LEON ‘SWEETS’ LEWIS – Running across Jamaica – Runner’s World, Oct 2025 issue

‘There’s only ONE Sweets Lewis! ONE Sweets Lewis! He runs every day, at least a 10k – running in a Lewis wonderland!’

That’s the terrace chant his friend Rene sings when Leon Lewis sets out on yet another run. The 37-year-old from Peckham, who introduces himself as ‘Leon Lewis, aka Sweets, aka south London’s Forrest Gump,’ was previously best known for an epic 10k run streak he (almost) completed in 2024, but as he sits broken on the side of a road in west Jamaica, watching two men tape a pair of sliders onto his swollen, hideously blistered feet, he needs that song more than ever.

It’s the fourth and final day of his run across Jamaica, late May 2025, 335 of the overall 345km total done. Night fell long ago. All day he’s been wearing shoes that are a size up from his usual, and these are now stained with blood. He tries to walk in his socks, but the shoulder of the A1 is scattered with sharp bits of gravel. Two pairs of socks? He attempts a hopeful tightrope walk along the solid white line at the side of the road – still too painful. Finally his crewmates, Rene Wong and CJ Paynee decide to cut the straps off the top of his sliders, which are also now too small for his monstrous feet, and attach the soles to his four socks with layers of KT Tape.

He’s hallucinating, seeing things in the shadows cast by his headtorch. A policeman stops to find out what the dumb tourists are doing, and Leon is barely able to articulate where he’s been and what he’s doing. Of the hundreds of 10k journeys he’s made in the past, this is going to be the slowest.

Looking back, he sees it as a low point, but not an end point: ‘I wasn’t gonna quit unless I couldn’t physically move forward any more. Even if I had to roll along the ground, I was gonna try my utmost to get to the finish line,’ he says. ‘From a personal standpoint, that’s just sort of how I am.’

It’s not how he’s always been, though. At the start of secondary school his PE teacher decided he might be good at cross country and put him up for a race. He came first in his school year, then seventh in a follow-up race for the whole borough of Lewisham. But that didn’t mean he liked it. ‘At the next race I stopped midway and faked an injury. The teacher put me through anyway because she really wanted me to do cross country, and I did the same thing again – just stopped. Mentally I didn’t enjoy it at all,’ he says.

In adulthood, nicknamed ‘Sweets’ because of his youthful looks, he was working full time in railway infrastructure for Balfour Beatty, going on and off to the gym, never really following a programme strictly enough to reach his goals. By 2019 he was running a little bit – 2k, 3k – and finding it tough. He had a more generalised sense of ambition though. In his spare time he didn’t bother with fiction. The books he was picking up were all about business advice or self improvement strategies. The kindling was there. It was David Goggins who lit the fire.

Leon read Goggins’s Can’t Hurt Me, a mix of memoir and inspirational advice by the American Navy SEAL turned ultrarunner who proclaims the idea that when your brain is ready to give up, your body is actually nowhere near. The book’s subtitle is Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds. Goggins doesn’t tread softly: ‘I sought out pain, fell in love with suffering, and eventually transformed myself from the weakest piece of shit on the planet into the hardest man that God ever created, or so I tell myself,’ he writes.

‘That book really got me locked in to the idea of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, wanting to push and test my boundaries over time,’ says Leon. It made him want to run further and further, but also affected his outlook overall: ‘My whole thing is about being the best version of myself and impacting the world in some way while I’m here. I don’t just want to survive. I want to leave the earth having made a difference.’

In the circumstances in which I meet Leon Lewis, it would be hard to avoid his ego getting a stroking. I’m a journalist waiting to record his words for posterity upstairs in Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema, where around 300 friends and family who love and admire him will imminently watch the premiere of the feature-length documentary he’s made about his Jamaican odyssey. He’s decked head to toe in clothing made by Puma, the brand that supported his trip alongside the hip Soho shoe store Footpatrol, from his green and yellow Jamaica tracksuit top to the black Palermos on his feet. The voices of the people he has invited to the screening drift upwards from the bar below us at increasingly excitable volume. It will be hard to go back to Balfour Beatty after this.

Since he began his 2024 run streak, his Instagram following has risen from about 3k to 14.6k, but he doesn’t have the self-adoring brashness of so many who spend all their time influencing. He still has the day job, and he keeps his shirt on, for a start. ‘Instagram is a necessary evil,’ he says. ‘I don’t really like a lot of attention.’ He’s pretty quiet while we talk, possibly nervous about shortly needing to introduce his film from the stage. When he speaks about his goals for Project Run Jamaica, yes he wanted to challenge himself physically, he says, but there were other broader ambitions too. He recognises that as the son of a white Scottish mother and a black English father whose parents were Jamaican, he’s changing the colour imbalance in running just by showing up. ‘I did my first marathon in 2022 in Manchester and there was such a lack of diversity on the start line,’ he says. ‘Then Brighton was even worse.’ But he wants more than a medal for participation. ‘I want people like me to be pushing to get that sub-3 marathon, pushing to get the six stars and all the other things that are available.’

As he began to immerse himself in the sport, he joined a few of the many run crews that are livening up London’s running scene. Run Dem Crew, of course, where he first received some coaching from Charlie Dark. He committed to track sessions on Tuesdays with LDN SLCT and on Thursdays with Runnpac. As interest in his personal running journey spread, some asked him if he’d consider starting his own club, but he remains happy just to host the occasional ‘pop-up’ event, where his many friends from the other clubs can join him. He did one at Footpatrol to encourage interest in the Jamaica project. ‘GWARN SWEETS’ said the green and yellow picture in the shop window.

It was important for him to pick a running challenge that reflected his culture. He thinks that in order to inspire as many people as possible, he needs to stay rooted in reality. ‘Obviously I’m out there doing these things but I want people to know that I am just a normal guy, and hopefully see a bit of themselves in me.’ He was obliged to wear Puma clothing for the documentary, but chose to do some of the run in AC Milan and Salzburg football shirts instead of running kit. For his support crew he picked old friends with Jamaican roots rather than more experienced coaches or nutritionists. He refers to them as ‘the mandem’. His videographer, Kelechi ‘Bullet’ Okorie, who has a Nigerian background, had never made a full-length film before. He fuelled himself with food from the island: sugarcane juices, cornmeal porridge, stewed chicken.

Jamaica is known for producing the world’s fastest sprinters, from Usain Bolt and Asafa Powell to Elaine Thompson-Herah and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce. The Caribbean nation, which gained independence from Britain in 1962, has won an extraordinary number of track medals for a country with a similar population to Greater Manchester. Leon’s challenge was a part of Puma’s celebrations marking 25 years sponsoring the Jamaican athletics team. ‘WI FASA DAN YU’ reads one of the shirts that Leon wore: ‘We’re faster than you’. But endurance running has yet to take off there. When he arrived in Jamaica he stopped at a store to buy a can of spray paint so that he could mark his finish/start point at the end of each day’s run, and explained to the woman behind the counter what he was planning. ‘Nah, you cannot do that, you have to drive,’ she said. ‘You gonna be tired, and the sun is HOT!’

That plan in full? Day one: from Morant Point, the lighthouse that marks the easternmost point of Jamaica, to the capital city, Kingston – 83.6km. Day two: Kingston in the south to to the tourist town of Ocho Rios on the north coast – 85.7km. Day three: Ocho Rios along the north coast to the city of Montego Bay – 85km. Day four: Montego Bay to the beach resort and westernmost point of the island, Negril – a daunting 99km to finish.

Leon first started thinking about it in 2023, when he and CJ went to Jamaica on holiday – the fourth visit of his life. ‘I was trying to run out there and really struggling in the heat,’ he says. ‘Then the part of me that wants to get comfortable with the uncomfortable was like, “It’d be good to do some ultra stuff over here.” But I didn’t think it would be possible to run the whole island.’

He briefly considered trying to run the length of much smaller Barbados, because it was achievable in a day. Then in August 2024 he got involved with crewing for a European iteration of The Speed Project – the ultrarunning relay that usually goes from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, which this time was covering 450km from Chamonix to Marseille – and began to think instead of Jamaica as a multi-day undertaking. Another experience in December 2024 crewing for his friend Hercules Nicolaou, who ran 405km north to south across Cyprus over four days, gave him a much clearer idea about how this kind of staged challenge works.

He didn’t just settle into training for the hot slog of Jamaica though. Leon’s list of running accomplishments has been getting bigger, fast. At the beginning of 2024, with no races in his diary, he decided to try to run at least 10k every day for a month. ‘I had always struggled to run 10ks consecutively. I could do 5k every day no problem, but the 10k distance would catch up with me three or four days in.’ This time, surprisingly, he did manage it. Still with no races planned, he thought he might as well try for a 10k streak in February too.

He ended up doing at least that distance for 365 days in 2024, racking up over 5,000km for the year. Unfortunately, last year was a leap year. The one day he missed was the day he was travelling home from Cyprus, just before Christmas. He thought he would wait to do his daily run back in London, then ate, fell asleep and woke up at 3am. He briefly considered keeping quiet about it on Instagram, but instead decided to confess: ‘In the same way that I celebrate all my wins, I’ve gotta put it out there when I do fail,’ he said at the time.

It made him seem more human, because otherwise it would appear that all he does is obliterate PBs. In 2024 he completed four sub-3-hour marathons and two 100km races, in addition to carrying out his own 100km challenge visiting every postcode in south London. As well as continuing the 10k a day into 2025 (though it paused after Jamaica) he has been ticking off the Marathon Majors, with Chicago in the diary for October and only Tokyo left to conquer. In one outrageous 13-day spell starting at the end of April, he ran Boston Marathon in 2:39:24, London six days later in 2:33:42 (his new PB), then came second in the UK at Red Bull’s global Wings for Life challenge, running just over 50km in 3:28:34.

Things keep escalating. Before you know it you’re limping in your socks on the side of a Jamaican road at night and the Police are wondering why you can’t speak in proper sentences. Leon sounds amazed at how far he’s come. ‘It’s weird. I never thought I could turn running into anything. Running was just something I did,’ he says. ‘By sharing my journey, I wanted to motivate other people to work towards something. It doesn’t need to be running specifically. I wanted to show that if you do something consistently over time, it will compound into something major.’ Eventually, it becomes self perpetuating. You keep showing up because you’re now the kind of person that shows up. For something really big, however, it also helps to have a personal reason to keep going.

Leon’s mum, Anne-Marie, moved from Aberdeen to London as a child. She met Shion, Leon’s dad, in The Bookplace, a community bookshop and literacy centre for people of colour and from poorer backgrounds in Peckham, where he worked. They had two sons and separated when Leon was five, but Shion remained involved in his life. When his dad died from heart complications in 2016, Leon unearthed a box of photos and letters, many of which were from a five-week trip Shion took to Jamaica in 1991, spending time with the members of his family who had stayed on the island in the north coast village of Mango Valley, where Leon’s grandmother grew up.

Leon had tried to visit the place during his 2023 holiday, but phone issues meant he was unable to get hold of his cousin for help finding the spots connected to his family. This year, just before he started the run, he successfully located his roots. ‘Scotland, where my mum’s from, has never really pulled me as much as Jamaica has,’ he admits. ‘There’s so much culture that comes from Jamaica: the cuisine, the music, just the whole vibe of the island. I always felt a strong connection to it. When I got there, I just felt like I was home.’ The sign outside Mango Valley says: ‘Ride and drive with care. We love our children.’ Even those that live on the other side of the ocean.

Back at the Ritzy Cinema, the Jamaica adventure is condensed into around 100 minutes and Leon gets to experience his pain and joy over again with a delighted audience. Those in the red velvet seats find logistics man CJ, who seems to be as good at impressions as he is bad at maths, hilarious. There are more laughs to be had watching the gang scale a large fence, with differing levels of success, to sneak up to the cordoned-off lighthouse at the absolute easternmost point of the island. At the end of each day, when Leon bends shakily down to spray his personal finish line onto the pavement, he gets a mighty cheer.

‘A lot of endurance documentaries are so focused on the runner and the running, and apart from the background scenery, can all feel pretty much the same,’ he says. ‘It was important to me that this felt personal, that you see our interactions with people on the island, and that you get a real feel of Jamaica.’ Asked to name an inspiration for the film, he goes for Disney’s Nineties comedy about the Jamaican bobsleigh team, Cool Runnings. Project Run Jamaica is in fact a buddy movie, where Leon is far from the only character. There’s surprisingly little running in the first half of the film. You can tell he’s on the island with his real mates when you hear their easy banter, their excitable shifts into patois, and from the calm way that Rene accepts a rare bollocking when he isn’t quick enough to be ready with Leon’s food and hydration.

Somehow, even in the darkest parts of the run, Leon keeps a sense of humour. Currently single, he complains that he’ll never get a girl once everyone watches the film and sees a close-up of his feet. When he finally reaches the end point, a dark deserted beach populated only by flies, he is draped in a small Jamaica flag and given a slow clap by the sole witnesses, his steady crewmates. ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here,’ he slurs, clutching a Red Stripe.

It doesn’t feel like an anticlimax because he’s done it in a place where his connections stretch back through generations, where even though he’s only visited five times, he feels an indelible sense of belonging. It makes his run something more than a physical feat. When his weary feet plant down over and over again on that sunbaked land, the impact goes deep.

Towards the end of day three, the group pay a visit to an older woman named May, the mother of a friend who runs the Pure Cane juice bar in Peckham. As she says farewell to Leon, she articulates for him why his journey is special: ‘You touch base with roots. It’s with you. It affirms your spirituality, your strength. Because that knowledge goes with you. Blessings.’

Leon’s dad never met Leon the serious runner. What would he make of the man today? ‘He’d be in disbelief! But he’d be proud and happy,’ he says. ‘He’d be glad I made the connection. That I went back.’ There may only be one Sweets Lewis, but his family, his friends, the current and future runners he inspires to get out and keep moving forwards day after day – they’re all over.