On 1 March 2013, approaching his 27th birthday, Simon Messenger set up a web page and published his intentions for the world to see: ‘I’ve decided to finally put pen to paper, to put my words into action and to register the website for the start of what will be, I hope, a great adventure over the next decade or so,’ he wrote.
In the end, it proved to be many great adventures, and he did get the timescale about right. On 10 August 2024, age 38, Simon took part in his 80th race of a Jules Verne-inspired running journey around the world: the Marathon Pour Tous, the event for 20,000 members of the public following the same route as the Paris Olympic Marathon earlier the same day. He has written about them all on his blog, Around the World in 80 Runs, beginning in with a half marathon in Edinburgh, where he worked back in 2013, and completing the challenge suitably close to his current home on the outskirts of Paris.
He hasn’t actually circumnavigated the globe. A click around the pins on the map on his site (red for marathons, blue for half marathons, green for international runs that weren’t competitive races) shows that South America and the Far East are still due some more attention. Even so, visiting 55 different countries is a lot more than Phileas Fogg managed, and the fictional Victorian explorer never podiumed a half marathon in the Faroe Islands. ‘Of course I didn’t really set many rules,’ he says. ‘It just made it more fun to have that target of doing 80 – to draw a line in the sand.’
There is far more space on his blog than here for him to tell his many tales, but when asked for highlights, he reaches for the surprises he encountered on self-organised runs rather than mass participation races. ‘At first, it was mostly about performance for me – getting good times,’ he says. ‘But it became a lot more about the travel and the adventure.’
There was the time he and his wife Pippa went to the Seychelles on honeymoon, and because the trip didn’t overlap with the islands’ official marathon and half marathon, he asked the Seychelles Marathon Committee if they wouldn’t mind sharing the route for the half with him. And perhaps a few local runners might like to join him? When he turned up, there were five other runners waiting, plus numerous marshalls, an official photographer, and a Police motorbike to close the roads in front of them. ‘They’d arranged a proper half marathon just for me. It was mortifying! Especially because I had an upset stomach so could hardly run anyway.’
He earned a bit of media attention, and had a short film made about him, when in 2015 he became the first person ever to run a half marathon on the unrecognised micronation of Sealand. Sealand is a decommissioned sea fort about seven miles off the coast of Suffolk, first occupied by the Bates family in the Sixties with the intention of broadcasting pirate radio, then cheekily declared an independent principality with its own flag, passports and currency. ‘Prince’ Michael Bates and his son James permitted Simon to become their first ‘tourist’ in two years, a wild journey even though the run itself had to be on a treadmill he brought along with him.
‘The fort platform is about the size of a tennis court, so I either could have run in zig-zags and potentially fallen to my death, or done it on the treadmill,’ Simon explains. ‘Anyway, just getting there was enough of an adventure. I’ve never had to be winched up to a race before.’
The only rule he really stuck to was never to do the same race twice. He did originally intend to try for 80 different countries, but later decided that, for example, just because he had done a race in Washington DC didn’t mean he was forbidden from doing another in San Francisco.
He was also limited somewhat by wherever his job was sending him. As a sustainability consultant for the UN and various NGOs, it wouldn’t have been a good look to jet across the world just for a race, but if he had to go somewhere interesting for work, he always found a way to run. That meant being chased by teenagers as if he was an escaped boy band member in Kazakhstan, earning a medal made out of volcanic rock in Ethiopia, mosque collecting in Istanbul and gorilla spotting in Uganda. ‘I do offset my emissions, and try to be as conscientious as I can, and I’ve never flown out to do a race for the sake of it.’
More recently, a number of things slowed down his progress, and it sounds like he’d almost given up on reaching the magic 80. There was the pandemic, of course, followed by a knee injury sustained while climbing (not running) in the Pyrenees, which left him unable to run for around a year. He and his wife also had their first child, who is now two. ‘Obviously that adds another priority in life, so with work and family there isn’t as much time for running,’ he says. ‘But I’m quite happy with that. I don’t really care about performance and PBs any more.’
However, he and Pippa do put a lot of energy into encouraging PBs from others. Since 2021 they’ve been organising the FAST 5000, a spectator-friendly track night north of Paris that makes no secret of taking its firework-launching, music-blasting style from London’s Night of the 10,000m PBs. ‘We know we’re not reinventing the wheel here, but the athletics scene in France is a bit less advanced than in the UK, so we’ve been able to take this concept of athletics being a great spectator sport over here and grow the event pretty quickly.’ Their races have now featured dozens of athletes who have also gone to the Olympics.
And it was the arrival of the Olympics in Paris that motivated Simon finally to complete his adventure with the Marathon Pour Tous as his 80th run. ‘Looking back, the project took a little bit longer than I thought, but it definitely exceeded my expectations,’ he says. So what next? ‘I’ll just carry on. Whenever I go somewhere interesting, I’m still going to run there and write about it.’ Around the world again? Why on earth not?
THREE FAVOURITE RUNS
Swakopmund, Namibia, July 2018
Other than the sandstorms, the wind, the heat and the confused looks on locals’ faces, Swakopmund is the easiest and best place to run in Namibia: flat, safe, with paved roads (hallelujah) and enough variety in scenery to keep you interested. It also, amazingly, hosts a weekly parkrun, which I won.
Giza Pyramids, Egypt, April 2019
You might suspect that it’s a bit of a weird thing to go running around the pyramids, especially in peak sunshine at noon. It certainly was, but runners be runners, right?
Bratislava to Budapest, April/May 2019
The best one of all wasn’t a race, but a long adventure. Six days, 235km, with Pippa travelling with me on her bike. That definitely pushed me to the limit of what I thought I was able to do.
