Sara Cox after 135-mile run: For the first time in days I’m not in pain
Supported by her team, well-wishers and a message from Prince William, the BBC DJ pushed through injury and exhaustion to carry Pudsey Bear to Pudsey
Powered by cold baths, pork pies and a morale-boosting message from the future King, the radio DJ Sara Cox pushed herself through 135 miles of brutal weather to complete her Great Northern Marathon challenge for Children in Need.
She finished her mission, to get Pudsey the bear to Pudsey, the town in Yorkshire, on Friday afternoon with rain in her eyes and more than £7 million raised for charity. “It’s 7 million quid’s worth of pain,” Cox said from the finishing line, five days after leaving Kielder Forest on the Scottish border.
Before starting training, Cox, 50, had never run further than 5km. Despite months of preparation, shin pain became her constant companion. “Going downhill just wrecks your body,” she says. “Just the constant pounding on the shins. Different bits of my body were tag-teaming the pain. It was my knees and then it would be my hip flexors and then they gave up, and it would move to my shins.”
“I’ve been blister-free which feels like a miracle. No rubbing, no chafing. I mean, I’ve been really jammy with that one. I wore something called Monkey Sox [compression socks], which are double-layered socks and they were incredible. So I think that has made a massive difference,” she added.
She had about 40 people helping her behind the scenes, from physios to support vehicles. “I basically had an amazing team looking after me. These guys don’t mess around. Talk about it takes a village.”
Her trainer, who ran alongside her, was Greg Whyte, the former Olympian who also helped train David Walliams when he swam the Channel in 2006 for Sport Relief. He said Cox’s ultramarathon was incredibly tough because of the relentless rain, bitter cold and gruelling hills. On the second day she tackled a 1,500-foot ascent up Bale Hill.
Whyte tried to support her as much as he could, both physically and psychologically.
Cox struggled to sleep during the challenge, adding to its difficulty. “When you’ve beaten yourself up so much with physical activity, then actually what you get is this inflammatory response and that can sort of cause this low level, sort of almost constant pain and that makes it incredibly difficult to get to sleep,” Whyte explains.
Sleep deprivation can also make the psychological, rather than the physical, challenge tougher. “When you’re sleep deprived, you just don’t have the mental power to be able to sort of fight it,” he said. “So, you know, what I was working really hard on was the sort of psychological coping strategies.”
Support also came from outside her team. Cox wept during a call from her mum and choked up as she spoke of her brother, David, who died in 2019 and who she described as “a real iron man”. She said she was drawing on his strength when her own faltered.
Messages from famous people helped too. Sir Rod Stewart belted out a personalised Keep Right on to the End of the Road down the line, while Dame Judi Dench sent her well-wishes. A moving message from Prince William, played to Cox on Friday morning, motivated her to the finish line: “I know the people of Pudsey will all come out and welcome you with huge open arms, big hugs … and hopefully, lots of your favourite crumpets.”
Local people cheered her on and let her into their homes when she needed the toilet. Music from the rapper Stormzy got her over the hills, which at times she ran backwards, arms linked with her support team. “Because I was in such agony walking downhill forwards was just so sore on the shins,” she said.
Cox kept a Pudsey Bear strapped to her rucksack, as a reminder of the mission. The bear is the mascot for the BBC’s charity, which raises money for disadvantaged children and young people in the UK.
BBC Children In Need raised more than £45.5m after its annual appeal show.
To recover between stages, she subjected herself to cold baths to get the swelling down and physiotherapy sessions that reassured her that the pain pattern was, perversely, a good sign. “The physio said if the pain is in different bits of your legs, then that’s right. That’s what should be happening. Because different bits are tensing up because they’re helping other bits. But if you get it just in one bit for the whole challenge, that’s when you’re in real trouble,” she said.
Her pre-race training programme was also vital to her success: “I did a lot of strength training and I did a lot of running in the build-up. But the strength training was the one. So it saved me.”
Cox, who has arthritis in her knee, hopes her achievement will be inspiring to older women.
“With the right approach, anything is possible,” Whyte said. “As we age things change — for women obviously there’s the menopause. That plays a critical role because of the fall in oestrogen … there’s a decline to our physical capacity, but what’s critical is actually we can reduce that rate [of decline] in the physical activity we do. A lot of the work I did with Sara was around strength work to rebuild that strength.
“There’s a wonderful plasticity to the human body, we think it’s inevitable that as we get older we can do less. But it’s untrue, what is true is that we have to work a bit harder to make it happen. But it can still happen.”
On the final day, Red Arrows flew overhead, crowds lined the route into Pudsey, some people held hand-painted signs and Melanie C of the Spice Girls performed at the finish line. “For the first time in a few days I’m not in any pain,” Cox said, dazed at the finish line.
“Once the adrenaline dies down I am going to be in pain … But it’s worth it.”
