Running News Daily

Nick Butter ran a marathon in every country in the world is now running around Britain

Nick Butter has faced gunfire, muggings, dog attacks and a minor heart attack in his running career. Now he has a new obstacle: Britain’s rugged coastline.

Butter is best known as the first person in history to run a marathon in each of the world’s 196 countries, which he did over 674 days from 2018 to 2019. Over the course of that mammoth challenge he ran in temperatures that exceeded 40C and fell below 20C, around an erupting volcano and through a forest swarming with frogs. He recounted his experiences in a book, Running the World.

His latest challenge is a little less extreme, though by no means easy. This time Butter has embarked on Run Britain, an attempt to run 200 marathons around the coast of Britain in 100 days. His anticlockwise journey began in April at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, and will end there later this month.

After his world tour ended, Butter says he wondered what to do next. But fellow endurance athletes told him to do what he loved, without feeling the need to keep topping each previous expedition just to challenge himself.

He explains: ‘When I think about the amount of people that live in Britain that have never seen many beaches, let alone the entire coastline…what do I love to do? Take photos, see the world and travel. And then you combine that with what I can do in Covid times. And here I am.’

Mountains to climb

It hasn’t been easy. When we ask if there have been moments where he doubted his ability to continue, Butter pauses. ‘‘A lot of moments,’ he says. The former skier has had four or five injuries since the challenge began, including a slipped meniscus in his knee and a stress fracture in his shin.

And while Butter’s respiratory fitness has gone through the roof during his latest epic tour, his body fat has plummeted from 11 per cent to just 2.7 per cent, which he agrees is too low. ‘I’m just skin and bones now,’ he says. ‘And I'm eating like a horse, I’m eating everything every day. And I still can't put weight on because you just burn it off and burn it off.’

Faced with those kinds of challenges, many runners would call it quits. But although Butter has had to adapt his schedule to build in more resting time for injuries, he’s determined to get to the end.

He says: ‘I started this trip very publicly saying I really don't know if I can do it. And it turns out that I can do it, but just a bit slower than I was planning to.’

The drive to keep going is partly down to the ‘machine’ Butter now has behind him: his support team, photographers, PR people and brand representatives, each with different demands. But it’s also due to the charitable intentions behind Run Britain: this challenge is a fundraising vehicle for the 196 Foundation, a micro-trust Butter set up after seeing the scale of poverty in countries such as Sierra Leone while on his Running the World trip.

‘I realised I wanted to do something significant that was going to be a bit of a legacy piece of the journey, and that I could continue putting my energy into for the rest of my life,’ he says.

Launched at the beginning of this latest expedition, the Foundation now has around 500 monthly donors. These donors give £1.96 a month: no more, no less. Anyone can write to the Foundation to suggest a worthy cause – whether that be an orphanage in Kenya or a new wheelchair for a neighbour – and once a year, all the donors vote on what cause they want their money to go to.

What’s next?

Although he hasn’t quite got to the finish line of Run Britain, Butter says it’s in his nature to have the next adventure planned. This wasn’t even the first choice of trip; he was supposed to be running north to south through New Zealand, but the pandemic forced a change of plan. Also in the works is a circumnavigation of Iceland and a journey through Malawi, visiting 196 Foundation projects. And he is exploring the idea of a north-to-south trip through Japan.

‘I'm yet to put my finger on why I love to put myself through so much pain,’ he says. ‘But I do, and this trip is brutal. ‘It’s something that I'm never going to forget.’