where the men were, he said, he decided to do it.
He was taken on a seven-hour drive.
“In my mind I thought it was,” he wrote on social media. He arrives at a village and is met with more fruitless requests for money. It took several days for his team to reach him, give money to his captors and get him back on the run.
“My head is not completely there now,” he said after the incident.
Cook also suffered from back pain, food poisoning and other health issues, which, along with the dreaded motorcycle detour, eventually led him to take more days off than he originally planned and lower the his daily mileage.
In the end, he ran 10,100 miles and raised 690,000 pounds, or about $873,000, for the Running Charity, which supports youth experiencing homelessness, and Sandblast, which supports the Indigenous People of Western Sahara. Cook, nicknamed the Hardest Geezer, averaged about 29 miles a day, even accounting for rest days and his various illnesses and accidents.
Although it was billed as the first crossing of the continent, a group of runners, the World Runners Association, told The Telegraph that a Danish athlete, Jesper Olsen, achieved the feat in 2010, albeit by a different route. He ran some 8,000 miles, north to south, from Egypt to South Africa.
The group said they recognized Cook as the first to run from the southernmost to the northernmost point of the continent.
“A lot of people before me have made a lot of big runs,” Cook told “Good Morning Britain” on Monday. “Kudos to them all.”
After his ultra-ultramarathon accomplishment, Cook said he had a strawberry daiquiri and a few beers.
“It was huge yesterday,” he said Monday. “I woke up a little tired.”
As for her plans for her first day after her exploit, “I need to stretch today, but no running.”
“It’s time for a haircut,” he added.
With 48 hours remaining, Cook was asked by a crewmate to share his thoughts as the finish neared. “It’s pretty crazy,” he said. “There are a lot of ups and downs.”
“Is there less in the middle of the road?” said the crewmate, hoping for viral content.
Cook’s response: “Bro, I ran 63K.”
