‘Life is brutal. Running helps': the 17-year-old who faced despair – and ran the length of Britain

The Guardian

25-06-2025

Day three of Marcus Skeet's epic run from Land's End to John o'Groats was a low point. It had been a sunny April morning when he set off. Marcus was in shorts and a T-shirt – bright yellow so he could be easily seen running beside the A30. But then, 18 miles (29km) in and just a few miles before the end of the day's leg, it started to rain. 'Absolutely bucketing down, then hailing really heavily, hailstones right into my face.'
Marcus, who had been sweating, got cold very quickly. He tried to call his friend Harry, who had gone ahead in the support car to check in to that night's Airbnb, to get him to come back with a coat, but the phone had got wet and wasn't working. He managed to reach a layby where there was a breakdown van. He asked the driver if he would make a call for him (Marcus didn't know Harry's number from memory, but he knew his mum's, and she could ring Harry). 'And he looks at me and goes: 'Mate, I'm working, bore off.''
The breakdown man drove away. As did the car he had been attending to – they didn't even open their window when Marcus knocked on it. Maybe they were frightened, he suggests: 'It probably looked really weird because I was crying at this point.
'I sat down, I was really cold, I started getting the shivers, and I was like: I can't do this. I was screaming, asking for my mum, my grandma, all the family. There were all these cars going by but no one stopped.' Eventually, a lorry driver pulled up, got Marcus into the cab to warm up, dry off, dry the phone and call Harry to come and pick him up. The following day, he and Harry returned and Marcus started from the layby. There were still 56 days to go, and about 790 miles.
It was a low point of the challenge, but there had been lower points in Marcus's life.
From the age of about 11 to his mid-teens, Marcus was hit with a salvo of diagnoses, physical and mental: type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. The OCD caused him to have intrusive thoughts: 'At some points it took me an hour to get out of the house, because I had to put my foot in the right place or think the right thing. A 10-minute trip to the shops would end up taking a couple of hours because if I didn't do the right thing at the right time, tap a wall however many times or whatever, I was going to die. I was really badly suffering.'
On top of that (and certainly a contributing factor, he says), Marcus's dad, Philip, was diagnosed with dementia. His mum, Jayne, had to add caring duties to her full-time job, and Marcus added the role of young carer to everything else he was dealing with.
How did all of the above affect school for Marcus? 'You either really enjoy school, or you go through a horrible time, and I experienced a bit of both. I enjoyed it in certain parts …' he begins, before interrupting himself seamlessly, with perfect comic timing. 'That's a lie, no I didn't.'
'I was going to say, I must have missed that day,' Jayne chips in, reminding him that his attendance was roughly 3% one year, and 0% the next.
We are in the living room of the family home in Norton-on-Derwent, North Yorkshire. It doubles as Jayne's office; she has cut down to 16 hours' work a week, from home, in order to look after Philip. He is here, too, sitting in an armchair in the corner, less present mentally now that the dementia is quite advanced. Also present, in separate cages, are two rabbits, Oreo and Booper – brothers apparently, although they look very different and, says Marcus: 'They really don't like each other.' Hence the separate cages, and the evil eyes.
Marcus is dead funny. It is evident on his YouTube channel where he posts football videos as Thehullboy about his beloved Tigers, Hull City FC. And from some of his social media posts from the Land's End to John o'Groats challenge: taking on a herd of deer in a running race (Bambis 1, Marcus 0), then cattle (same result, Marcus admits he's not the quickest). And he was funny when he told Naga Munchetty and 6 million BBC Breakfast viewers that he had popped into Lidl for a sneaky poo.
He also speaks with a thoughtfulness and an eloquence that belie his age. It is hard to believe he only turned 17 in February. He talks about his mental health with an honesty and openness that has to be helpful, to himself and to others. In December 2023, aged 15, Marcus attempted suicide, after which he 'had an overwhelming feeling of guilt, and regret, that to me shows that deep down I still did want to be here'.
He has a message about that. 'Life is brutal, sometimes you feel like you're in a place you can't get out of. But I promise you, every road may have speed bumps but you'll get over them. Mental health is such a big thing, everyone is different but I find running helps mine.'
Marcus never liked running before. Hated it in fact. 'I always had a lot of anxiety when it came to running in front of people. I was always quite on the tubby side of things. I felt they would laugh at me. Any time at school, whether running or in PE, I used to fake injury or illness.'
But after the suicide attempt, he started – a walk first, then a longer walk. 'And I realised how beautiful nature was, and I thought to myself: 'You know what, I can't run but I want to give this a go. I'm going to run one mile a day.''
So that's what he did, a mile a day. He posted about it on social media. Marcus, who had weighed 145kg (22st 11lb), lost three or four kilos that first month. 'I kept going up in distance,' he says. 'You can become obsessed with the process but that's what makes it proper.'
Marcus hooked up with Russ Cook, nicknamed 'the Hardest Geezer', who has run the entire length of Africa. Cook had seen what Marcus was doing and sent him a message of encouragement. They made contact and Cook helped Marcus with his training, to build up the distance. They ran a marathon together, round and round Hyde Park in London. Marcus raised some money for the mental health charity Mind, which he had contacted before. 'When I was at my lowest, I rang them. They were really helpful.'
Mind was also helpful to Philip, who was diagnosed with depression before being diagnosed with dementia. 'I feel I've always wanted to give back what they've done,' Marcus says.
The marathon, and the ultramarathon that followed, were always going to be stepping stones to the big one Marcus had set his sights on. On 1 April this year, he set off from Land's End. 'I remember that first hour of the run, just jogging away, and I was like: 'Yeah, this is really it, I am running the entire length of the country.' It was magical.'
It wasn't wall-to-wall magic the length of Britain. There was the hailstone battering and layby meltdown just a couple of days later, but then it became routine. 'I didn't see it as a chore, but it was just very repetitive. Me and Harry had our ups and downs, we both lost our minds a bit.'
Harry, 'an absolute legend' whom Marcus met at a Liam Gallagher concert, quit his job to come and drive the support car, organise their accommodation, cook and get Marcus up and running in the morning (not always easy). Some weekends, Jayne would drive Philip in the family car to wherever they had got to, to give Harry a break. The support car Marcus and Harry were using was donated by the company Jayne works for, but then they crashed it. That was another low point. After that, Jayne's brother lent them an old truck he had on his farm. Everything else – accommodation, food, fuel – went on Jayne's credit card. She now has a £15,000 bill to pay off.
Then there was the physical exhaustion. Marcus remembers one 27-mile day: 'I was in the middle of the countryside somewhere, trying to find Harry, and I was like: if you can do this, run through this when your legs are going through the worst pain you've ever felt, you can do anything.' Then, looking at me, he adds: 'And I can get out of bed, come downstairs and do an interview with you.'
Was that difficult? 'I do get nervous sometimes,' he admits. 'Going on the BBC was nerve-racking.' But today was mainly hard because he had been up till dawn, with mates, in a field.
There were loads of good times on the challenge, too: the scenery, Wales, the Lakes, Scotland. Marcus ran mainly alongside A and B roads, headphones on, listening to Oasis, Catfish and the Bottlemen, Sam Fender, a lot of indie stuff, but then a whole day listening to Brazilian rap. Also true crime podcasts. 'The Moors Murders. I was running past Bolton, thinking: 'I'm near this!' That's a bit odd.'
Were the Lidl toilets a highlight? Would he recommend them? 'Do you know what? I would. I think Lidl toilets are brilliant. There were loads of Lidls, loads of Asdas, also Waitrose toilets, quite nice … When you need to go you need to go.'
As well as the few not-so-great people who didn't stop or drove off when he needed them, he met a lot of really great ones, who invited him in, fed him, donated. On the way into Warrington, he says: 'This guy just came bombing down the road, he had a massive beard and a hat, and he runs up to me, shakes my hand, is like [adopting I think a quite decent scouse accent]: 'Hello mate, how ya doing, I'm Rob.' Sorry, that's a horrible scouse accent,' he says. (He means his, not Rob's.) 'We were just talking, and he's the English Forrest Gump. It was the ultramarathon runner Rob Pope. You can search him up, he's quite famous. He ran across America five times.'
Marcus was joined for a day by Colson Smith, who was PC Craig Tinker in Coronation Street. Sir Mo Farah sent him a message on X: 'Keep going champ. Anything is possible.' An invitation to the pub in Lockerbie turned into one of the best evenings of Marcus's life. 'The people were so lovely.'
The first sign to John o'Groats was a highlight; that's when it sunk in that he was actually going to do it. He had a special playlist for the last few miles, including Lover, You Should've Come Over by Jeff Buckley, Walkin' After Midnight by Patsy Cline (his dad's favourite), and finally his own favourite, Live Forever by Oasis.
His mum and dad were there, of course, to cheer him over the line. Aged 17-and-a-quarter, and after 58 days, he had become, on 29 May, the youngest person to run the length of the UK – 874 miles. Plus £111,000 raised for Mind …
That was then. A couple of weeks later and it's £156,000 … £157,000 Jayne corrects, showing his GoFundMe page on her phone. It will probably be more by the time you read this. Sarah Hughes, chief executive officer of Mind, said it was also a record for a single fundraising activity for Mind. 'What Marcus has achieved is nothing short of extraordinary. We cannot thank him enough for pushing himself to the limit. We hope what Marcus has achieved inspires other young people to make a positive difference in other people's lives and encourages anyone struggling to be open about their mental health. Every pound he raised will make a real difference.'
On pounds he lost, Marcus now weighs around 109kg. It's been tough, since finishing, though: 'I've had a comedown, that was always gonna happen. But it's all about learning how to deal with that. It was such a buzz, the sense of freedom.' It is good to be back home, seeing mates, going to gigs; he bought himself an electric guitar and is trying to learn to play it. 'Keeping my head busy because, deep down, I do miss the challenge,' he says.
On the plus side, he doesn't have to run 20 miles a day. He took a couple of weeks off, to recover, now he's getting back into it, slowly. Five miles, six miles.
Any plans? 'I'm not going to do anything crazy for a while. I obviously want to do America, things like that.' Do America, what does that mean? 'Run across, left to right or right to left, 4,000 miles, why not?' And he laughs. Run, Marcus, run.
In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393. Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [e-mail] (in Ireland [e-mail]). In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. You can text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org