Hardest Geezer

The man who ran the length of Africa

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Jack Needham & Will Caplan
April 8th, 2024 • Reading Time: 7 minutes

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TLDR: A guy from a small coastal town in the UK has sucesfully run over 16,000 km from the most Southern tip to the most Northern tip of the African continent.

19 million steps
16 countries 
200+ ultra marathons
$1mil for charity

The most amazing part is that he is a completely normal bloke, inspiring millions globally. I want to explain why that's awesome.

Take yourself to Namibia for a moment. Try to imagine its landscapes. The Namib desert covers vast portions of the country. Vast areas of sandy flat lands with towering rocky outcrops.

The sun has just set and a guy called Russ Cook, from Worthing in the UK, is locked in for an evening run of 30km having already run 1000km in the past 20 days. Running along these worryingly straight roads makes him feel slightly insane. The kilometers drift by painfully slowly, checking his watch every 5 minutes to see how far he has gone. At some point, he enters a daze beginning to no longer notice the pains shooting up his leg with each step; autopilot carrying him between kilometers.

Midway through his night run, he notices some guys running behind him. One of them overtakes him and the other stays behind. As he looks back at the guy behind him, in the pitch black, he notices the guy is carrying what looks to be a prison shank. His support team is miles away, and Russ from Worthing is left to fend for himself.

He picks up the pace and starts shouting, outrunning the guy behind him and the guy in front becomes tired enough to approach Russ, admit he wanted to rob him, and then just asks for food.

Russ and the team then gave him a lift to the nearest town. Watch the video below to hear the story in his own words.


So who is Russ Cook and what is he doing?

Russ Cook, also known as Hardest Geezer is your everyday Brit. Not as Americans imagine Brits; drinking tea and saying Cheeewwwsday. He is a proper Brit: loves football, a Gregg’s sausage roll, a Tesco’s meal deal, and a pint with his best mates in the local.

This time last year he set off on a challenge that has captured the internet: to be the first person to run the length of Africa. The continent. The feat would entail over 200 ultramarathons (more than 30 miles) in as many days, through deserts, jungles, and war-torn countries.

We have covered a relatively homogenous set of Change Makers in this newsletter so far. Intellectual powerhouses like Elon Musk whose ability to institute changes comes from his cerebral foundation partnered with one-of-a-kind ideas.

Russ is different and I want to explain why.

The power of normality

One of the problems with change makers like Elon is they feel distant. They either have a genetic gift or lived experiences that make them uniquely positioned to bring about change. Things that I don’t have.

Elon read for 9 hours straight until 6 am on a regular basis. Yeah, never done that…

In James Clear's book Atomic Habits, he says that one of the first ways you build new habits is you think of yourself as the type of person you want to be. If you want to run more, you identify as a runner.

How can I relate to Elon Musk, Bryan Johnson, or Mr Beast?

It makes their achievements feel far off and in many ways unreachable. But Russ Cook’s superpower is he is wonderfully normal.

Everyone can relate to Russ.

As he started his continental run, he would post daily video updates of how things were going. Have a quick watch of one of the below to give you a sense of how “wonderfully normal” Russ is:

Everything about Russ makes him feel like your friend. His accent, the complete gibberish he shouts about ones and twos, smashing tarmac, and all the stuff that goes wrong, from food poisoning to car breakdowns.

These Russisms bridge the gap between the terrifyingly giant nature of his goal with the everyday man who’s doing it.

It leaves me with an inexplicable sense of pride in a man I have never met and a growing self-belief in my ability to overcome something incredibly hard.

And that is half the job. So much of our ability to bring about positive change, to do something that changes the world, comes from our belief that we can do it. Russ inspires that belief; “If the guy from Worthing can do it then why can’t I?”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to go and run the length of Africa, but we all have that thing that feels insurmountable. Starting your own business, making new friends, or maybe you want to run your first 5km.

Crossing the finish line

Yesterday, Russ completed the run, finishing in Tunisia. He ran a total of 16000 km with over 19million steps, across 16 countries.

What he has completed is unbelievable and he has raised over $1mil for charity.

But what's even more impressive is his butterfly effect on his following. In many ways, the nature of his challenge has become irrelevant. It is the completion of it as “Hardest Geezer”, remaining perfectly authentic to who he is, which means the effects of this achievement go far beyond his completion of it yesterday.

You can see these effects as he is endlessly tagged in Tweets and Instagram posts of people embarking on their own challenges.

One of my favourite films is The Imitation Game. In it, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the famous mathematician and computer scientist who broke the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during WxW2.

Here is Alan Turing’s quote that perfectly sums up Russ Cook.

“Sometimes, it is the people who no one imagines anything of...who do the things that no one can imagine.”

The Imitation Game

Russ Cook has sparked the imaginations of millions of people around the world to think about what they might be capable of. Precisely because he is a change maker that no one imagined anything of.

We salute you, Russ.

Some interesting resources: