Running the Badwater Elite 267 VR for Bayo – Femi Oguntokun Macaulay

It started innocently as most things do that subsequently turn out to have a monumental impact. I was scrolling through Facebook in January of this year and came across a post about Badwater. The iconic ultramarathon race called Badwater 135, an annual 135 miles race in the USA that runs through Death Valley in California, had been canceled because of the global pandemic, and in its place Chris Kostman, the race director, had come up with an alternative.

The alternative was a ‘virtual race’ covering 267 miles (430km) where runners enter and run wherever they are in the world. There were 2 versions of the race, the one in January required that the 267 miles be completed in the 31 days between January 1st to the 31st, and the other version, titled ‘Elite’, required covering the same distance in only 16 days from April 3rd to 18th.

Over the coming days, I couldn’t shake the thought that it would be an incredible experience to have a go at doing this Badwater virtual race, but surely this was way beyond my capabilities. It was too late to sign up for January so that was out, on the other hand April race was still 3 months away. I did the calculation, 267 miles would mean running an average of 16.7 miles a day for 16 straight days. Put another way, it is the equivalent of running 10 marathons in about 2 weeks.

Although I have been a distance runner for 25 years, and completed approximately 50 marathons and ultramarathons, I had never run more than 60 miles in a week and even that was infrequent, usually only at the peak of marathon or ultramarathon training. My normal weekly mileage was 30-40 miles. To compound and complicate matters, I had a chronic plantar fasciitis injury to my left foot, a problem I’d battled for 18 months and that wasn’t going away any time soon.

“Plus, I have a wife, two teenage children, a job (I work for myself), two dogs and a mortgage. Not forgetting I’m no spring chicken at 59 years old. The more I pushed the thought away the more it kept coming back. It dawned on me that that the only way I could possibly do this was if it had a real purpose and meaning beyond myself and my own gratification.”

Given the high number of people suffering mental health issues, which has been made 100 times worse by the devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, what better cause than to try to raise awareness of mental illness and raise money for a mental health-related charity?

“On a personal level, I witnessed first hand the pain and suffering of a loved one who battled depression and psychosis. My brother, Bayo, the youngest of my siblings (I am the eldest) was first diagnosed as mentally ill in his teens. He had suffered the sudden and traumatic death of our mum when he was only 15. After that, Bayo, who was an outstanding A+ student, popular with his peers, head of choir at boarding school, on the debating team, and who played for his school’s rugby, cricket, football and athletic teams, started to struggle. His grades went down, although remarkably he still managed to pass 9 GCSEs and 3 A levels and gain entrance to university.”