So last year I attempted to run and draw the world's largest GPS
drawing of a cock and balls, a 72 mile manhood masterpiece.
I not only did it to raise £1000 for the mental charity Movember,
but quite frankly, I'd let myself go.
I was all out of shape and I wanted to reclaim my edge and
get myself back into shape. So welcome to the Rockmore
podcast and in this episode I'm going to share exactly how I
took on the hardest challenge of my life.
The training routine that I undertook to take on this
challenge. Whether I lost the weight and
got myself back into shape. Whether I hit my fundraising
target it and whether I actually managed to achieve and set a
world record for the largest GPS drawing of a deck.
So let's dive into it. My first big problem was I was
completely out of shape. After having two young kids in
the last four years, I pretty much let myself go.
I'd put on weight. I wasn't sticking to my
training. I was really unfair.
I was probably in the worst condition that I'd been in in
the last 10 years. I was tipping over 100
kilograms. I needed to lose about a stone
and a half to get back to any sort of normality.
But being out of shape had an effect on how I felt about
myself. I was lacking confidence.
I didn't sort of feel myself and it was very important that I got
myself back into shape and one of the major things I was
lacking is motivation and I knew that I needed a challenge.
Every time I've got myself into situations like that, challenges
are what pulled me out. It's having a focus, it's having
something exciting and massive to sort of attack and achieve.
Getting fit, getting stronger isn't enough of a motivation.
I had to achieve something. We are creatures of aim.
At the end of the day. A whole dopamine system within
us is set up for achievement and the pursuit of goals and goals
and goal setting and targets have already always been a
massive influence on me in turning things around.
So I knew I needed a target and one that excited me.
I also knew I wanted to do it for charity.
I wanted to tie in doing it for a good cause, something
important to me to give me that extra level of motivation.
Doing a challenge that is bigger than just myself.
Doing it for other people as well.
And men's health, and more specifically men's mental health
has always been an important topic for me and that's why I
chose the charity Movember. Now obviously if I want to
ignite those motivational fires and also raise £1000 for
Movember, I needed a challenge that was big attention grabbing
and exciting. Now I knew I wasn't the fittest.
I was never going to be the fittest or the strongest or the
most mental resilient. I'm not an elite athlete so I
can't compete with these challenges on world's stages
like like Ross Edgeley or Ross Cook.
So I use some blue ocean strategy thinking in order to
force sort of find my niche. And this is where you sort of
look at your strengths and where you can stand out.
And I thought, well, why don't I do GPS art and why don't I do a
world record for GPS art? I thought, well, what could I
do? And tying in with the Men's
Health charity in Movember, I thought what do men find
hilarious? Massive cock and balls.
So I decided there and then I wanted to do the world's biggest
GPS drawing of a cock and balls, which led me on to applying to
Guinness for my world record attempt.
I wanted it to be recognized. So I filled out their
application form, filled in all the bits, said what I wanted to
achieve, massive cock and balls. And my application came back
denied. They didn't want to do it.
I would sort of stumbled and fell at the first hurdle.
They weren't going to recognise it.
They just weren't interested. God knows why.
Who wouldn't love that? But then I got thinking and I
was like, I don't need Guinness. Guinness are just a company.
They don't own world records. They're just a company, just
like any other business out there, built to make money.
When you're a brand or a business and you're looking to
do a world record, save for exposure and promotion of that
business, they can charge up to £10,000 for the privilege of
doing that world record. You don't even have to get it
that, it's just for the privilege.
So I was like, screw them, they're just a company like
anyone else. As I said, they don't own world
records. So I decided to do it off my own
back. So I did my due diligence and I
scoured high and low on the Internet trying to find out what
was the biggest GPS drawing of a cock and ball on foot in a
single continuous effort. My web search history was very
interesting that week and I couldn't find anything over just
a few miles, 5-6 miles, something like that.
So I was confident that the record didn't exist.
I could actually go out there and set this and as long as I
got the publicity and the exposure, I would then cement my
place as the person who with the world's largest GPS tick.
And by the way, this episode is probably going to be laden with
Dick puns, so we'll turn it into a bit of a drinking game.
If you hear a Dick pun, you just got to do 2 fingers of your pint
or bleach. And the next hurdle I had to
overcome was had to find my cock shaped root.
Now first I had to know how big it was going to be.
Now five years previous I'd done a 50 mile ultra marathon
challenge. That was the biggest distance
I'd ever done and that almost broke me.
The last five miles I'd have to basically drag myself across
that finish line. Now being in the worst shape of
fitness I've ever been in my life, I knew I probably wanted
around that distance or maybe slightly less.
So I went out searching on the maps to try and find this cock
shaped route. It's very easy to find cock
shaped routes when you're looking on the micro, when
you're looking at little streets.
Streets lend itself quite well to shafts, balls, helmets,
whatever it is. But when you're zooming out,
when you're looking for a 50 mile route, when you're looking
on the macro, it gets harder. 2 fingers.
And the most difficult part was finding 2 parallel lines that
run long enough parallel to each other to create that penis
shaft. And thankfully I managed to find
one, but it was in the Brecon Beacon Mountains, full of
elevation. And I followed these paths up
and I was like, brilliant, that's my shaft.
I was like, can I take a helmet on the top here?
I was like, yeah, got a little bell end.
Can I take 2 balls on at the bottom?
I was like, yeah, there's 2 balls.
I was like, fantastic. I found my route, we're back on.
But then I saw the distance. It was 72 miles, which was 50%
increase on my previous challenge.
And don't forget, I'm a lot less fit now.
And also there was 10,000 feet of elevation gain.
It's almost the same distance, a base camp to the peak of
Everest. But I thought that's it, that's
got to be it. I've got to do it.
If it's not going to push me out my side of my comfort zone, if
it's not going to push my limits, if it's not going to be
hard, then it's not going to be a challenge.
So I thought, we're just going to have to do this.
So I set my announcement, I put my social posts out, I put my
stake in the ground and it was on.
So then I started my training and the first week of training I
was dog shit. I couldn't believe how unfit I
was. I only tried a few little runs
on that first week and I was dying after every run,
struggling on every run, and it was starting to dawn on me how
hard this was going to be. But I kept at it.
I kept training, I kept putting the time in, and after four
weeks, I still felt like death. I was honestly starting to
think, what the hell have I signed myself up for?
I couldn't do any more than like 6 miles on my long runs.
But after six weeks, that was the turning point.
That's when things started to click.
I started to feel stronger. I started to feel fitter.
The endurance runs started to increase with the distance
things were starting to work. Last lesson here is things take
time. You've got to allow yourself
that time to get fit again and trust the process Essentially.
Things did start to click. My next problem though, was when
we got to the halfway stage. The latter stage of this
training plan, the endurance runs on the weekends started to
increase by an hour or two every single week.
Getting up to the point where I was doing 10 hour training runs.
That means getting up in the morning, putting your shoes on,
hitting the tarmac, and then coming back at bedtime, having a
shower and jumping into bed. Finding that time was difficult,
but luckily I had a very understanding wife that would
allow me to go out on these weekends, not be at home with
the wife, not be at home with the kids, which was quite lovely
to have the break to be honest. But she's very understanding and
she let me go out and do it. And that's one of the hardest
parts of doing these challenges or doing training to get fit is
finding the bloody time. We've all got life
responsibilities, whether it's the wife, the job, the kids, the
dog, the goldfish. Finding time to get stuff in it
can be difficult, but what I utilized was just times where I
went in demand. And what I mean by that is when
people aren't relying on you. So it would be the mornings
before anyone got up. It would be my lunch break.
When I had my designated time, it would be my commute home.
Because when you're home, when you're in work, when the kids
are around, you're going to have those.
Can you help me with this? Can you help me with that?
You're going to be in demand sometimes.
Can scupper your training plans. So I just utilized that time
where I wasn't in demand. And by the end of the form of
training plan, I started to feel fitter, stronger, happier, and I
managed to shift the weight that I'd aimed to do, 10 kilograms in
all. I'd managed to get that part
sorted. It was whether I could actually
do the record now and raise the money.
And if you want to see the exact training plan I did to do this
challenge, then there's a link in the description below.
But as the challenge approached, this is where things started to
go wrong. Most of the people that said
that they were going to come out and support me started to cancel
last minute. And I don't blame them, I
understand, you know, the people have got lives, people have got
things going on. And at the end of the day, who
wants to spend their Saturday going out running in the pitch
darkness in the Brecon Beacon? But I relied on this port.
I needed this support to get me through.
You can't tackle challenges like this on your own.
You need a supportive team around you.
And also all the promotion I was doing for the challenge just
wasn't hitting. It wasn't sticking.
My posts were getting barely any views and by the time I started
the challenge I only had about £200 raised for Movember, way
off my 1000 LB target. However, I still have my core of
supporters. I have my friend Robin, Dave,
Harry, my brother Fred and my mum and dad who said they would
support me on the run to get it done and I thought that was
enough. That bare bones crew is going to
be enough and I'm going to be able to do it and get it done.
It just meant that I had someone running with me at all times to
lend that support and I had people at checkpoints to give me
the nutrition and the hydration to get me through.
This was going to be 72 hours. It's going to practically be a
24 hour challenge after all and the hardest thing I've ever
bloody done. So at 5:00 PM from Abergaven, I
started the challenge. The sun was just going down.
It was started in pitch black and for the 1st 22 miles of that
challenge to the first checkpoint, it was all uphill.
I had not anticipated that at all and it wrecked me.
I was a broken beaten man by the time I got to my first
checkpoint and I was honestly wondering what the hell have I
got myself signed up for here. And when I left that checkpoint
I honestly did not know whoever I'm going to be able to
continue. I honestly didn't know if I'd be
able to get it done. I had 9 hours of running more to
go only until the next checkpoint.
I still have 50 miles to actually get to the end and
achieve the target, but quitting wasn't an option.
Although I really bloody wanted to in that moment, it just
wasn't an option. I'd made too much noise about
the challenge and sometimes that is the best thing you can do,
tell other people that you're going to do it and that puts a
pressure on you to actually get out and get it done.
So I just put 1 foot in front of the other and just kept marching
on. Now, the Brecon Beacons may
sound like a lovely place to go and do this challenge, but for
the 1st 12 hours it was in pitch darkness.
This is November the 1st after all.
This is like the middle of autumn.
There's barely any sunlight. For the 1st 12 hours pitch
darkness. The landscape was barren,
desolate, depressing. Kept getting lost.
I couldn't see more than a meter in front of me, even with my
little head torch because of the fog.
Kept going off route. And obviously with a challenge
like this, staying on route is so integral to what you're
trying to achieve. But I just have to take it slow,
take each couple of meters at a time, keep checking my watch,
keep checking the GPS tracker, making sure we're on route.
At one point we even lost my brother as he headed back to the
checkpoint. He rang me saying I can't see
where I am. At that point.
I honestly thought that the challenge might actually end
there, because we can't leave someone out on the mountains,
not knowing where they are in this bloody horrible landscape
in the pitch black and fog. But thankfully he managed to get
his GPS working on his phone and plot his own route to take him
back. But that is one of the last
things you need in a moment like that, when you're barely hanging
on yourself and then you've got to go and help someone else.
Which of course, of course, I would have done if needed, even
if it was my brother. And about halfway through the
challenge, having gone through the night, having not slept
after going for about 12-15 hours, started to get little
hallucinations that we're not sort of, we're not talking mad
colours or beasts coming out from everywhere.
You start to see things in the bushes and the trees, shapes
people, but they're, they're actually not there.
At one point I thought a pair of headlights were coming from
behind us and we were going to get run over by a car.
I said to Robin. I was like, get out of the way,
there's a car, come in, there's nothing there.
Your mind just starts to play tricks on you and you've just
got to sort of accept that, let it happen, but know that it's
not real and they're only fleeting.
But thankfully it didn't get any worse.
Now, what also helped me get through this monstrous task was
energy gels, but not in the nutritional way that you might
think. Because when you think of a 72
mile run, fifty mile run, 30 mile run is big enough to
intimidate you. It's big enough to crush you.
But what I did is I have an energy gel every 45 minutes.
And this broke up the monster down into achievable chunks.
Could I run the next 50 miles? Probably not.
Could I run 45 minutes? Yes, O each gel became a little
checkpoint inside my head, a little sweet treat to keep me
going at all times and that helped see me out through the
long depressing moments. And as we got to the point with
five miles just to go, that is when my knee locked out and I
couldn't bend my bloody knee. It brought me down to a walking
pace, but we were so close to the end.
That was not going to stop me. I was going to drag my ass all
the way to the end of that point.
And eventually, once we returned back to Abergavenny, I crossed
that finish line and set the record for the world's largest
GPS drawing of a cock and balls. And almost instantly when I
crossed that finish line, the press started.
Get in touch. They picked up on the challenge.
It was featured in the BBC, the Metro, the Guardian, the Daily
Mail, the New York Post. It went worldwide.
I honestly did not expect it to go that far.
My social posts actually started to click and stick and go viral.
I was getting over 1,000,000 views on some of the posts and
with this extra exposure the donation started to come in as
well. I blew my 1000 LB target out of
the water and we ended up raising over £10,000.
Honestly could not believe it. I was actually the second
biggest individual fundraiser for Movember that year and even
even though it was one of the hardest challenges I'd ever
taken on in my life, it was the most meaningful and fulfilling,
especially as I got myself back into shape.
Absolutely slaughtered my 1000 LB target raising £10,000 for
November. And I hopefully prove to people
that when you're suffering the strain of life, when you're
lacking a purpose, direction, the challenges are the best way
to get yourself out of that hole.
Give yourself a foundation for living, something to aim for,
but not only to improve your health and your fitness, but
also sort of your mental well-being as well.
Now, obviously, I couldn't have done this challenge without a
proper running plan. To go from zero fitness to
taking on world records 72 mile ultra runs, you need a proper
plan. And if you want to see the exact
running plan that I used to get myself back into shape, you can
just download it directly with the link in the description
below. Thanks for watching the Rockman
Podcast and we'll catch up again soon.
The.