MARATHON MAN
Fundraiser Jamie McDonald talks to Olivia Blair about the highs and lows of running a marathon a day across Canada despite once being told he could lose the ability to walk
In 2014, Jamie McDonald donned a Captain Flash costume and ran the entire breadth of Canada. A remarkable feat for anyone, but especially for Jamie – who at nine years old was told by doctors he may lose the ability to walk. Jamie, 30, was diagnosed with the rare spinal condition syringomyelia as a child, and spent much of his childhood in and out of hospital, even taking one full year off from school. His symptoms manifested as epilepsy, immune deficiency and a pain which seared down his legs “like big bricks weighing down on them”.
Doctors later advised his parents that the condition could progress to the point where Jamie would never be able to walk again. He says the seriousness of how ill he was hit home when his parents used all their savings to take him on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Disneyworld in Florida, and he added that he could only understand the severity of the condition through observing his mother: “She feared I would never walk
again, or even worse that I might die,” he told The Independent.
However, Jamie’s symptoms “gradually disappeared” instead, a development he attributes to constantly being active thanks to his mother encouraging him to take up tennis after the prognosis. “I had the dream of being the next Tim Henman,” Jamie says. However, he soon realised he “was really bad at tennis” and became an instructor. About to put a down payment on a house after saving for three years, he suddenly backed out of the deal as he realised he wanted his life to take another path.
“I started to wonder: ‘What is it that I want from life?’. I reflected and thought about all this time I had spent in hospital and I went to visit the children’s hospital in Gloucester. I walked out and I thought ‘I’ve got £20,000 of my own money – maybe I’m in a position where I can give back.’” That pivotal moment resulted in a spontaneous £50 buy of a “terrible” bicycle, and Jamie cycling the 14,000 miles from Bangkok back to the hospital in Gloucester, travelling with just a compass in the pre-smartphone era.
One remarkable fundraising adventure was not enough for Jamie, though, and he soon scrapped plans to go backpacking and decided to run across Canada. “I was just going to travel but everyone in Gloucester kept coming up to me and asking: ‘What are you doing next?’ I remember thinking, ‘What do you mean what am I doing next? Have I not done enough already?’ But then I had this epiphany.”
Jamie decided to run the equivalent of almost 200 marathons, despite only have run one previously, seven years previously, after which he had vowed to never run again. “Everyone kept coming up to me asking when I was going to train but my visa had already kicked in. At what point do you train enough to run across the second largest country in the world?”
In total, he ran over 5,000 miles and raised a quarter of a million pounds for children’s charities, including Great Ormond Street hospital – where he had been treated as a child. He had one break, two weeks in, after tearing the ligaments in his foot. At the beginning of his journey, he ran about 10-13 miles a day, but after a couple of months, with his visa period running out and winter kicking in (temperatures reached minus 40 degrees at times), he switched to approximately a marathon a day. Jamie caught the imagination of many Canadians during his run
I tell Jamie that I once trained five months to run a 10k race, and that the idea of running almost a marathon a day is beyond my comprehension. He laughs and says I must have “nailed that 10k”.
One of the hardest aspects of his journey was loneliness, and after a few months he plucked up the courage to simply knock on a random Canadian’s door, tell his story and ask to camp in their garden. Surprisingly, after the woman Googled him and found out he was “real”, he was invited into her home. From this grew a network of hosts across the country; one mother set up a Facebook group to support Jamie which grew to about 30 people who would call ahead to each next village to ask each other to look out for, and more importantly look after, Jamie.
“They were really worried that I was this stupid Brit who knew nothing about Canada, so they took me under their wings,” he says. When he was not being looked after, Jamie camped and also slept on a mat at public rest areas. One of the low points of Jamie’s journey made national news at home when he was mugged on New Year’s Eve in the Rocky Mountains, and a bag containing film footage of his journey and “all [his] possessions” were taken.
“I guess it was just wrong place wrong time,” he says. “It was a bad experience, but what I didn’t want it do was change my perception of how incredible Canadians were because of that one bad experience.” As well as the funds raised for GOSH and the children’s hospital back in Gloucester, Jamie also raised money for a different children’s hospital in every Canadian province Exuding positivity at all times during our chat (Jamie was included in The Independent’s Happy List in 2014) he homes in on the silver lining of what was clearly a traumatic experience.
Despite his incredible achievements, Jamie is remarkably self-deprecating: “I never raised that money, I just did the Forrest Gump thing. It was actually everyone else that made the difference and made it happen… I just plodded away,” Since his run, he has set up the Superhero Foundation, which aims to support people undertaking adventures and challenges to fundraise for mental and physical illnesses.
As for his next adventure, Jamie isn’t quite sure yet. He says his new book Adventureman: Anyone Can Be a Superhero (of which all the royalties go to his charity) is one of the hardest things he’s ever done, up there even with extreme running and cycling due in part to his dyslexia.
“I can’t spell anything and wasn’t very good at school,” he says. When returning to school as a tennis coach years later, a former teacher encouraged him to re-sit his English GCSE at the age of 23. “I got a B in the end, and I worked my socks off for it!”.
I ask what he does to unwind and he appears to struggle to find an answer. “I go out for a beer with my friends, we’ll just take the mickey out of each other. I guess that’s my downtime,” he says. “My path is now so clear – I love it. I’m not saying it’s easy and am not say it’s not hard work. Sometimes I question it: ‘What am I doing? Am I bloody stupid?’ But I really do love what I do”
Adventureman: Anyone Can Be a Superhero by Jamie McDonald is published by Summersdale Publishers (£9.99)