Sleep deprived and scorched from the desert sun, with a newly shaved head and chiselled body barely recognisable from his hedonistic days as a reality television star, Spencer Matthews made history on Tuesday when he broke the world record for the most consecutive marathons run on sand.
After an astonishing 30 in 30 days, running from Wadi Rum on the edge of the Arabian desert to near the Dead Sea in Jordan, the 36-year-old Made In Chelsea star turned entrepreneur was met by model and presenter wife Vogue Williams, 38, and the eldest two of their three children, Theodore, five, and Gigi, three – they also have a two-year-old named Otto.
Running the equivalent of the length of Britain in searing heat and an unstable surface would test the most experienced athlete to their limit. For a man who used to drink ten pints a day and get out of breath climbing the stairs, it is all the more remarkable. So how on earth did he do it? Here’s a step-by-step account of Spencer’s extraordinary achievement.
Spencer Matthews is met by his wife, Vogue Williams, on Tuesday after completing 30 marathons
3 MONTHS TO GO: May
Right at the beginning of his training, Spencer tears his IT (iliotibial) band – the fibrous tissue that runs from the outside of the hip to the outside of the knee – forcing him to take six weeks off training, which ‘threw a spanner in the works’. But by May this year, he’s up to running around 100km a week – he will complete 2,000km in total before he sets off – and lifting weights three times a week. No mean feat for a man who ‘would have struggled to run a mile’ a few years earlier.
Eton-educated Spencer, younger brother to James, who is married to Pippa Middleton, credits his newfound strength to a change in ‘mindset and work ethic’.
During his time in Made In Chelsea, the TV show he quit in 2015, he describes himself as ‘lazy’ with an ‘inflated ego’. But after he married Vogue in 2018 and she became pregnant with their eldest child, he vowed to turn his life around, replacing an abusive relationship with alcohol with regular exercise, which enabled him to push ‘boundaries’. And how.
Since then he has completed five ultra marathons (any distance longer than a 42km marathon), including The Jungle Ultra last year, a 230km self-sufficient marathon (where you carry your own food on your back) through the Amazon Rainforest in Peru.
‘This was without a doubt the hardest physical challenge I have ever undertaken,’ he said of the challenge, adding somewhat presciently, however, ‘although I’m sure it won’t be the last’. This time, he’s fundraising for Global’s Make Some Noise charity.
2 WEEKS TO GO: July
Spencer, a city trader before embarking on his TV career, heads to Kenya to train with some of the country’s Olympic team, famous for running long distances in searing heat. ‘Petrified’ of failing his desert challenge, he also travels to Jordan for a ‘recce’ to familiarise himself with the environment, where the extent of his challenge becomes clear.
‘I had originally hoped that our chosen route might be relatively firm,’ he writes on social media, but ‘our trip has assured me that it most certainly isn’t. I’ll be facing a lot of soft beach-like sand, rolling dunes and plenty of elevation’. As a result, he writes, his ‘whole race strategy has had to shift’ to incorporate ‘more mind games’.
LESS THAN A WEEK TO GO: July 24
Spencer reveals on Instagram that to further acclimatise to temperatures of up to 50C, he has had ten sessions in a heat chamber – which simulates high temperatures with 20 per cent humidity to help lower his starting core temperature, which means he has a greater heat storage capacity.
‘The idea is try to train yourself to control your internal body heat because, when that goes wrong, you’re in all kinds of trouble,’ he says. ‘I had to practice running slowly, which is hard for me to do. In sand it’s a huge expense of energy to run quickly because your footing is not solid, so it saps a lot of energy.’
The heat chamber does not prove easy. ‘The first time I tried it was almost humiliating. I ran really slowly for 20 minutes, lost all sense of time, and became incredibly faint,’ he says. ‘I had to come out after 40 minutes as I was in quite serious pain.’
Luckily, his perseverance pays off: ‘I’ve now got myself to a position where I can cruise pretty comfortably for two hours.’
On holiday in Zanzibar with his family, meanwhile, there is no respite from training, which proves a valuable learning opportunity.
‘I was fortunate to be on this incredible beach and it was 35c . . . I ran the first day in trainers, and the second day was so lovely I thought I will go out and run barefoot,’ he says. ‘I ran over 30km barefoot and I will not make that mistake again. My feet were just bruised, battered, torn to shreds, standing on rocks…’
Eton-educated Spencer, younger brother to James, who is married to Pippa Middleton, credits his newfound strength to a change in ‘mindset and work ethic’
MARATHON 1: July 29
Spencer finishes his first marathon on July 29, in four hours 20 mins, on just two hours’ sleep, after a ‘harrowing’ run up to the big day. ‘I didn’t quite feel myself, away from Vogue and the kids and about to embark on an unprecedented journey,’ he writes on Instagram. ‘At 4am, we cracked on down the sandy trails near Petra towards the deep desert where we will spend the majority of the challenge. This is going to be a very long month but one that will never be forgotten.’
With him for most of his first three marathons is his ‘wholesome’ running coach Chris Taylor whose ‘favourite thing to tell me to do is to ‘slow down’.’
Also on his team, who run part but never all of his marathons, is a physio and doctor to ‘prevent things taking a bad turn’, and videographer and photographer Matt Stone.
MARATHON 4: August 1
After a 2.30am wake-up call – Spencer has to start running at 4am, in the dark with a head torch, to be finished by 9am or the heat will be unbearable – he completes his ‘best run’ to date. ‘Confidence is building,’ he says. ‘I’m getting stronger.’ He wears a Garmin in his shorts to help him navigate and two GPS devices in his front pockets. His running shoes have Velcro stitched in them so straps can be attached to cover the top to stop sand pouring in.
‘It’s going to be a long old month’, he writes. The temperature – an average of 38C – so extreme he can lose 4kg in body weight after each marathon. In testing times, he’s often motivated by the memory of his older brother Michael. He died in 1999 while descending Everest after becoming the youngest Briton to reach the summit.
MARATHONS 7-9: August 4-6
Once feted for his long locks, Spencer has shaved his head for comfort, and to boost his fundraising efforts. Today, he shows his Instagram followers round camp, revealing a ‘home cinema system’, which is a phone propped up against a rock; solar panels to charge the team’s devices; and an enclosed tent for ‘number twos’.
There’s no running water – he showers kneeling under a bag of water. ‘About 17-and-a-half hours are spent every day in a small tent, to escape the brutality of the sun.
‘When the running stops, there is little to do,’ he says, the marathon actually becoming his favourite part of the day ‘because the rest of it is at the best of times pretty grim’. Each team member has a mat: ‘You lie on them with as few clothes on as possible because it’s very, very hot.’ Little wonder, perhaps, he says: ‘My body has literally moulded itself to the harsh environment.’
In early August Spencer shaved his head for comfort and to boost his fundraising efforts
MARATHON 10: August 7
With ‘nine in the bag’, Spencer says Vogue – whom he met on the set of reality TV series The Jump and is missing ‘like crazy’ – is ‘more comfortable with his challenge than she was before’.
Describing his tenth marathon as a ‘milestone moment’, he recalls his 36th birthday the day before, when his team and local Bedouins threw him a surprise party with cake, ‘necklaces made from rope, rocks and old tin cans’. By now, pictures of a topless ‘Spenno’, as his wife calls him, running against a backdrop of sand, are attracting a wide online audience, and his wife quips: ‘I don’t know how you’ll cope with wearing a top again when you get home!’
MARATHON 12: August 9
He may now have covered more than double the distance of the some of the ultra races he’s run, but, as Spencer puts it, he’s ‘not even half way’, admitting that, when in pain, ‘it’s quite easy to slip into negative headspace’.
Nonetheless, he writes: ‘Running 12 marathons back-to-back is something that not so long ago, I wouldn’t have believed I had in me. Goes to show what effort and self belief can do for you.’ Prone to niggles in his ankles, knees, thighs, hips, glutes and Achilles, he’s ‘only getting about five hours sleep’.
MARATHON 13: August 10
Spencer talks his Instagram followers through a day in his extraordinary life, explaining that his 9am marathon finishes ‘can be much later depending on terrain’ – a lot of his runs have an incline of 800m. Between 9.30 and 11.30am he’ll have ‘lunch and a stretch’ – a post-lunch nap is ‘rarely successful’ as it’s so hot, followed by ‘a few games of Ninja’ and dinner is at 4.30pm.
Burning around 8,000 calories daily, his food is carted around in a support vehicle at a non-appetising-sounding 45C. It consists of a ‘basic’ breakfast of pitta bread, Nutella, boiled eggs and fruit; more pitta, hummus, sweetcorn, cucumber and tomatoes for lunch; chicken and rice ‘every single day’ for dinner. While running, he snacks on dates, nuts, hummus and more pitta but, no matter how much he eats, it isn’t enough, because, he later said, ‘in order to retain muscle and weight through that period, you’d need to be eating an extraordinary amount, which I didn’t have access to’.
During his time on Made In Chelsea, the TV show he quit in 2015, Spencer says he was ‘lazy’ with an ‘inflated ego’ (Pictures taken ten years apart)
Surprisingly, he drinks cups of tea while running and, in the evening, enjoys an alcohol-free spirit from CleanCo, the company he launched in 2019. He needs all the liquid he can get, given he can sweat five litres a day.
The sheer scale of the desert and its remoteness surprised him, with up to 100km between towns and villages, while the local cuisine was of an acquired taste, meaning he went hungry for long periods of time. He admits his body is ‘starving itself’, as it’s so difficult to consume enough calories, especially with food he isn’t familiar with such as boiled goat’s head.
MARATHON 17: August 14
There’s ‘jeopardy’ as Spencer nearly treads on a deadly horn viper, which his team initially takes pictures of in excited fascination before being told off by the Bedouin driving the support vehicle. ‘Had I stepped on it, I could have lost my leg or died,’ says Spencer.
MARATHON 21: August 18
In the Eastern Desert he says: ‘The terrain is far more challenging than Wadi Rum. It’s hotter, windier and much more desolate.’ By now Spencer has burned 140,361 calories in total – claiming 52,500 would be the total in ‘normal’ life – drank 104.5 litres of water, eaten 315 dates and listened to ‘countless’ Taylor Swift songs along with Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and rappers Eminem and Post Malone to ‘pep’ him up.
The more weight he loses and the more exhausted he becomes, the faster he runs – today’s marathon is his speediest so far, at just four hours and 16 mins. Despite covering an astonishing 1,274.02km in total, he’s still only been through one pair of trainers, because the ‘softer sandy terrain is not destroying them’.
MARATHON 24: August 25
Entering the final week, Spencer is receiving 500 messages a day from fans on social media. He’s sent support from friends and celebrities who’ve completed similarly bonkers endeavours, including fellow adventurer Bear Grylls, who tells him to N.G.U (never give up) and Russ Cook – aka the Hardest Geezer – who earlier this year became the first person to run the full length of Africa.
‘Obviously, his athletic achievement was crazy as well, but the thing that I was more taken by with him was his enthusiasm for life,’ says Spencer. ‘I’m sure he had tons of issues along the way, but he chose to focus on energetic, positive messaging. Which is exactly how I would want to be in this situation, and I think how I have been.’
Only on the homestretch does Spencer deploy one of his greatest recovery methods: an ice bath
MARATHON 28: August 27
Only on the homestretch does Spencer deploy one of his greatest recovery methods: an ice bath. ‘It’s taken us 28 days to find a suitable power source to bring it down to temperature,’ he writes. ‘Turns out the desert lacks a strong, regular power source . . . duh.’
There are other challenges, however. Two days earlier, his support vehicle got stuck in the sand, delaying his start and leaving him in the scorching heat for longer, and there’s a ‘real fly issue’ he says, with black clouds of insects forcing him to move while eating. ‘If you sat still, they’d be all over your food, all over you’.
In fact, conditions in his final camps are so bad he bans his family from joining him there: ‘Vogue would last less than five minutes in one of these camps. That’s no poor reflection on her. It’s deeply unpleasant,’ says Spencer. Luckily, an emotional reunion is just around the corner.
MARATHON 30
‘I did it! I can hardly believe it!’ says a euphoric Spencer as he finishes his final marathon in just four hours and 17 mins – pre-ternaturally brown and 10kg lighter, his metamorphosis from entitled boozer to superhuman desert stormer complete. Met by Vogue and two of their children, he’s raised around £350,000 for Make Some Noise.
There will be more challenges, undoubtedly, but his immediate aspirations are somewhat less ambitious: ‘I can’t wait to have a pizza and a nice cold shower. A normal bed with some air conditioning would be nice.’
To donate to Global’s Make Some Noise, visit spencer-matthews-challenge.raiselysite.com
Spencer is reunited with his son Theo after completing Marathon 30 in Jordan