AMOL RANDHAWA – running the length of England – Runner’s World, Feb 2026 issue
When The Bee Gees sang about Night Fever, they made it sound like a good thing. For Amol Randhawa, night sweats put a serious dampener on his sleep schedule during his attempt to run the length of England from Berwick-Upon-Tweed to Land’s End. ‘For all 14 nights and two nights after, I’d be waking up in the night shivering and have to wrap myself in a towel,’ he says. ‘You can do as much training and preparation as you want, but you don’t anticipate stuff like this happening.’
Amol had waited a long time between the start of this 891km challenge and the event that inspired it. It is now 20 years since he lost his mother, Gurbux Kaur, to lung cancer. He was around seven years old when she first became ill and 10 when she died. He says he didn’t really process the magnitude of the event for him, his father and his older brother at the time. ‘You’re so naïve to everything at that age. My mum passed away probably around 3am, and by 8am I wanted to get to school because it was sports day. You don’t understand how your whole life is going to change.’
In 2025, as a father to a toddler daughter himself, he was ready to acknowledge his loss on a suitable scale. Since taking up running he had completed a few marathons, working his way to a sub-3 PB and raising around £4,000 for cancer charities. ‘For this anniversary I didn’t want to do another marathon,’ he says. ‘I’d thought about trying to do a 100k or 100 mile race, but it wasn’t enough. It needed to be something massive.’
So he planned a 14 day route down the length of England that would take up the second half of August, averaging around 69km a day. The run was to support Ellenor, the Kent hospice that looked after his mother in her final days. At the time of writing, including Gift Aid, Amol had received well over £40,000 in donations, the vast majority of which he says came from locals around Gravesend, where his family is part of the large Sikh population. ‘A lot of people are connected to the hospice because it has supported so many people. The work that place does for the community is amazing.’
To prepare for the kind of daily distances he was going to have to cover, Amol trained by running while tired. He did some back to back 40k days, or multiple runs in the same day. He tried getting up at 3.30am to run 15k before his family got up, then running 20k while his daughter was at her childminder’s, and 20k again the same evening. ‘The furthest I ran in a single day before the challenge was about 63k, and then on day one from Berwick to Hawick I did 74k – so already I was in no-man’s land,’ he says.
You would expect a multi-day run of this duration to lead to some physical pain, but unfortunately for Amol the discomfort was there from the very beginning. He had injured his ankle at the end of June and still hadn’t recovered. Before the challenge even began, he was unable to stand on one leg for more than about 10 seconds. He rolled his ankle twice just walking over grass to the start line on the Scottish borders. Once he got going, even stepping on the slight raise of the white line in the road was painful.
Why didn’t he just postpone it? ‘I had already booked all my accommodation, and friends had all booked accommodation and time off work to come with me on certain stages. If it wasn’t for charity, I would probably have pushed it back a whole year, but people had already donated a lot of money. I was too far in.’
He came close to giving up, he admits. ‘I was on the phone to my wife telling her that I couldn’t take another step. I’d never been in that much pain in my life.’ But there’s also a sense that he feels that his tribute to his mother almost wouldn’t have counted if he hadn’t found it a monumental struggle. ‘There were definitely moments during the run where I kind of felt inferior,’ he explains. ‘My mum went through so much and she didn’t give up. She tried – how can I not try? And there are so many other people going through much worse times than I was, and they don’t have a choice. I only had to get through 14 days.’
With a combination of head-down shuffling and heavy-duty painkillers – an inadvisable 10 days of the combination of paracetamol and codeine known as co-codamol – he did get through it, to be met by his wife and daughter and other friends and family at the iconic Land’s End fingerpost. His watch stats say that he was running for a total of almost 129 hours, with an elevation gain of 9,371m – more than Everest.
He describes reaching the finish line as ‘a massive weight off my shoulders.’ After 20 years without his mother, he did something big enough and hard enough to match the way he feels about a life-changing occurrence which he was unable to comprehend fully as a young boy. ‘My brother said something to me during the event which I’m still thinking about now. He said: “Voluntary suffering is a privilege.” So many people have to suffer and they have no choice. This was my choice. I had to get it done.’
Amol Randhawa is raising money for the Ellenor hospice (ellenor.org)
