In a world where toxic masculinity is a growing concern, Russ Cook is a breath of fresh air. Yes, he’s the first man to run the length of Africa, and yes, this is mightily impressive. But chatting to him, it’s the 27-year-old endurance athlete’s openness and irresistible enthusiasm, rather than his impressive mileage, that reaffirms his status as a newly-adopted national treasure.
We talk via Zoom ahead of his latest challenge – running the length of New Zealand – and as the conversation continues, I’m surprised to learn that life looked very different for the Huel ambassador less than 10 years ago.
“When I was 17, 18, 19; they were quite hard years for me in a lot of ways,” he tells me. “I was living in a flat by myself and I was quite lonely really. I was just coming out of school and trying to get a job, but it was hard to get employed. I was mostly working cleaning jobs, scrubbing toilets at 4am.”
“I was pretty skint and most of my money was going on rent, so I had a lot of questions about the world. I knew I wanted to live an impactful life, but I really struggled to know what that was or how to do it.”
It was a drunken introduction to running that changed the tide for Cook – now known by his moniker, Hardest Geezer. This is how a 2am decision in a Brighton nightclub led him to where he is today.
After leaving school, Cook found himself “meandering around” and seeking quick dopamine wins; “drinking, going on nights out, partying, gambling, really just trying to cut corners to meaningful things that made me feel alive”. Then, in a club under Brighton’s seafront arches in the early hours, he had an epiphany.
“I looked around and everyone was off their nut,” Cook says. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t really like doing any of this, but I don’t know what else to do at this point’. That was my culture; that was my world. So I ran home [to Worthing]. It was 10 or 11 miles and it took ages. I was sitting down on the pavement every half-hour or so – it wasn’t pretty. But I did it, and my mate heard about it.”
Cook’s friend suggested they train together for the Brighton Half Marathon. After the pair successfully negotiated this, they signed up for the city’s full marathon a few weeks later, and another marathon soon followed. Cook had caught the running bug.
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“Running showed me how much more capable I was than I realised”
Through running, Cook found a lot of what he’d been looking for in that Brighton nightclub. Dopamine wins? Sure, by the bucketload, as any ardent runner will persistently tell you. But running also provided belief, belonging and purpose.
“When I completed a marathon, it was a huge moment for me,” he says. “Just six weeks before, a marathon had seemed like something other people did, not something I could do. Being able to do it showed me a lot about myself, and how much more capable I was than I realised.”
“Off the back of that, I started applying a similar formula to other parts of my life. I saved up a bit more money, I started being a bit more organised, structured and disciplined, and then I came up with a plan. After I saved up some money, I thought, ‘Right, let’s go and travel the world’.”
On a strict budget, Cook invested in a series of one-way tickets to locations across the globe, and wound up having a life-changing chat with an Italian man in Kenya.
“He had been cycling around the world for six years, and speaking to him really changed my perspective on how I could live life if I wanted to. I don’t have to subscribe to everything I’ve been taught, I can play a different game, and that’s when I ran home from Asia to London, which was what started the whole idea of running Africa.”
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Love the process and treasure adventure
A marathon is most people’s running pinnacle, but for Cook’s (by his own admission) “obsessive nature”, it was only the start. He soon began to take on new ultra running challenges.
“When I got into running, I felt the benefits of it so much that I just wanted to wring that dry as much as possible,” he says. “I wanted to push more and more and more and see how far I could take it.”
This vision involved combining his two great loves: running and travelling. The result was the adventure of a lifetime, as most of his fans now know, having tracked him traipsing through Africa from the comfort of our sofas.
Adventure is something Cook values highly, but he stresses that it can take different forms for different people.
“I’m all for people finding whatever adventure is for them and taking that on, but I don’t necessarily want to shove running Africa down everyone’s throats,” he laughs. “In the traditional sense, we talk about climbing mountains, travelling, going across countries and all those types of things. But for me, there are so many adventures to be had in life; getting married is an adventure, creating a business is an adventure.”
And the key to enjoying any one of these adventures to the fullest, he tells me, is learning to “appreciate the process as well as the achievement”.
“There has to be some love for the process, not just the outcomes”
“As a 17-year-old, I was trying to navigate all of these different challenges, like applying for a job that paid me £6 an hour instead of £4.50, scrambling the money together to go and get my supermarket shop, or whatever it was at the time,” Cook says. “I look back on that now and I think there’s an adventure in there too. It’s a journey, and one of the things Africa taught me is there has to be some love for the process, not just the outcomes.”
“I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t benefit from that advice myself, even today. It’s so easy to look ahead. But one day we’ll all be lying in a bed somewhere, hopefully nice and ripe at 90-odd years old, and it’s all going to be said and done. Even in the rough times, there are always things to be grateful for, and that’s something I actively try to do. I’m not the best at it, to be honest, but having that gratitude for the journey and the ride we’re all on definitely helps, I think.”
“Hopefully we can do that with this New Zealand project: try to get people to appreciate the process as well as the achievement or the goal that they’re going for.” Cook adds.
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The New Zealand challenge
For his latest physical feat, Cook will be travelling the 3,000km Te Araroa trail from the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island to the peak of its North Island.
And while this is far from a walk in the park – the route will see him tackle roughly 300,000 feet in elevation, or the equivalent of climbing Everest more than 10 times – he does plan to follow his own guidance and enjoy the ride a bit more than he has done in the past.
“I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand, so I’m really excited about this trip,” he says. “[There should be] less gunpoints and less hostage situations this time, so I think we should be all right.”
Cook was robbed at gunpoint a couple of months into his Africa challenge, and later kidnapped and held hostage by a machete-wielding gang.
“For this challenge, we’ve partnered with the tourism board, so they’re going to be showing us a lot of the country,” he adds. “We’re going to dive into the culture and hopefully meet some more people. That’s one of the smaller regrets of Africa – because I was running so much every day and powering through, it was harder to build that depth of connection with people.”
“This time I’m going to take in the sights a little bit more. It’s not just about the achievement, it’s about the process and trying to enjoy that, rather than just blasting it to the finish line as fast as possible. Sometimes it’s nice to pick your head up and see the trees, you know?”
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For Cook, adventure is encouraged, but it can be expensive. Despite the enormous athletic challenge that lay ahead of him as he geared up to run the length of Africa, he says securing funding “took up 90 per cent of my brain space”.
“If you come from loads of money and you’re super rich then sweet, but if you’re a normal person then funding these kinds of expeditions is such a daunting prospect,” he says.
“This is why I’m super proud to work with Huel, and when they told me about their new Limit Seeker concept I immediately thought, ‘This is sick’. That will really be a bridge for a lot of people who have these ideas and want to make them happen.”
The Limit Seeker fund offers £100,000 intended to “inspire ordinary people to conquer extraordinary personal goals and achieve the seemingly impossible”. Applications for funding can be made on the Huel website, with successful applicants receiving personalised sponsorship, unlimited Huel products and guidance from Huel’s nutrition team.
“It’s something that I found a lot when I was younger, and I see it with other people too; there are these limiting beliefs we have about ourselves,” Cook says. “Trying to break those down and empower people to believe in themselves and take on their adventure is an important part of what I want to do, and what Huel wants to do as a brand. It’s sweet, eh?”
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