Jonny Davies: ‘You can do an awful lot on very little sleep’
‘Jonny is probably the most stubborn bastard you’ll ever meet.’ Not the voice of a sworn enemy, there, but Jonny Davies’ coach, Tommy Trees. ‘Once he puts his mind to something, he’s gonna get it done.’
Tommy was one of a small team of men in a motorhome that, in September 2024, supported 32-year-old Jonny in his bid to become the first person to run between all the capital cities of the UK and Ireland. That’s 960km, starting in central Edinburgh, running to the ferry to Belfast, down to Dublin, a second ferry back to Wales, then on to Cardiff and London, finishing on the Embankment by Charing Cross. There was no FKT (fastest known time) to break, but nevertheless, he set the bar intimidatingly high for anyone foolish enough to follow him by completing the route in 11 days, 12 hours and 25 minutes.
A mighty feat – one that even so, left him feeling somewhat disappointed because he had overshot his self-imposed deadline by half a day. Like the man said: stubborn. ‘I wanted it to be difficult. I wanted it to be uncomfortable,’ he says. ‘If I had taken longer and covered shorter distances every day, it would have been more of an “adventure”. This was definitely a “challenge”.’
Doing it this way, there was no room for compromises. ‘Every day for the six months prior, the first thought in my mind when I woke up, and the last thought at night before bed, was: “You’ve got 960k to run.” Everything in my life was structured around my training, my recovery, my nutrition.’
It was the pinnacle of a career spent doing painful things. A former rugby player for Wimbledon RFC, a sport in which he says ‘You’re always nursing some kind of injury,’ he’s now a full-time fitness content creator with an audience of 190k on Instagram and 217k on TikTok. He gained plenty of attention in September 2023 when he followed the 11 tube lines of London to run between all 272 underground stations. That one was 572km. Then, in spring 2024, he was part of a 10-strong team taking part in The Speed Project, the 550km relay between Santa Monica and Las Vegas. When we speak, three weeks after his Run the Capitals challenge, and he mentions that he has the New York City Marathon coming up, it sounds like a pop to the shops.
What did he learn from his previous undertakings that he could bring to Edinburgh? ‘Mainly that you can do an awful lot on very little sleep,’ he says. ‘As long as you keep putting fuel in the tank, even when things are really hurting, you can keep going.’
When he couldn’t keep solid food down, he switched to drinking dextrose powder mixes. He refused to go inside the motorhome until the planned distance was completed each day, preferring to sit on a chair by the road or lie on the ground with his aching legs raised against its chassis.
What he wasn’t prepared for was an injury getting a grip on him very early on. Three quarters of the way through day two, he developed tenosynovitis, an inflammation of the membrane around his tendons. He became unable to flex his feet, and the only way he could carry on was with the feet so thoroughly taped up that they were effectively locked in one place.
‘Everything became very serious at that point,’ he explains. ‘There would be moments when the pain would get so bad that I would fall over and lie on the ground thinking, “Surely this is it.”’
For Jonny, the red line during any challenge would come if his physio, Adrian D’Costa, told him he was going to do lasting damage to his body. During these times, Adrian simply raised Jonny’s legs, iced and re-taped, and told him he could go a bit further. ‘Sometimes it got so bleak that all I could do was laugh,’ says Jonny. ‘All we could think was, “Let’s just go for another hour and see how it feels.” “Let’s get to that bend in the road and reassess from there.”’
Both the London Underground and Run the Capitals challenges have raised money for CALM, the mental health charity. At the time of writing, the total gathered from the latest run was approaching £17k. The brightest moments of Jonny’s journey came when he arrived in the cities and was joined by bigger groups of fellow runners, some of whom talked to him about how they had benefitted from CALM’s support.
‘Suicide is the biggest killer of young people in the UK today, and it’s also the most preventable cause of death,’ he says. ‘To meet people who told me they had been in a very dark place in the past, and are here today thanks to CALM, was so special.’
For Jonny, although he’s already planning marathons (and possibly the Marathon des Sables), another undertaking as big as this one can wait ‘another couple of years’, he thinks. But he doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of running epic distances: ‘When you’re in those ultra spaces, you have so much more time to appreciate what you’re doing. I will always be amazed that the body can do these things.’
Instagram: @jonnyrdavies
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