Ken Fancett’s original goal was a lot easier when he first thought of it: he wanted to run every single 100 mile event in the world. At the time, in the early 2000s, there was only about a dozen such ultramarathons in the US and not many anywhere else. ‘But I realised it was impossible because the number of races began to grow faster than I could ever keep up,’ he says. ‘After I’d done 30 or 40, I found a new way of motivating myself: what about trying to do a hundred 100s?’
Ken, a former BT employee from Sidcup, finally achieved his goal in October last year, completing the Centurion Autumn 100 in Goring-on-Thames in 25 hours, one minute and 10 seconds. He was 74. Of course you’d expect somebody with that many belt buckles under their belt to be a grand age, but when you consider that he only started picking up the race-collecting pace around 2010, it’s a staggering achievement.
Not that he’d be one to brag about it. It was his friend Pat from Beckenham Running Club who put him forward for an interview in RW, and if anything, he says he regrets letting people know about his gigantic undertaking. ‘I was foolish enough to blab that I had an ambition to do a hundred 100-mile events, and then I was constantly being asked, “How far have you got? Is this number 96? Number 97?” I did start to feel a lot of pressure,’ he says.
Unusually, although he’s done a lot more races in the past decade as he got closer to his goal, he didn’t follow the usual runner’s progression of 5k to 10k to half marathons and marathons before reaching the big distances. He first became interested in long distance walking, when a woman named Barbara Moore was in the news for walking from John o’Groats to Land’s End in 23 days in 1960. She’s well worth a google: born Anna Cherkasova in Russia, she also walked from San Francisco to New York City in 86 days. Her Wikipedia page contains the tragic but not entirely surprising pair of sentences: “She was a vegetarian and a breatharian, believing it is possible for people to survive without food… She died in a London hospital on 14 May 1977, bankrupt and near starvation because of her refusal to eat.”
Moore’s instinct for publicity did, however, lead to increasing interest in the idea of long distance walking challenges. The UK’s Long Distance Walking Association was founded in 1972 and put on its first 100 Mile Challenge – with the distance to be completed within 48 hours – in 1973. Ken had already done a 30-mile event in the late Sixties, finishing in about seven hours, while the winner had run it in just over four. ‘Before that, I hadn’t known it was physically possible for someone to run 30 miles,’ he says. ‘It seemed unbelievable to me that someone could do something like that.’
He soon headed towards what he calls ‘a sort of halfway measure’ of walking fast most of the time and running the downhills. ‘Then eventually you get to a point where you’re thinking: “I’m going to run this. I’m going to start running and carry on running.” But looking back, I can see that I wasn’t terribly successful because I would fade after about 10 or 15 miles. I hadn’t appreciated the training that you have to put in.’
It was slim pickings for ultrarunning events in the early days. There was the London to Brighton road race, a journey of around 55 miles which became effectively the world championships for extreme distance running after its birth in 1951. He also did the Round Rotherham 50 mile race, which was founded in 1983. America was more advanced. His first 100 mile race outside the Long Distance Walking Association events was the venerable Western States Endurance Run in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, which launched in 1977 and Ken completed in 2005. A total of 22 of his 100 100s have been in the US.
Ken did the most famous one of all, the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB) in its fifth iteration in 2007, but hasn’t been motivated to return now that it is ever more glitzy. ‘It’s definitely one that ultra runners should do at least once, but it isn’t really as hard as it looks,’ he says encouragingly. ‘The cut off time is pretty generous, and there isn’t any serious altitude in it.’
He may only be saying that because he’s done so many harder races though, not least the HURT100 in Hawaii, which took him 34 and a half hours in 2007. Ken has also completed seven mind- and leg-numbing 24-hour track races, looping the Tooting Bec athletics track in 2007 for his record distance of 144 miles. He’s done four more 100-milers so far this year, and has been almost permanently first in the M70 category since 2019.
Sadly, when asked what’s next, it sounds like he may soon be running out of road. ‘I don’t think you lose endurance as you get older, but you certainly do lose speed,’ he says. ‘Do I want to keep on doing races if the only thing I can think about is: “Am I going to make the cutoff?” There are events where I might make it again this year but I probably won’t next year.’ On the other hand, there’s no question that he’s already accomplished more than enough.
