The real Forrest Gump: the man who ran for a year
Peta Bee
Published at 12:01AM, January 16 2016
He’s been dubbed “the hairy runner” and “the UK’s Forrest Gump”; monikers with which Jamie Ramsay is proud to be saddled. For the 35-year-old’s mass of facial hair holds a story of adventure and accomplishment on an epic scale. Sixteen months ago Ramsay was your typical thirtysomething high-flyer — clean-cut and clean-shaven, with a career in financial PR and a propensity for “drinking a bit, smoking the odd cigarette and eating atrociously”.
What set him apart was his dream to embark on a solo run through the Americas with only a baby-jogger pram containing his possessions for company. Last Sunday he landed in London Heathrow, mission complete, having covered 14 countries and 10,276 miles (16,538km) on foot in 367 days of running (472 in total). His extraordinary feat saw him run the equivalent of more than a marathon a day across two continents. He wore out 17 pairs of trainers and burnt 186,000 calories, and the beard he grew during the leg-sapping journey is, he says, his “badge of honour”.
What drives someone with a steady, middle-class lifestyle to give it all up in such spectacular fashion? I met Ramsay in a London café a few days before he set off on his eccentric mission. He told me how work had consumed much of his twenties and early thirties, how it had been enjoyable but demanding, often eating into his evenings and weekends. He’d craved a change, yet even he did not envisage that his life would change in quite the way it has done.
Starting in Vancouver, Ramsay crossed some treacherous terrain, through deserts, across the Andes and skirting around the notorious Darién Gap, the stretch of land connecting North and South America that is inhabited on each side by drug-traffickers, paramilitaries and guerrillas. His biggest fear had been loneliness, as much of the time was to be spent in isolation, pushing the 45kg (100lb) pram packed with the basics he needed to stay alive.
Of the three charities for which he raised money, the one closest to his heart is a small set-up called Calm (Campaign Against Living Miserably) which is dedicated to preventing male suicide, the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK.
“I have never suffered depression but I came across this charity and what struck me is how prevalent male suicides are, accounting for 77 per cent of all suicides,” he says. “It is shocking and people who get to the stage where they think about taking their own lives can be very lonely and feel there is no one to talk to. Calm is trying to change that and convince men that they can ask for help about their feelings.”
Surprisingly, being lonely turned out to be the least of Ramsay’s worries. “Before I left, everyone was fixating on the physical challenge of all the running but I was more concerned about the mental side of it as I thought that would be much, much tougher,” he says. “I was to be alone for months and that scared me. But, do you know what? I can say that I never felt lonely, not once.” Social media helped. Whenever he felt low, Ramsay would write his feelings on a whiteboard and post on Twitter or Instagram. “I never felt like I was out of contact with my family and friends,” Ramsay says.
I had sensed beforehand that his challenge was to be partly cathartic. He had originally planned the trip with his girlfriend, the couple hoping to make a documentary about the places and people they encountered on the way. But they split up and, “needing to get away”, Ramsay decided “to go anyway and to do it alone”. One of the reasons the relationship had floundered, he says, is because his girlfriend felt he didn’t express his feelings enough. “That changed immeasurably when I was away,” he says. “We talked all the time and we are now back together. It is remarkable that I was so far away yet our relationship grew.”
Why running? Ramsay ran at primary school, but not again until some friends persuaded him to join them in the Stockholm marathon a decade ago. He ran with little training and surprised himself by clocking a respectable 3 hours and 30 minutes, leaving his friends half an hour behind. He was hooked but soon got bored with marathons, so tried a half ironman triathlon, a 10km swimming race and a run through a safari park in Kenya, where he was surrounded by lions and elephants.
A turning point came in 2013 when he entered an event that involved running seven marathons in seven days through the jungle in Vietnam. When organisers cancelled the race at the last minute, he decided to go anyway and run the routes himself. “As soon as I did that, I got the bug,” he says. “I felt it could be the start of something bigger.” He got back and started planning his own ultra, ultra marathon. He made it so long because “I didn’t want people to think that this was me going on some kind of gap year,” he says. “It was never intended to be a holiday. I worked out that it would probably take 600 days to complete if I got moving. In the end, I did it in 472 days.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing. Each morning he would wake and consult a map to pinpoint a place to sleep that night. “Sometimes that was in a cheap hotel and near a café,” he says. “Often it was in my tent in the remotest of areas for nights on end. At one point I went for 12 nights without getting near a shower or changing my clothes.” He spent the last few days running through Argentina, camping alongside “the equivalent of the M25”. There also were moments of terror that left Ramsay questioning whether he had made the right decision to leave his relatively cushy life at home. “I had to have a police escort across a road near the deserts of north Peru that is notorious for robberies and attacks,” he says. “A friend had been held at gunpoint when he cycled there and I was lucky to have police support until I got through it, but it was hairy.”
He got clipped by a motorcyclist and narrowly escaped being hit by a speeding car in Argentina. “I thought I was going to be killed,” Ramsay says. “I sometimes wondered if the risk was just too big and I would find myself wondering what my mum would think about the dangers I was in.” Never, though, did he consider throwing in the towel. “I promised myself that if I couldn’t run, I would walk it. And if I couldn’t walk, I’d attach my pram to a bike and cycle to the end,” he says. “My mind was firmly set on finishing.”
And if anyone was born to run, it is probably Ramsay. For all the concerns about the body-battering effects of running, his exploits resulted in no serious injuries and he jokes that he took less ibuprofen during the entire trip than he would normally have swallowed to deal with a hangover. “My achilles tendons were sore at the start but I figured that I just needed to run through the discomfort and it worked,” he says. “Over the past 28 days, I think my body sensed we were winding down and I got a slight niggle in my left knee, but generally I escaped with nothing.” He took no nutritional supplements and, other than occupational hazards such as parasitic infections, his immune system remained strong.
One unexpected change is that despite burning up to 6,000 calories a day when running, he has returned heavier than when he left. “I’m slimmer and more toned but there is a definite little layer of fat around my middle that wasn’t there before,” he says. He puts it down to his diet being largely sugar based. “I ate what I could find and a lot of local food was sugary,” he says.
Before his adventure, Ramsay had told me he was most anxious about how he would feel when he got back, that he would “lose sense of who he used to be and would return a completely different person”. So is he prepared for the humdrum of daily life? “There are aspects of me that have changed,” he says. “I don’t drink any more and can’t see the appeal of a hangover. My outlook on life may have changed but I have the same friends and I am loving catching up with everyone.”
What is the most important thing his last trip taught him? “That life doesn’t need to be complicated to be rewarding,” he says. “Just waking up every day and being the best version of yourself is enough.”
To donate, go to jamieisrunning.com
