What You Can Learn From the Man Who Ran Across Africa

Russ Cook was 103 days into his attempt to run the entire African continent when two men with machetes dragged him into the bush. 

With no phone, water, or idea what was going on, Russ did what he’d been doing for the last few months—he ran. 

Despite his best efforts, two men on motorbikes managed to catch up to him and hauled him 7 hours through the jungle to their village. They held him in a hut until his friends came and paid enough money to get him released. 

What did he do next?

After just a couple days of recovering, Russ got back on the road and ran another 37.29 miles. 

The day after that, he ran 31.07 miles. Then 31.32. 

And on it went until he reached the most northern point of Africa, 352 days after setting off. 

What’s this all about?

In this email, we want to explore Russ Cook’s recent record-breaking achievement of running across Africa in 352 days. We think anyone interested in improving either their physical or mental strength can learn a lot from Russ’ achievement—and it’s honestly just a crazy story we wanted to share. 

Russ Cook is a 27 year old endurance athlete from the UK. He wasn’t much of a runner growing up, and likely never would have imagined becoming one. But one day, after a drunken night out, Russ ran 12 miles home from a nightclub at 2am. Shortly after he started training for his first half-marathon, and then his first marathon. 

Russ, a young man at the time, was struck by how direct the connection was between simply putting the work in and improving as a runner. He realized that if he did something positive, it would pay itself back. Running became the simplest way to prove that principle, again and again. And so he kept improving. 

At 22, he put his progress to the test—becoming the first person to run from Asia to London. He covered 71 marathons in 66 days, crossing 11 countries.

But that was just the beginning…

In 2023-2024, after years of preparation and training, Russ successfully ran 10,190 miles to get from the bottom to top of Africa, raising over £1 million for charity as a result. 

According to our maths, that’s the equivalent of 389 marathons in 352 days.

His Strava data (we went through all his runs and put them in a Google sheet) tells a brutal story:

• Average pace: 12:29/mile

• Daily mileage: 32.35 miles

• Peak day: December 19th—he ran 68.42 miles in 12 hours and 40 minutes. (This was after running 37.52 miles the day before.)

I (Benji) ran my first marathon last year, and it took months to feel halfway ready—and weeks more to recover. The thought of doing more than a marathon day after day seems almost inhuman. 

So how did Russ train for and become ready to do something like this?

As is often the case, the secret is both simple to grasp but hard to actually do: he trained really really hard.  

Journalist Josh Sampiere spent a lot of time with Russ and said that: “Loosely, he averaged 25-40km a day for about a year, with almost no rest days. I've seen this with my own eyes (obviously not every day.) International flight? He ran the day's workout in an airport. Basically: volume, volume, volume.”

Even with this training, the run pushed Russ to his limits. On Day 30 he was peeing blood, and by Day 205 he was suffering from serious back pain that, as far as we know, still isn’t fully resolved. He had to battle sandstorms, extreme weather, and occasionally dangerous interactions with locals. 

It’s sometimes tempting to think that great athletes like Russ are able to achieve these feats because it’s somehow easy for them. But from the videos we’ve watched of this challenge, Russ found nearly every day of running incredibly hard. What allowed him to finish this challenge, alongside the base fitness required, was his incredible mental resilience and ability to keep going despite the difficulty.

(Or as Russ says it: he's the Hardest Geezer.)

But what if we told you that the running wasn’t even the hardest part? 

Russ later said that the hardest part of this challenge was the logistical and business arm of the operation. 

• At the start of the challenge, Russ and his team arrived in South Africa with £10,000, about 4% of what they needed to complete the challenge. They would have run out of money in the first month if Huel and PerfectTed hadn’t stepped in to sponsor the challenge. 

• Alongside all the running and travel, they were also posting biweekly YouTube videos—filming and editing them from the van as they traveled. As a result, the team was primarily made up of people Russ had hired to create content—which meant that navigating Africa was something none of them were particularly equipped to do. (Russ later hired others to help out with that side of the operation.)

• Russ was initially denied a Visa into Algeria, which would have made it impossible to finish the challenge as planned. Luckily, a viral Tweet managed to convince the government of Algeria to let him in. 

• The team had to provide enough food for Russ to consume 6000 calories a day, even while traveling through incredibly inhospitable places like the Sahara desert, while also trying to avoid food poisoning. As far as we can tell, Russ consumed a combination of local food and Huel to hit his caloric intake. 

The whole story is an incredible story of human resilience and resourcefulness, and we’d highly recommend checking out the YouTube series that Russ and the time published about it all. 

How were they so resilient?

One of the team, Stan, later said that “the resilience they had built up was accumulative and gradually they became less and less concerned about setbacks.”

In other words, the secret to building resilience might just be to do things that require resilience. 

That’s our takeaway from Russ’s achievement. 

We hope you enjoyed this email! If you want to check out or contribute to the charity that Russ was running for, go here. 

We’ll speak again next week.

Until next week,

Benji & Jacob.

P.S. Russ’s next project? Running coast to coast through New Zealand. 3000km and 300,000 feet of elevation. Stay tuned for more on that.

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