17 in 17: Blood, Sweat and Tears

One Canadian’s 717-kilometre journey to honour his brother.

The harrowing and inspiring story of one young Canadian’s 717-kilometre running journey across Nigeria to honour his brother.

CONSIDERING WHAT HE JUST PUT HIMself through, Fadesola Adedayo is feeling surprisingly good. Really good actually,” he says through a spotty cell connection from Nigeria. Even with the bad reception, I sense he’s smiling as he talks. Just three weeks ago, he completed a 17-day, 717-kilometre run across Nigeria. I ask Fadesola if he’s still tired. “I’m tired of selfies,” he says as he lets out a laugh. “That’s what I’m tired of.” I’m confused. Selfies? Adedayo’s epic journey has apparently turned the 25-year-old Ontarian into something of a celebrity in his native land and he guesses he’s had his photo taken “hundreds, maybe thousands” of times in the last few weeks. He assures me, in his typically jovial manner, that’s he’s only joking and he’s always happy to oblige supporters with photos.

Adedayo moved to Toronto from Nigeria with his parents and older brother and sister when he was 10 years old. It’s where he grew up, went to school and obtained his civil engineering degree. But throughout his life, he’s continued to spend holidays visiting family in Africa and considers Nigeria to be his second home.

His run, a marathon a day in honour of

his brother Adeyosola who died suddenly from a rare skin condition in 2012, took him from the capital of Abuja in central Nigeria to the financial capital of Lagos on the coast. The route took him across eight Nigerian states, countless jurisdictions and through a multitude of towns and villages where locals cheered him on in what Adedayo calls “an overwhelming display of support.”

His journey has raised thousands of dollars and invaluable awareness of the little known Stevens-Johnson syndrome which took his brother’s life.

He crossed his finish line on May 29 at 1:30 p.m.

This is his story.

Preparing the mind and body

“When I first started running I could barely run to the end of the street,” he admits, “then I ran the London Marathon and I realized that marathons are a mental barrier more than anything else. I figured that ultras were just another type of mental barrier. My brother taught me that life is all about the goals you set yourself,” says Adedayo thoughtfully.

Last summer Adedayo ran eight marathons in eight days in Toronto, but he didn’t tell anyone he was doing it. He was testing his limits, seeing how far he could push himself. In the weeks that followed, he continued to prepare quietly, his monthly distance peaking at 640 kilometres.

“You could never do 17 marathons in 17 days in training, it’s just too exhausting. Training for me was a fine balance of distance, technique, running in the heat and learning to recover.”

With his preparation complete, Adedayo set about planning his journey, taking advice from officials on the safest route for him and his support crew.

“I originally wanted to run from one side of the country to the other,” he says, “but there are a lot of places in Nigeria that just aren’t safe so I decided to run between the major cities instead. Lagos is where my family are from so it felt like running home.”

Running i n Nigeria, says Adedayo, is “completely different” to running in Canada because of the humidity and the soaring daytime temperatures. “One marathon in Nigeria feels like three or four marathons in Canada,” he claims. But Adedayo didn’t let that put him off and, on May 13, he set off on his tarmac route into the heat.

Baptism of fire

Like any runner undertaking a new challenge, Adedayo approached his race with a mixture of nerves and excitement.

“I decided to do this two years ago and I’d been planning for about 18 months. I shipped 1,000 bottles of Gatorade to Nigeria because that’s what I use in training and I wanted to make sure I could get it there. There was no room for error when it came to nutrition.”

Despite being prepared with sports drinks, clothing and a support crew, Adedayo admits the practicalities of running in Nigeria still held many surprises. “In hindsight I feel like I was actually pretty ignorant in the planning of this whole thing,” he says, “and that really showed on the first day.

“We’d organized a press conference for 9:00 a.m. Nigeria’s Minister of Health was going to f lag me off and we were expecting a lot of media,” he says. The press conference lasted two hours, and then everyone wanted footage and shots of him starting his run. By the time it was over the temperature was 38 C and climbing.

“I just wanted to say ‘ guys it’s too hot now, let’s just start tomorrow’ but I had to keep going. Everybody was watching. It was

terrible. I spent the whole first day thinking ‘how the hell am I going to finish this?’ That’s when the magnitude of what I was about to do really dawned on me.” Like most of Adedayo’s tales from the road, he laughs throughout this story at his own predicament. His determination to see the funny side is as great as his determination to rise to the challenge he’s set himself. He learned a big lesson that first day – running in the midday heat was out of the question. But he survived and from then onwards he was on the road by 5 a.m. “That first day is still one of the toughest days I ran.”

Chilling out

Loved and loathed in equal measure by long distance runners, ice baths have been used to reduce inf lammation and f lush out metabolic debris from muscle tissue. At the end of day one Adedayo realized this was one part of his recovery ritual he couldn’t do without. “After that first day, I sent my support crew out to buy me a bath tub because I knew it was going to be critical to me finishing. My crew have a pretty good sense of humour and they came back with a bright pink one. I didn’t care, I knew it was what my body needed.” The tub was hauled into the street at the end of every day, filled with ice and water and Adedayo would hop in, fully clothed. “You couldn’t miss me, out in the middle of the road in my pink tub, it was hilarious.” His mobile spa followed him in the back of his van wherever he went, ready to provide relief at the end of each gruelling day. But finding ice in Nigeria wasn’t always easy and on two occasions his support crew came back empty-handed. Those days Adedayo describes as horrible and excruciating to get going the next day. “I could barely walk most days but if I’d had an ice bath I could run through the pain and my muscles would eventually loosen,” he says. “But without the ice baths, it felt impossible.” The runner also credits compression gear for getting him to the finish line in one piece. “I ran and slept in compression gear. It’s critical for recovery when you’re running distances like this day in, day out.”

Gaining momentum

As the kilometres accrued, news of Adedayo’s feat spread and each town brought new supporters. “It was pretty incredible. People were chanting my name at one point and I just couldn’t believe it was happening.” As the support mounted, so, too, did the demand for autographs and selfies. “Every time we stopped it was pandemonium. At one point I think there were like 2,000 people gathered. I even met the king of one of the villages and he asked for a photo with me,” recalls Adedayo. “Actually that reminds me, I still have to send it to him.” Adedayo’s police escort came to regard him as an unofficial national figure and while most people wished him well on his run, for many he was a source of bemusement. “In Nigeria it’s unheard of for someone to do something like this,” he admits. “The villagers would ask what I was doing and why I was doing it. Everyone thought I was nuts, but they cheered me on anyway.”

Tales from the road

Throughout his run, Adedayo had a police escort, an ambulance and the Federal Road Safety Commission ( frsc) in addition to his own support crew and van. “The frsc were there to keep the roads cleared and the police were there to make sure I was safe. They changed over at every jurisdiction. I’m pretty sure they’d all been told to just not get me killed.” Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country with one of the highest crime rates in the world. While many people would consider the streets of Nigeria to be no place for running, Adedayo took it all in his stride, including the country’s notoriously chaotic roads. “People here drive a little crazy,” he admits, “but that’s just Nigeria.”

Car horns and engines have punctuated our entire conversation so far; the sounds of Lagos build a vivid picture of the “crazy” as Adedayo talks.

“I was running along a single lane carriageway at one point and this car was coming towards me and it was totally overloaded when suddenly the wheel popped off and came speeding towards us. I had to jump out of the way. I just remember thinking ‘I don’t want to die like this.’”

This wasn’t Adedayo’s only brush with danger on the roads of Nigeria. On day seven, the intrepid runner recalls he and his support crew had to make a sharp exit amidst news of a local kidnapping. “The town was pretty weird from the start,” he recalls. “It was the only place where nobody came out to see us when we arrived. The only person who spoke to us asked us when we were leaving. It was just a strange place. Then we heard that two dignitaries had been kidnapped there the day before.” Kidnapping in Nigeria is commonplace; more than 1,500 kidnappings are reported there every year. The country’s highest profile case occurred in 2014 when nearly 300 school girls were taken by extremist organization, Boko Haram. “That town was just bad news so within 15 minutes we’d gotten out of there. That wasn’t a safe place to be,” says Adedayo.

One last challenge

Having survived his perilous journey so far, Adedayo started to look forward to the finish line. He could imagine “having all the people there, seeing the familiar faces,” when an unexpected detour meant he was facing a 60-kilometre leg to get him to within the finish line for his last day. Unfazed by this unexpected twist to his tale, Adedayo simply did what he’s good at: “I just kept going.”

There were no towns or villages on that stretch. “It felt like it was going on forever,” he says. “I started to set landmarks ahead to aim for, anything to keep my mind off how painful it was. I imagined my brother there running with me and telling me to keep my shoulders back and my head up. It sounds a

My brother’s death crushed me. I became very depressed and I started running to alleviate that.”

little crazy but that helped a lot.” The day before Adedayo had a huge blister pop on his toe, causing him to lose a toenail. “The doctor advised me not to keep going but there was no way I was going to stop this close to the finish line, even with 60 kilometres to run. I didn’t care if the whole toe came off. Who needs a toe anyway?” His determination paid off and, with all toes still intact, he finished his final hurdle and entered the home stretch.

Like an astronaut in space

Adedayo describes approaching the finish line, having covered more than 700 kilometres on foot, as “surreal and deeply satisfying” but admits he finds it difficult to summarize. “It’s hard to articulate, to relate to people, what it felt like,” he says, still struggling to put words to the compounded collection of sights and sounds, and all the hours spent in his own head.

“I kind of feel like an astronaut in space because I was the only one who experienced it so it’s hard to really describe it. It’s quite a lonely sense of achievement. I don’t really know how to talk about it sometimes.”

That sense of isolation echoes the runner’s gruelling training regimen which he admits has left him distant from his peers.

“You have less time for normal stuff, for personal stuff,” he says. “I’m totally out of the loop with popular culture. It’s been harder to relate to people. It’s funny because more people know me now because of the publicity for the run but it’s been socially isolating to get here.”

For now, Adedayo will “reconnect with friends and work on getting my social skills back.”

But the mental barriers which were broken down during his experience have left his confidence soaring.

“Nothing phases me now. I feel like I can do anything.”

A brother’s love

Motivation for runners comes in many forms. For Adedayo, the drive to keep going came from a desire not to disappoint his brother.

Adeyosola Adedayo died in 2012 at the age of 27 after a 12-day battle with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome; a deadly skin disease he contracted through an inoculation against hiv. He had been working as a physician in a medical clinic in a slum in Lagos. Adeyosola and his wife had recently welcomed their first child, Fadesola’s nephew, into the world.

“My bother’s death crushed me. I became very depressed and I started running to alleviate that,” he says.

Throughout our conversation Adedayo has laughed and joked about his experience in Nigeria and it would have been hard for me to imagine such a positive, energetic and lighthearted character struggling with depression. But now Adedayo is suddenly sombre for the first time and the seriousness with which he has taken his challenge is clear. “My brother never disappointed me so I knew I couldn’t disappoint him,” he continues. “This run was in his honour and I just kept thinking of how proud he’d be and how I just couldn’t embarrass him.” Adedayo credits his brother with making him the person he is today, a person who isn’t afraid to run 17 marathons in 17 days.

“You have to be something of an outlier to do something like this and my brother helped me to be an outlier. I’ve never been someone who moves within boundaries and that was tough growing up. My brother always had my back. He gave me the confidence to be myself and I wanted to show my love and gratitude for that.

“This run: every day, every kilometre, was a testament to the power of that love.”

Sharon Crowther is a writer and runner originally from Scotland. She interviewed Fadesola Adedayo from Malaysia, where she has been running in the jungles, but she also calls Calgary home.