4.5 Hours From Home and Still Showing Up — Day 2007 of My Daily Running Streak

There are days when everything lines up. The weather is right, the route is familiar, the legs feel good, and the run almost takes care of itself. And then there are days like the last couple have been — where nothing about the situation is convenient, and showing up requires a different kind of effort entirely.

Day 2007. I am four and a half hours from home.

I have been away for a couple of days now, deep in the practical side of running a property business. Renovations. Furniture assembly. Getting units back into a usable state and ready for tenants. It is not glamorous work. It is the kind of work that leaves your hands tired and your schedule unpredictable. There is no comfortable routine when you are that far from home, operating across different environments, and trying to hold everything together at once.

But the run still happened.

That is what 2007 consecutive days has taught me more than anything else: the conditions are almost never perfect, and waiting for them to be is the same as giving up. The streak does not pause because life got complicated. The mission does not take a day off because I am tired or because I slept in a different bed or because I spent the previous hours shifting furniture rather than resting.

The street I ran along today struck me in a way I did not expect. Bright colours, real vibrancy — the kind of place that lifts your mood before you have even consciously registered why. It felt almost at odds with the kind of grind the last couple of days had been. And yet, that contrast was exactly what I needed. Sometimes the environment around you shifts something internal without you asking it to.

That is one of the quieter lessons this running journey has given me over the years. You are not always in control of the conditions. You rarely get to choose your surroundings when life gets demanding. But you can choose where you put your attention. And in that moment, running through a colourful street while carrying the weight of a couple of hard days, I found something worth holding onto.

The property side of my work is not separate from the mission. It funds it. The business model that allows me to pursue this goal — 40,075 kilometres on foot, a complete lap of the earth, raising £1 million for children's causes including Great Ormond Street Hospital and BBC Children in Need — that model requires real work. It requires problem-solving, travel, physical graft, and the willingness to get your hands dirty when that is what the situation calls for. There is no shortcut around that. And I have never wanted one.

Twenty thousand and seventy kilometres completed now. Just over twenty thousand remaining.

When I break it down like that, it is a number I can sit with. This is not something that resolves in a month or a year. It is a multi-year commitment, and Day 2007 is simply one more brick placed in that wall. What matters is that the brick was placed. What matters is that I did not look at the circumstances — the distance from home, the tiredness, the back-to-back days of physical work — and decide that today could be the exception.

Because there are no exceptions. That is the point of a streak. Not as a point of pride or a performance for other people to admire, but as a structural commitment to yourself and to something larger than yourself. The children this mission is designed to support do not get to take days off from whatever they are facing. That reality keeps me honest.

I wear Vibram FiveFingers for every run. The barefoot-style approach has been part of this from the beginning, and it continues to shape how I relate to the ground beneath me, to effort, to discomfort. There is no cushioning that removes the reality of the surface you are moving across. You feel the road. And on the harder days, when the legs are tired and the mind is elsewhere, that connection matters. It is grounding in the most literal sense.

I have been asked before how I manage to keep going when the business demands are high, when travel is involved, when there is no obvious space in the day for a run. The honest answer is that I stopped treating the run as something that needs to find its place in the day. It is the fixed point. Everything else builds around it. That shift in thinking — from the run being one more item on a list, to the run being the anchor — changed everything.

And yes, sometimes that means running four and a half hours from home, in unfamiliar streets, after a day of renovations and furniture and logistics. Sometimes it means running earlier than I would like or later than is ideal. Sometimes the conditions are far from perfect. But the run happens.

Two thousand and seven days. Twenty thousand and seventy kilometres. Twenty thousand and five remaining.

The mission continues. The streak continues. And if you are reading this and the last couple of days have been hard for you too — the kind of hard where you are far from your usual routine, where things feel heavier than they should — I would just say this: the doing of the thing is usually simpler than the resistance to it. Not easier. Simpler.

Get up. Get out. Do the work. Even when you are four and a half hours from home.

If this resonates with you, I would be grateful if you shared it. Every view, every share, every person who gets behind this mission is one step closer to the £1 million target — and one step closer to making a real difference for children who need it most.