Jamie McDonald: How a man ran 5,000 miles across Canada despite being told he would be unable to walk

Fundraiser talks to The Independent about the highs and lows of running almost a marathon a day

Jamie McDonald (glenn-bonnet)

In 2014, Jamie McDonald donned a Captain Flash costume and ran the entire breadth of Canada.

A remarkable feat for anyone, but especially for Jamie – who at nine years old was told by doctors he would be unable to walk.

Jamie, 30, was diagnosed with the rare spinal condition syringomyelia as a child and spent a vast amount of his childhood in and out of hospital, even taking one full year off from school. His symptoms manifested as epilepsy, immune deficiency and a pain which seared down his legs “like big bricks weighing down on them”.

Doctors later advised his parents that the condition could progress into Jamie never being able to walk again. He says the seriousness of how ill he was hit home when his parents used all their savings to take him on a once of a lifetime trip to Disneyworld , Florida and said he only understand the severity of the condition through observing his mother: “She feared I would never walk again or even worse that I might die,” he told The Independent.

However, Jamie’s symptoms “gradually disappeared” – much of which he attributes to consistently being active ever since which was sparked when his mother encouraged him to take up tennis after the prognosis.

“I had the dream of being the next Tim Henman,” Jamie says nostalgically. However, he soon realised he “was really bad at tennis” and became an instructor. About to put a down payment on a house after saving for three years, he suddenly backed out of the deal realising he wanted his life to take another path.

“I started to wonder: ‘What is it that I want from life?’. I reflected and thought about all this time I had spent in hospital and I went to visit the children’s hospital in Gloucester… I walked out and I thought ‘I’ve got £20,000 of my own money, maybe I’m in a position where I can give back.’”

That pivotal moment resulted in a spontaneous £50 buy of a “terrible” bicycle and Jamie cycling from Bangkok 14,000 miles back to the hospital in Gloucester, travelling with just a compass in the pre-iPhone era.

One remarkable fundraising adventure was not enough for Jamie, who after obtaining a visitors visa for Canada decided to scrap his backpacking plans and run across the country instead

“I was just going to travel but everyone in Gloucester kept coming up to me like: ‘What are you doing next?’ I remember thinking, ‘What do you mean what am I doing next? Have I not done enough already?’ But then I had this epiphany.”

Jamie decided to run the equivalent of almost 200 marathons, despite only running one previously seven years before after which he vowed to never run again.

“Everyone kept coming up to me asking when I was going to train but my visa had already kicked in. At what point do you train enough to run across the second largest country in the world?”

In total, he ran over 5,000 miles and raised a quarter of a million pounds for children’s charities, including Great Ormond Street hospital – where he had been treated as a child - in the process. He had one break, two weeks in, after tearing the ligaments in his foot caused by carrying a 30kg backpack every day while running. On his return, he switched to pushing a pram for the rest of the journey.

At the beginning of his journey, he ran about 10-13 miles a day but with the visa and winter kicking in (at which point several areas reached minus 40 degrees) after a couple of months, he ran approximately a marathon a day.

Jamie in Canada (Jamie McDonald)

It is at this point I tell Jamie that I trained five months to run one 10k race which I have since never repeated so the idea of running almost a marathon a day is something beyond my comprehension. He laughs and assures me I must have “nailed that 10k”.

One of the hardest aspects of his journey was the loneliness and after a few months he plucked up the courage to simply knock on an unassuming Canadian’s door, explain his story and ask to camp in their garden. Surprisingly, after the woman Googled him and found out he was “real”, he was invited into her home. This then triggered a network across the country, one mother set up a Facebook group to support Jamie called ‘Stalking Mumma bears’, it grew to about thirty women who would ring ahead into each next village to ask each other to look out, and more importantly look after, Jamie.

“They were really worried that I was this stupid Brit who knew nothing about Canada so they took me under their wing,” he says fondly.

When he was not being looked after by a ‘Mumma bear’, Jamie camped and also slept on a mat in public toilets at pit-stops during his run – much of which he did wearing a Flash superhero costume.

Another low during Jamie’s journey, which made national news back at home, was when Jamie got mugged on New Year’s Eve in the rocky mountains in Banff and his bag containing film footage of his journey and “all [his] possessions” were taken.

“I guess it was just wrong place wrong time,” he says giving the impression he does not want to talk about it much. “It was a bad experience but what I didn’t want it to do is change my perception of how incredible the Canadians were to that one bad experience.”

As well as the funds raised for GOSH and the children’s hospital back in Gloucester, Jamie also raised money for a different children’s hospital in every Canadian province. Exuding positivity at all times during our chat (Jamie was included in The Independent’s Happy List in 2014) he hones in on the silver lining of the traumatic experience which was raising an additional almost £30,000 in just 24 hours.

Jamie running through Canada (Jamie McDonald)

Despite his incredible achievements, Jamie is remarkably self-deprecating: “I never raised that money, I just did the Forrest Gump thing and it was actually everyone else that made the difference and made it happen… I just plod away,”

Since his run, he has set up the Superhero Foundation which aims to support people undertaking adventures and challenges to fundraise for mental and physical illnesses.

As for his next adventure, Jamie isn’t quite sure yet. He calls his new book ‘Adventureman: Anyone Can Be a Superhero” (of which all the royalties go to his charity) one of the hardest things he’s ever done, even up there with the extreme running and cycling, partially due to his dyslexia.

“I can’t spell anything and wasn’t very good at school,” he says. When returning to school as a tennis coach years later, a former teacher encouraged him to re-sit his English GCSE aged 23. “I sat at the back of the classroom with the – I got a B in the end, I worked my socks off for it!”.

I ask what he does for himself and he appears to struggle to find an answer. “I go out for a beer with my friends, we’ll just take the mickey out of each other. I guess that’s my downtime,” he says happily.

“My pathway is now so clear, I love it. I’m not saying it’s easy and not to say it’s hard work. Sometimes I question, ‘What am I doing? Am I bloody stupid?’ But I really do love what I do”

Adventureman: Anyone Can Be a Superhero by Jamie McDonald is published by Summersdale Publishers (£9.99)