After a year of running, it can get a little difficult due to robberies, illness, and guys with machetes.
Russ Cooke, a 27-year-old Briton, completed a traverse across Africa from south to north in Cape Angela, Tunisia, on Sunday. He had departed Cape Agulhas, South Africa on April 22, 2023.
Along the way, he encountered challenges not often found meandering around suburban parks.
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. There were visa problems in Algeria.
In the end, we passed through 16 countries. After starting his operations in South Africa, he mostly remained near the sea, often detouring around the western side of the country. He chose the West African route primarily for safety reasons, but still encountered dangerous conditions, he said.
In June in Angola, Cook was resting with his crew in his team's support van when a man with a gun opened the door. The man took money, a cell phone, a camera, and other items and fled, but no one was injured.
“He's going to take things on. He's going to have to allow it,” Cook said in a YouTube video shortly after.
The events in the Republic of Congo were even more horrifying, he said. In August, Cook was running away from his team due to impassable roads when he encountered several men with machetes demanding money, all he had with him were half-eaten cookies.
“I gave it to them and ran,” he said.
Later that day, still separated from his team, he met two men on a motorcycle and gestured for them to get into their car. He said he decided to do so even though he had “no money, no food, no water, no traffic lights, no data, no knowledge of where the boys were.”
He was taken on a seven-hour ride.
“I thought in my head this is it,” he wrote on social media. He arrives at the village, only to be met with more fruitless demands for money. It took several days for his team to contact him, give his captors money, and let him run.
“My head isn't quite put together right now,” he said after the incident.
Mr. Cook also suffers from back pain, food poisoning, and other health problems, which add to the frightening detours he takes on his motorbike, and he ends up taking more time off than he had originally planned. Daily mileage decreased.
In the end, he covered 10,100 miles and raised £690,000, or about $873,000, for running charities that support young people experiencing homelessness and Sandblast, which supports indigenous people in Western Sahara. . Cook, known as the Hardest Geezer, ended up averaging about 49 miles a day, even with rest days, various illnesses and accidents.
It was touted to be the first continental crossing in history, but runners' organization World Runners' Association told the Telegraph that Danish athlete Jesper Olsen accomplished the feat in 2010 via a different route. . He rode approximately 8,000 miles from north to south from Egypt to South Africa.
The organization said it did confirm that Mr Cook was the first person to run from the southernmost tip of the continent to the northernmost tip.
“There are a lot of players before me who have made great runs,” Cook told Good Morning Britain on Monday. “I salute them all.”
Cook said he had a strawberry daiquiri and a few beers after completing the ultramarathon.
“Yesterday was really overwhelming,” he said Monday. “I woke up a little tired.”
Regarding his plans for the first day after his feat, he said, “I need to stretch today, but I won't be running.''
“Time for a haircut,” he added.
With 48 hours remaining and the finish line approaching, Cook was asked by his crew for his thoughts. “I went a little crazy,” he said. “There are a lot of ups and downs.”
“Do you ever do anything halfway?” the crew member said, hoping for some viral content.
Cook's response was, “Brother, I ran 63K.”