JACK FAINT interview – Running India with a brain tumour – Runner’s World, April 2026 issue
‘This is India. Plan A never happens, so you must be ready for B, C and D.’
In September 2025, a man in a Himalayan café shared that wisdom with five western men who were in the early stages of spending almost three months moving slowly across his country. Jack Faint, their leader, already knew it though – India or otherwise. His Plan A had been crumpled up, hurled in the bin and set on fire six years earlier, as he lay beside his bicycle with a bleeding face outside Flinders Street Station in Melbourne. Now, as he attempted to become the first person to run the length of India – just under 4,000km from Panamik in the mountainous north to the oceanside tip of Kanyakumari in the south – negotiating floods, food poisoning, blackmail and extortion was somehow achievable, because the worst had already happened.
‘India is every end of every spectrum,’ Jack says now. ‘We saw the most extreme beauty, and I ran past open sewers and the worst litter I’ve ever seen. The most beautiful smells and the worst smells. The worst of humanity, in one particular situation, to the absolute best of humanity: generosity, kindness, curiosity and love.’
It won’t spoil the story too much to reveal that he did it – in a mighty 73 days, including a day 72 spent not running but throwing up – and is back home, attempting to negotiate the very different pressures of interviews, podcasts, sponsor meetings and book agents. Raised in Cheshire but currently based in Cape Town, he fits in perfectly when we meet in a hotel lobby in London’s hip Hoxton area – a 21st Century pirate with long black curly hair, a ring in his left ear, a buoyant moustache and a beanie hat. He’s wearing a shungite stone around his neck, a gift from his girlfriend Bronwyn before he started the run. ‘It’s a powerful stone said to enhance protection from negative energies and different things,’ he explains.
His demeanour is calm, unhurried, largely serious. He’s so zen that I quickly find myself complaining to him about a running injury of my own, briefly forgetting that we’re here to talk about a much more serious health condition at his end. A brain tumour, diagnosed in 2019, is what pointed him towards India, both physically and mentally.
Jack says the word ‘oligodendroglioma’ with the ease of habit. It’s a rare type of brain tumour that grows relatively slowly but is not currently considered curable. His is above his right ear, by his occipital lobe, which is where the visual processing happens. He shows me with his fingers how big it was when it was discovered – ping pong ball – and how big it was when he was last scanned in January 2025 – closer to the width of a tennis ball. He was given a prognosis of 10 to 15 years to live. That was seven years ago now.
Lying on the road at Melbourne’s busiest transport intersection in early 2019, he thought he had blacked out because he fell off his bike on his way to work – maybe he caught his wheel in a tram track. He didn’t realise that he fell off because he blacked out. It was the first and only seizure of his life. His first thought from the tarmac, with his left cheek mashed up, was to notice that he kept repeating the same thing, but he can’t remember what he was saying.
He was taken to hospital in an ambulance and given a CT scan as a precaution. He was alert, chatting to a doctor while waiting for the results, when another doctor ran in saying: ‘We’ve got a code stroke.’ This term means that a stroke is suspected and a medical team needs to respond instantly because time is critical. ‘That was when things started moving really fast,’ Jack says. ‘It was a whirlwind process at that point.’ Because the doctors had seen a mark on the back of his brain during the first scan, they needed to do a second CT scan right away to determine whether it was a continuous bleed. After that, they ruled out a stroke, but moved him to a neurosurgery ward to get blood tests and an MRI scan. Jack somehow stayed calm.
‘I still didn’t really comprehend that it could be anything serious,’ he says. ‘Maybe it was a bit of disbelief, but also, when you’re 25, I think you feel like you’re indestructible. I’ve always had a predisposition not to cry. I never react emotionally. I just react rationally.’
In the evening, after a full day in the hospital, he was told that the medics suspected a brain tumour. He was given three options. The first was to watch and wait, have another MRI scan in three months to see if there was any change. The second was to take a biopsy through keyhole surgery and test a sample. If benign, no problem, but if it turned out to be highly aggressive, it would be important to act quickly. The third option was a full resection – a major operation to open the skull and cut out as much of the tumour as it was safe to remove. He had three days to think about it before going back to see Professor Kate Drummond, Director of Neurosurgery at The Royal Melbourne Hospital. When he returned, he asked her: ‘What would you do?’
Together, they agreed on the middle option – the biopsy. It happened about two weeks later and he got the results about 10 days after that. Not that there’s ever a good time to receive this kind of news, but Jack was in the middle of what was supposed to be a period of particular fun and excitement. He had six weeks left to go on a recruitment consultancy job in Melbourne, with numerous drinks and parties planned before he ended his three year stint in Australia. Then he was due to return to the UK for his sister’s wedding, before six months travelling alone across South America.
How do you respond to this anvil from the sky – this sudden drastic shortening of your time on Earth?At first, Jack carried on. He told his parents, but not straight away. He persuaded them to refrain from jumping on a plane to Australia, as he didn’t want them crying in an AirBNB round the corner while he had so many social events planned. His mother Linda is a nurse, but bedside manner is likely less composed when your own son is involved. ‘Work was very flexible. They said just to come in when I wanted to come in, but I think I needed to work. I wasn’t going to sit at home,’ he says. ‘I had great friendship support and I kept myself busy. I was very unhealthy at that time of my life and had been for many years – drinking, smoking, drugs. There were all these different occasions planned to celebrate the end of my time there and I leaned heavily into those.’
He went to his sister’s wedding, then flew to Madrid with some friends to watch his beloved Liverpool FC beat Tottenham to win the Champions League final. He was told he could go ahead and travel South America – he went through Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Chile and Argentina – as long as he returned to the UK six months later, at Christmas 2019, for another MRI scan. But he also knew that keep-calm-and-carry-on was not a viable long-term option. He asked his neurosurgeon what he could do to help his chances of a longer prognosis. ‘She took off her doctor’s hat, put on a human hat and just saw a man who needed advice.’ She suggested that he make a major holistic change to his lifestyle: stop smoking and drugs, limit drinking, shift to a plant-based organic diet and start meditating. ‘That was the start of a huge transformational journey,’ he says.
After the Christmas scan he continued travelling, this time to India. The trip was cut short due to the pandemic, but he spent enough time there for the country to have an immense impact on his mindset. He spent time in ashrams – Hindu retreats – and learned to practice meditation and breathwork. He had become completely vegan. ‘I experienced a huge shift in values. A shift in the relationship I had with myself. It was incredible,’ he says. ‘India was the place that helped me to understand what it means to be human. What it means to really live.’
When we meet, Jack still hasn’t had any radiotherapy, chemotherapy or other medical procedures to help with his diagnosis. He’s thrown himself into natural treatments including Ayurveda, an ancient Indian mix of diet, herbal medicine, cleansing routines, meditation and yoga to correct ‘imbalances’ in the body’s energy systems. He has become a big fan of Joe Dispenza, a meditation guru and former chiropractor from New Jersey who claims to have healed himself from severe spinal injuries using the power of thought. Dispenza’s website looks somewhat sciencey, and includes research papers produced in collaboration with the University of California San Diego. It also promotes ‘Coherence Healing™’, including a series of 12 ‘healing sessions’ for children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. A wider web search shows a great deal of scepticism for his claims. The American news site The Daily Beast ran a highly critical investigation into his work in 2023, calling him: ‘a new-age guru who uses the language of science to make his mysticism seem slightly more mainstream.’ Dispenza’s website does feature a legal disclaimer stating: ‘Coherence Healing is not a substitute for medical treatment or advice.’ Meanwhile, the US Department of Health’s official stance is that: ‘Some complementary health approaches, such as acupuncture, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and yoga, may help manage cancer symptoms and side effects of treatment,’ but ‘No complementary health approach has been shown to prevent or cure cancer.’
Jack was booked in to have an operation to remove as much of the tumour as possible in January 2022 and February 2023, and pulled out both times – once, a month before, the other time, the day before. Given the location of his tumour, the main risk of surgery is damage to his optic nerve. He is worried about a condition called homonymous hemianopia, where you lose vision on one side in both of your eyes. From his perspective, having been on three Dispenza retreats – at one of which he met his girlfriend – he continues to have faith in alternative routes to better health. ‘Some people find it really hard to believe that I’m thinking that meditation can have an impact on this, and probably think I should just get the operation, but they haven’t had the same experiences I’ve had,’ he says. ‘I implore anybody to go on one of these retreats as an out and out sceptic and not come away from it thinking that other things are possible.’
Giving himself the best odds of surviving for the maximum time possible meant improving his physical fitness too. That’s where running enters the picture. Pre-seizure, the peak of his sporting achievement was a handful of 5k races and one unofficial half marathon against a mate in Melbourne in 2018. Later, when he was travelling, he found that a run was the quickest way for him to get his bearings in a new place. It also proved a great way to raise money to help others like him. In 2021 he did the London Marathon in 3:25:21 for the Brain & Spine Foundation. The same year, he raised more than £11,000 for the Brain Tumour Charity by doing a 4x4x48 challenge – running four miles every four hours for 48 hours. ‘Running has been a catalyst for positivity,’ he says. The India challenge is raising money for a third brain tumour charity, the Brainstrust, plus the Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s cancer charity YouWeCan.
Things escalated further: he did a 50-miler, then 118km in just under 16 hours to finish 23rd in the Ultra X Azores race in 2023. The same year he was 18th in the Wadi Rum Ultra, a 250km, five day race in the Jordan desert. He started planning something really big. A May 2024 solo run from Cape Town to Nature’s Valley on the southern coast of South Africa, covering 650km in 14 days, proved to him that a world first run across India was possible.
He had moved to Cape Town after lockdown, where he is currently on sabbatical from a remote role with a UK-based Corporate Social Responsibility company. While there, he worked with a running coach and saw a different coach for strength and conditioning sessions three times a week. He credits these sessions with the absence of any serious injuries during the India run.
After a scan in January 2025 which he describes as ‘not great’, he also changed his diet again, from vegan to ketogenic. That involves taking on 70% fats, 20% protein and very little carbohydrate. He typically eats mackerel, eggs, avocado, nut butters, red meat and greens. This means that the entirety of his six months of training for India, running up to 100 miles a week, was done on no carbs. His intention was for the challenge to be carb-free as well, but as we established, there is no Plan A in India.
He had put together a crew that did its best to shield him from inevitable practical problems. There was Fred Reid, head of logistics and also the author of a frequently hilarious daily blog documenting the journey. They became close after hiking the UK’s Three Peaks Challenge in 24 hours together in 2021. Daniel ‘Robbo’ Robinson was the head chef. He’s a woodworker from Glasgow who first met Jack 10 years ago at 2am in a Melbourne branch of McDonald’s. The third person to come along for the whole journey was Jordan Fairclough, who left his job as first team physical performance coach with Liverpool FC to help Jack’s legs to keep moving. Three content people with cameras and drones joined at different times to produce daily clips for Instagram and a couple of longer films for YouTube, and a handful of local drivers negotiated National Highway 44, the epic road that bisects India clean down the middle.
The team’s biggest headaches were trailer-based. Two hired trailers were supposed to be their mobile sites for cooking, washing and resting throughout, but the run began on 1 September – monsoon season. Ladakh, the northern territory where Jack started, experienced its worst rains for 56 years. A washed away road meant that the trailers were unable to get to the start point. In the end the group were without them for the first 12 days of the run, having to sleep in the homes of locals, use taxis and eat where they could find food – which was far from reliable in the Himalayas. ‘This was definitely the hardest part physically for me,’ Jack says. ‘The trailers would have been a bed at the side of the road, home-cooked meals, a shower and a toilet. It was all back to basics and that proved really tough, especially nutrition-wise. I was getting rice, dahl and chapatis where possible but was probably underconsuming calories by 1,500-2,000 a day.’ The keto diet had to be abandoned during this period, and the sudden change caused stomach issues.
Jack reveals another, more serious problem with the trailers which he had kept quiet about while trying to make inspiring, adventure-packed Instagram content: the owner of the hire company tried on three different occasions to extort more money from them, ordering his drivers to stop moving unless he was paid extra. ‘It was blackmail, and he tried it time and time again,’ Jack says. The first time, the team reluctantly paid up. The second time, they managed to negotiate with the help of a local mediator and got him to back down. On a third occasion, with eight days of the run to go, they decided to send the trailers back. ‘We just had to ditch them and rawdog it for the final week.’
Even when talking about this experience, he sounds unflustered, again opting to look on the bright side. ‘It’s important to know that this was one of very very few negative experiences we had with the Indian community. Generally, my faith in humanity is still really high.’ That faith was bolstered further when one of the drivers, Manju, after returning his trailer, quit his job and came back to carry on driving Jack and team all the way to the south coast. They crossed the finish line together to cheers of ‘Go on Jacky boy!’ and clouds of white heart confetti thrown by friends and family at the point where the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea meet.
Other snapshots: an ascent of the Khardung La Pass, which claims to be the highest motorable road in the world at 5,359m; wild horses galloping alongside the trail; a heartbreaking box of abandoned puppies; a personal letter from Arne Slot, the Liverpool manager, saying: ‘I want you to know how valued you are and how inspirational your story is’; putting cut-up pieces of socks in between his toes to ease the pain of corns; dodging mopeds in the apocalyptic traffic of Bangalore; more nut butter and rice cakes than it seems humanly possible to consume – all to a Project India theme tune of Ananda Shankar’s funky sitar-stuffed version of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. A full length documentary is in the works but a trawl through Jack’s daily Instagram clips offers much of the atmosphere, if not the odours.
Promoting his run and his health situation on social media didn’t come naturally to Jack. He only joined Instagram in 2024 when he began planning the India project, and is now approaching 50,000 followers. Now that he doesn’t have a cameraman with him to film and edit the clips, he’s struggling to keep it up. While he admits that it’s tempting to tie your self worth to a big following, ‘The success of the project was absolutely not defined by social media. At the end of the day it was about going on a big spiritual adventure, a rite of passage with a wonderful group of people, and hopefully telling a story that has an impact. My success metrics were internal.’
Having finished what is highly likely to be the biggest sporting challenge he will ever undertake, is he surprised at the kind of person he is now? ‘It’s night and day when I look back,’ he says. ‘I never would have been able to contemplate running almost 4,000 kilometres. I’ve learned a huge amount in the past 12 to 18 months especially, and inherently, I still believe I’m going to be okay. I still believe I’m going to live to an old age.’
Nevertheless, even with this resilient belief in the power of his body and mind to create an environment where cancer does not thrive, he is pragmatic. Another scan is in the diary and if the news is not good, he says, ‘Realistically, I’ll probably need surgery. I’ve delayed it to go on a huge transformational journey and learn so much about what’s possible. I might need more time to figure that out, which means the helping hand of an operation.’
My own brain short circuits slightly while talking to Jack. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for him or wildly envious. I think it’s both. In his first week of running he went past a mountain road sign that read: ‘Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you do not mean to take.’ His own life has performed a screeching handbrake turn onto what is highly likely to be a much shorter journey, but he’s throwing everything at giving 10 years the value of 30. On Friday mornings Jack leads a breathwork group on the rocks of Cape Town’s Camps Bay, then swims in the tidal pool. Are the rest of us really getting the maximum out of what feels, after speaking with him, like a florid abundance of careless days? Are we living Plan A, B or C? ‘I’ve been working on having a relationship with myself where I can thrive with it,’ he says. ‘You could call it a gift, to be able to have a wonderful life alongside that fear.’
I hope that this three month adventure across the country that taught him so much about how to spend his time is not his peak. I hope he has something even bigger and crazier in him before, whether in years or decades, his world becomes more medicalised than it has been and poor health shrinks it inescapably. ‘I’m super at peace with what might happen,’ he says at this point. ‘I’ve had nearly seven years of preparing mind, body and spirit for it. I want other people who have a dream, or a goal, that they might not have had the confidence to go for before, to be inspired to take a chance. To take a leap of faith.’
