Among running medals on my shelves is a chunky, silver-coloured one for a run I did in 2013 and — simultaneously — 2006. I managed that because the event was in Ethiopia, and while it was 2013 in the Western calendar, it was 2006 in the Ethiopian one, because of different calculations about the birth year of Jesus Christ.

I’m still in awe, though, of Kevin Webber. He lives in the same street as I do, Newbury Gardens, but also in a parallel universe inhabited by superior beings. While I’m doing three runs of three or four miles in a week, he’ll sometimes do a marathon a day. He can be in suburban Stoneleigh and the Sahara Desert at the same time (more on that later). And, according to his doctors, he shouldn’t be here at all. In November 2014, at the age of 49, he was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer and told he might have only two years to live. After his first chemotherapy session, he decided that, rather than roll over, he was going to run on, and on…

I knew nothing about Kevin until recently, when restrictions prompted the setting-up of a WhatsApp group for the street. It’s a bush telegraph of needs and offers and happenings: one isolating resident has shopping or a prescription to be picked up; another has plants and fruit to give away; a third is reminding us to turn out on our doorsteps for the next “Clap for Carers”; and a fourth is telling us that Kevin Webber is haring off again to raise more cash for charity.

His plan for April 2020 was to take part — for the fifth time since 2016 — in the Marathon des Sables, “the toughest foot race on Earth”: a run of about 250km (156 miles) over the sand dunes and salt plains of the Sahara in Morocco. When a world health emergency intervened, Kevin ran his own event — in Stoneleigh, in his back garden and round his house, doing roughly a marathon a day over a week.

Terrain aside, he told Sky News, it felt real enough. “OK, it wasn’t 50 degrees and, no, it wasn’t soft sand and massive dunes, but each lap had 16 turns in it and every turn just does your ankles and your hips in and you can never get a rhythm going. Mentally, it was just like doing the race.”

I haven’t met Kevin (I’m not supposed to be mixing with strangers), but thanks to WhatsApp and the internet as a whole, I’ve learnt a lot about him. A father of three with a bald head and a broad smile, he worked for a bank for 36 years. In his twenties, as well as playing rugby, he’d run a few 10K races and half-marathons; he’d fantasised about the Marathon de Sables, but decided that 26.2 miles on the road, let alone 156 miles over seven days in the sand, was beyond him. In his early thirties, he gave up completely after tearing both his calf muscles on the pitch. Fifteen years later, a friend of his wife’s died at 40. His wife, Sarah, said to him then, “You know you’ve always talked about wanting to do the marathon…”

Kevin had physio, restarted training, and ran his first marathon in Orpington, Kent, finishing in four hours, 18 minutes. Then he did both the London and Brighton marathons, finishing the latter with a personal best of three hours, 48 minutes. After that, he ran 100k from London to Brighton (“a great day”) and embarked on a new hobby: ultra-marathons.

Then came that diagnosis. During the week before his first chemo session, he ran 20 miles. The morning after chemo, on January 14, 2015, he woke feeling “rubbish, tired, sick and sad”. So he told Sarah he was going for a run. “You can’t!” she said. He could, and he did. Cancer, he says, “was screaming at me, ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, let’s see, then.’”

He didn’t overdo it. Just half a mile to the park. And then round the park for two miles. And then home. But he was back in the game, and each day he went a bit farther. In April — week 13 of chemo — he ran the Brighton marathon with his best friend, Jim, both sponsored to raise cash for Prostate Cancer UK. Two weeks later, again with Jim, he ran the London. In July, he did the Race to the Stones, 100K split over two days, from Lewknor in Oxfordshire, over the North Wessex Downs, to Avebury Stone Circle in Wiltshire. After that, he decided he was ready for the Marathon de Sables.

“Why,” his oncologist asked, “would anyone want to run that, let alone someone in your condition?” A reasonable question, Kevin admits. It had become for him “the Everest of running”.

And it wasn’t just a race. It was “an opportunity to punch cancer in the face, to say to others who have some tough times that giving up is so often a mental thing — and it would give me a chance to raise awareness and money for prostate cancer. A chance to help improve the odds so that my boys, family and everyone’s families will not have to deal with prostate cancer being a killer in years to come. I always say better to start and not finish than never start at all.” *

I’ve never started a marathon, let alone an ultra-marathon. When I was in my twenties, when Teri and I both worked shifts and before we had children, I’d often come home in the summer, change, and head out to do a decent distance: depending on how I was feeling, anything from four miles to 10. A half-marathon is the farthest I’ve run in an organised event — in Richmond, Surrey, partly through the streets, past the packs of cheerleaders, partly through the park, where the deer were less easily impressed.

When I’m out on a run, though, pounding pavements, I often take myself elsewhere. Sometimes (more often than usual lately, because I’ve been denied a return to my home town) my feet are skimming the firm sand at the water’s edge on Portstewart Strand, my eyes looking into the distance for Mussenden Temple, a cliff-edge rotunda in Castlerock where the Earl Bishop of Derry kept his library. Occasionally, too, I imagine myself on a road in a city that’s normally choked with traffic; a road that — except in its tree-planted central reservation — is streaming with runners and walkers, all wearing T-shirts of the same yellow-and-green design. I have a picture in my study of that road, and one of those T-shirts in a drawer.

My T-shirt has an “L” for large, but it fits my skinny frame like the medium ones I buy myself. Back and front it’s emblazoned with the names and logos of sponsors, from Huawei and Hilton to Plan International, which works to promote children’s rights and equality for girls, and Sensation, which — I have just discovered online — is a brand of condoms. In the middle of the chest is the logo of Ethiopian Airlines. Above that, in a motif that combines twisty road and five toes, are the words, in lower-case characters, “2013 great ethiopian run”.

A couple of inches below the neckline is a faint trace of green marker pen, stroked on the day by a steward as confirmation that I’d completed the 10K course. I phoned Teri as soon as I could to reassure her that I was over the finishing line. She hadn’t been terribly keen on my starting.

“Are you out of your tiny?” she had said, when I first mentioned the possibility. “You know what happened last time you ran in Africa…”

How could I forget? I have a medal for that, too, on a shelf in the study — though it’s not an official one. I’m not sure there were official ones. That would explain why some enterprising local guys on the beach in Mombasa, seeing running holidaymakers limber up in the days before the event, offered to carve them some souvenirs. So I have an ebony disc, about three inches in diameter, with raised letters that spell out this legend:

MOMBASSA [sic]
10K
1992.

It’s a reminder that I was there, and might be taken by others as confirmation that I finished. But I didn’t. Indeed, that 10K in Mombasa might well have finished me. But this runner is getting ahead of himself.

***

Kenya has long been renowned for both big game and distance runners. My idea was to watch the first from the back of a 4×4 and pad along in the wake of the second in a road race. It had seemed a good idea in January in London. It was time, I told the travel editor, that we had a piece about a package with a difference: a running holiday. What sort of people went on these jaunts? Why did they want to run 26 miles round a city like New York where there were (then, at least) plenty of cheap taxis? I would find out by joining them.

But not in New York, and not over a marathon. I had in mind a package with a little less running and a little more exploring. So I got fit (fit enough to run six miles in 47 minutes in the Epsom midday sun), and entered Mombasa’s 10K, which would be run in June on the same day as a marathon.

I arrived in Mombasa about 7am on a Monday, after a flight on which I’d got no sleep at all, to find the city steamier than a Mickey Rourke movie. I prayed it didn’t always get this hot this early. Having bought Kenyan shillings and bottled water, I boarded a safari bus heading for Shimba Hills, a reserve less than an hour’s drive away but a refreshing 1,600 feet above sea level. I was knackered, but determined, on my first trip to Kenya, to stay alive to the sounds and smells of the bush as we bumped towards Shimba Lodge. That weird squeak… was it made by a bird, or by a monkey? Neither: it was coming from a window catch on the van.

Over the next few days, I would see sights that would make it harder than ever to take my daughters to the zoo. By far the most remarkable was the arrival of a herd of buffalo at 5.30 one morning at the waterhole below Voi Lodge in Tsavo East National Park. It began with a lone bull, coming into view, stage left, half a mile away on the plain. Thirty yards behind came the second buffalo. And then, obediently, the rest: a muscular and stately procession of bulls, cows and calves, perhaps 800 animals in all. With a few shakes of his massive head, their leader saw off any zebra foolish enough to have hung around. Then the procession broke, and the buffalo rushed in fives and sixes towards the drink. After that, it was about as stately as a London Marathon water station.

It was on a Friday that I headed to Mombasa to prepare for the race. Though my only exercise since the previous Sunday had been a swim, I felt in good shape. I arrived at about 12pm at the Severin Sea Lodge hotel, from which the races would start on the Sunday. At least they had been scheduled to; I learnt that the 10K had been moved forward to Saturday.

I went looking for my fellow runners. In the same hotel was Russell George, from Cwmbran in South Wales, an electronics technician with the RAF, and a marathoner. I rang his room and invited him down for a drink. He hesitated. I remembered he was in training. “An orange juice…?” I added.

Russell, an earnest bespectacled man of 29, was a bit of a fidget. “I hadn’t had a holiday for a while because I found them boring,” he said. “But going to marathons gives me a focus — I’m really enjoying it.” He had run Boston, New York and (twice) Berlin.

I thought Russell was keen until he introduced me to the Prossers. John Prosser, 56, from Pinner, London, was the kind of postman a pitbull would think twice about tackling: all knotty legs and bulging arms. Fifty-three-year-old Barbara, on the other hand, looked more dinner lady than distance runner. In the past 10 years they had run in places from Brussels to Barbados, John each time doing the marathon course, Barbara the 10K. (John and Barbara, I reckon, would get on very well with Kevin Webber.)

Since their arrival in Kenya they had been following their usual routine: rising early for a pre-breakfast jog, spurning the booze, going easy on the sun. “We find,” Barbara said, “that if we’ve done a run, we’ve achieved something on our holiday. Then we do a bit of sightseeing.” I told them some people might think they were bonkers. It wasn’t the first time they’d heard it.

Race day came, overcast, gently breezy. Ideal conditions. I had tea and rolls at 6.30 with the Prossers, Russell George and Dave Cooper, a 39-year-old computer programmer. Dave, Barbara and I were running, John and Russell cheerleading.
I collected my race number. “Mombasa 10K 1991,” it said. The numbers had been due to arrive that day; given Kenyan firms’ leisurely approach to deadlines, the organisers had decided to play safe and issue the previous year’s.

A minibus took us to the start, at the Jomo Kenyatta agricultural showground, where the banners, too, were a year out of date. The loos were tiny sheds, housing spiders the size of my fist. The heavens opened; rain bucketed down. Then we were off.

I’d decided to pace myself against Dave, but realised quickly that he was too fast and just let him hare ahead. I’m short-sighted, but I don’t like contact lenses any more than I like running while wearing my glasses. I found I’d be almost under the kilometre markers and directions before I saw them. The directions were in Swahili, with a small arrow below. The first surprise was that there were no water stations. The second was how hard I was having to work to keep going.

I glanced at my watch, but couldn’t remember exactly when we had started. I asked a Kenyan runner how far we’d gone. Four kilometres, he said. Farther on, I asked another. Not far to go, he said. I put on a spurt, then eased back when there was no end in sight.

I was finding it tough, even at a jog, to run in a straight line. I felt myself swaying…

Then my chest was being pressed. Two voices were talking in my head. The first said: “I’m dead.” The second said: “I’m not dead.” I had the overwhelming sense that if I agreed with the first that would be the end of me.

Then I heard a third voice, outside my head, say that they ought to give me a jab. I’d come round enough to be scared: what if the needles weren’t clean? I yelled: “Don’t let them give me an injection. I’ve got needles in my first-aid kit in the hotel. I WANT TO GO BACK TO THE HOTEL.”

I was in an ambulance, crewed, as it turned out, by volunteers from the Red Cross. They had decided, anyway, that the hotel might be the best place for me.

The siren started; the ambulance pulled away. I pleaded with a nurse not to let them kill me. He tried to assure me that murder was the last thing on their minds.

I’d keeled over (I’m guessing now — I never did find out exactly what happened) from heatstroke. Humidity, which prevents sweat evaporating and so hinders the body’s natural cooling, was one factor. Lack of hydration was another. Having assumed there would be drinks stations, I hadn’t been carrying water.

I remember being back in my room with the Red Cross team, but not how we got there. My room was one of a series, each in its own little conical bungalow with thatched roof, some way from the main building and reached down a winding path through a palm garden. I remember lying propped up on pillows on the bed, looking at a nurse sitting on the other side of the room who seemed to be surrounded by an aura. Through the window, I could see the canopy of a palm tree swaying in the breeze, the leaves a shimmer of DayGlo colours. Touching my own skin was like fingering blancmange, and I didn’t seem to have any knees. I was convinced I was going to die.

No one else was. The Red Cross team, having checked me over, told me I needed to rest and to sip water every so often. Then they left me to have a snooze.

I think I dozed for a while. When I woke, I panicked. I was not only a long way from home but a long way from the main hotel building. What if the Red Cross team were wrong?

I dragged myself to my feet and out of the bungalow and started trying to walk the winding path through the palms to reception. Then I lost my way, or at least my conviction that I knew where I was going. So I wrapped my arms round a palm tree and, like some character in a cartoon, began shouting “HELP!”

The Red Cross team hadn’t gone far. Gently, they carried me back to the bungalow. Gently, they put me to bed. They also told me they would like to use my own needles and give me a shot of Valium, which would calm my brain and nerves, stop the hallucinations and help me sleep. I agreed, in so far as I was able. They gave me the jab, and, shortly afterwards, I stopped moaning, fell asleep and gave them all some peace.

When I woke, I rang the room of a couple of young British doctors I’d met a few days earlier and asked their advice. They kindly offered to come and have a look at me, told me I’d be fine, and stressed the need to keep replenishing fluids with water and diluted juice.

When I picked my running kit off the floor next morning, it was still rimed with salt. I ate one croissant for breakfast and lived the rest of the day on water and lemonade. The shorts that had fitted well a couple of days earlier were slipping off me.

I was in the habit of phoning my mother in Northern Ireland every Sunday for a catch-up. I’d told her the previous weekend I was heading to Kenya and what I had planned. I phoned and told her everything had gone well. It wasn’t until I was safely back home in London that I told her the full story. On hearing it, she said: “I knew rightly that day you phoned that there was something wrong. I could feel it.”

Though I hadn’t made it to the finish in the 10K (the Red Cross chief told me I’d fallen in the final kilometre), Dave and Barbara had. And on the Sunday John and Russell completed the marathon. I congratulated them all, and they passed on my souvenir: the wooden medal made by the guys we’d met on the beach.

A couple of days later I was back at work, and feeling a lot lighter. I’d also begun collecting several hundred quid for the children’s hospital where Teri was then working. My colleagues were forgiving of my failure to finish, and all of them stumped up the sponsorship money they had promised. Among messages that had arrived while I was away was one from a fellow runner. He was putting together a team for an event in Battersea Park; would I like to join…? I skipped that one, but, 21 years later, I did run again in Africa.

***

Under the mid-morning sun in Ethiopia, a van loaded with bottles of water was under siege. The workers inside it, unable to dispense bottles quickly enough, had to resort now and again to sliding the windows shut, only just avoiding the reaching fingers. Outside, jumping, jostling people were accidentally elbowing one another in the ribs or in the face. But all the while they were grinning.

It was Sunday, November 24, 2013, and the people outside the bus, medals on red bands hanging over their yellow-and-green T-shirts, had just played their part in the biggest mass-participation athletics event in Africa. They had finished the Great Ethiopian Run, a 10km race at 7,500ft through the streets of Addis Ababa that had attracted 37,000 entrants. They were a little thirsty, but they were jubilant, too, and on my second outing as a fun runner in Africa I was glad to be among them. I had gone to their city partly to lay to rest some ghosts.

That’s what I’d told Teri when I’d first mentioned the event and she had asked me if I was out of my tiny. I pointed out that I was not only older but wiser than I had been in 1992, yet still fit. This would be a well-conducted event, with drinks stations along the way. It was organised for the first three years and was still sponsored by Nova (now the Great Run Company), the team behind the hugely successful Great North Run and other events in Britain.

Travelling with a Nova-organised party, I would have the chance to meet Haile Gebrselassie, the dominant force in distance running for 20 years, and join a training run with Kenenisa Bekele, then holder of the world record and Olympic record in both the 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres. Opportunities like that didn’t come along every day. Nor did an opportunity to exorcise ghosts.

On the road in from Bole airport on the Thursday morning, it was easy to see why Addis Ababa – a city where you can frame skyscraper and goatherd in one photograph – is a byword for traffic chaos. I’d read that new roads and a light railway were being built, traffic lights upgraded. Not before time: in 2011 there were 275,000 registered vehicles but only about 30 sets of lights, and many of those were faulty. Pedestrians needed their wits about them at crossings, and even the traffic police, all windmilling arms, didn’t look too comfortable.

The skies seemed only slightly less busy. Flocks of yellow-billed kites, birds with a wingspan of nearly five feet, soared on the thermals. Climbing towards them, seemingly every few hundred yards, were groups of builders, entrusting their lives to the eucalyptus saplings that are lashed together here for scaffolding.

There were builders aloft on these rickety frames on the plot next to our hotel, the Kenenisa, which the athlete had opened three months earlier. We could see them, too, from the eighth floor of the Alem building, which was the business headquarters of Haile Gebrselassie and named after his wife.

Haile, as everyone referred to him, was no longer just an athlete but a sporting ambassador, a brand, a tycoon (and, it was thought then, potentially a politician). From the Alem building, which itself housed enterprises ranging from a cinema to a gym, he oversaw an empire that included property, a hotel, a car-importing firm and a coffee farm. “But without running,” he told us, “I don’t have a life.”

He had made time in a busier-than-usual week to chat to the journalists (and would welcome the British party as a whole to a post-race lunch at his hilltop mansion). Three hours or so after landing, we were still a bit groggy from the overnight flight. He was crisply turned out in navy suit, sky-blue shirt and brightly polished pointy-toed shoes, smiling that big smile that so many runners had seen flashing at them as he powered past on the track.

Settling us in his office in cream leather chairs, he asked what we’d like to drink, then joked that if the mineral water his aides were offering wasn’t from a race sponsor it couldn’t be good.

We spent half an hour with him, the topics ranging from the running of his home (as matriarchal a household as the Queen of Sheba’s, he reckoned, thanks to his wife and three daughters outnumbering him and his son) to the position of Mo Farah among the all-time greats. He wouldn’t be drawn on the latter question: “It’s like comparing Messi with Maradona, or with Pelé.”

He was more forthcoming about others in British athletics, paying tribute to Brendan Foster (chairman of Nova) and colleagues for having helped him start the Great Ethiopian Run in 2001. “Running or jogging is a fashion [here] now. Twelve years ago, to register 10,000 people was hard. Now, a week after we open registration, 80 per cent of the places have gone.”

The event, he said, was both a source of pride and a force for unity in a rapidly developing country. “Ethiopia is growing fast, but for me it’s not fast enough, because I’m a runner. Growth is not just about infrastructure but about changing the mentality of the people. The more we wait, the more we sacrifice. I’m not patient… We have to finish now. I don’t keep anything for tomorrow.”

His is both an inspiring and an uncompromising message. The greatest athletes, he believes, are made by struggle; born into it and hardened by it, as he and his peers were, running barefoot six miles to primary school and six home. “Nobody becomes a champion without challenge. The more challenges you have, the more you become a champion – not only in sport but in every discipline.”

Those words came back to me that afternoon as I chased Kenenisa Bekele. We had met him at his athletics centre and resort in Sululta, about 25km (15 miles) outside Addis Ababa in the shady Entoto Hills. With runners from the Birmingham Running, Athletics and Triathlon Club, whose performance in Nova’s British events had won them a trip to Ethiopia, the journalists made a few gentle circuits of his all-weather track, feeling the effects of the thinner air in our chests. Kenenisa, a shyer man than Haile, joined us for the benefit of Nova’s photographer and a television crew.

Then off he went on a run through the forest, the rest of us trying at least to keep sight of him and his training partners. It was rough ground, through the trees and along the dry bed of a stream where we had to dodge both horses and cattle. I tripped on a tree root and ended up sprawled full-length. Two of Kenenisa’s team, having checked that I was OK, hung back and jogged alongside me. What they were saying I’m not entirely sure, but I like to think it was the line that many visiting runners here have reported hearing from locals: “Iso ambessa – Keep going, lion.”

Those were words I was determined to heed on the day of the run itself – assuming it went ahead. The children’s event, on the Saturday, was cancelled a few hours before its scheduled 9am start because the police said they needed more time to make the city secure. In October, two people had died in an explosion for which responsibility was claimed by Somali militants. Would fears over terrorism lead to the cancelling of the main event? They didn’t.

The streets were full of grinning, chanting, singing people when we left our hotel around 7.30 on the Sunday. As well as the hawkers of cigarettes, mobile phone cards and chewing gum, a constant presence, there were stallholders offering to paint the faces of runners in the colours of the national flag. The nearer we got to the start of the event — where our Nova-issued passes entitled us to be — the more tightly packed the crowd was. The locals, seeing that we were visitors, and hearing where we were heading, did their best to squeeze aside and help us through.

The security forces didn’t quite share that spirit. When a horn blew just before the scheduled start time of 09.00, and the field of runners surged forwards, a few policemen swung at them with their batons as if they might drive them back. But they quickly acknowledged there was no stopping 37,000 people. The Great Ethiopian Run was under way.

Many of the Birmingham team, and one of the journalists, were suffering from something that the travelling runner, however well prepared by training, can’t rule out on the big day: food poisoning. Some, having hoped to test themselves at altitude, scarcely felt up to jogging, but all were determined to be part of the occasion.

I found myself running with Dave Newton, managing director of Nova International, and his wife, Sue. Dave, who had taken part the previous year, recalled the start in these terms: “It’s like being on a motorway, and turning on to a really short slip road, in a really dodgy car, to get in among the best sports cars in the world.”

We all took it gently, though not as gently as some of the locals who, on encountering their first hill, slowed to a walk. They stopped to chat, to wave to relations, to dance with stilt-walkers in shiny blue trousers, and to have a boogie in front of one or two of the half-dozen sound systems set up around the course.

We paused a few times too, so Dave could snap on his mobile the sea of humanity in which we were bobbing; the streets, where pedestrians usually took their lives in their hands, now reclaimed by runners. Some were in tracksuits, some in shorts, some in jeans, some were in wheelchairs, but all of them (or nearly all of them) were wearing the same yellow-and-green T-shirt inspired by the national flag: a reminder that we were in a land of runners, and part of something bigger than ourselves.

As well as the drinks stations, there was a refreshing roadside shower just after the 5km mark, where local participants, when Nova’s photographer appeared, rushed to join us for a soaking in front of his camera. They, and the cheering, whooping spectators, buoyed us along, so that running at 7,500ft (in a temperature of about 15C) seemed much easier than it might have been. When the 6km banner appeared, it was much earlier than I had expected. I was home if, thanks to the drenching in the shower, not exactly dry.

*Since his diagnosis, Kevin Webber has run a total of more than 17,000 miles and raised more than £1 million for cancer charities. In November 2024, he marked his 10-year “cancerversarie” by running from his home in Stoneleigh to the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton and back 10 times in 24 hours, raising more than £20,000 for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity.
All this is possible, he says, “only because of Professor Chris Parker, the other doctors, nurses, pharmacists, cleaners and everyone at the Royal Marsden who have given me the best care and help at every stage of my treatment. My cancer is still at stage 4, but I know that every day is a gift.”
For more on his efforts, see the Royal Marsden site.