What's harder than supporting Sunderland? Running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days – and winning

Seven marathons is a lot. Seven marathons in seven days is an undertaking. Seven marathons on seven continents in seven days is a physical, mental and logistical endeavour.

“It just seemed impossible,” says 40-year-old Paul Holborn. “I’ve never looked at something in my fitness career and thought ‘that can’t be done’, but that’s what I thought when I saw this”.

Sunderland-born Holborn, once a lightweight professional boxer in his twenties, is talking about his decision to sign up for the World Marathon Challenge 19 months ago. The race started in Antarctica, where he completed 26.2miles in just over three hours and 30 minutes.

From there, they went to Cape Town (Africa), Perth (Oceania), then Dubai (Asia), followed by Madrid (Europe), Fortaleza (South America) before finishing in Miami (North America). The challenge is to cover over 180miles in temperatures ranging from -10 degrees Celsius to +30 (14F to 86F), with 60 hours of air travel all making for limited and disrupted sleep — about as brutal a battering of the body and circadian rhythm as one person can give themselves.

Holborn’s marathons ranged from 3:15:35 to 3:34:15, averaging out to three hours and 22 minutes, the quickest of the 35 men competing. The field is limited to 60 men and women combined each year because they all fly together on a charter jet between races.

He became the first Briton to win the men’s edition of the challenge, first launched in 2015. Spanish ultramarathoner and national champion over 100km, Estefi Unzu (3:18:30), had the fastest overall time in this year’s competition, taking the women’s prize. But here Holborn was, fulfilling the stereotype about boxers liking long runs.

There is a contrast between the glory of winning to where he was, mentally, almost a year and a half prior.

“I always had a goal in my life and it was normally work-related: pay for the house, pay for the car, build this, build that,” he says. “I managed to get everything. I sold my business. All of a sudden, when I got it, I just kind of got unhappy”.

He says he was drinking more and was fatigued during the day. “If you’ve ever suffered from depression, it doesn’t matter where you are, who you are with, you just need a hobby. I couldn’t figure it out, (as) simple as it sounds, why I was tired all the time, unhappy”.

Holborn’s lightbulb moment came during a flight — ironic considering he would spend so many hours on a charter plane during the challenge. When he googled the hardest challenge in the world, the World Marathon Challenge stared back at him.

“I couldn’t get it out of my mind for three days,” he reflects. “Nothing has hit me like that in years, so I knew I was really interested, but the price was ridiculous ($50,000).

“I talked with my wife about it, she said, ‘You need this, I just need to see you happy, whatever it costs’. I knew if I signed up, there’s no way of pulling out”.

Holborn says he was “lucky with the timeframe” and having a big enough window — 19 months — to prepare. “Although I’d been in fitness before, I still had that mind where you can do anything. If that was six months away, I’d probably have signed up and failed,” he says.

The 40-year-old found a coach (family friend Sonrisa Garcia, who works with athletes at the University of New Mexico), a training plan, and started running. His first marathon came at the end of 2023, in his adopted hometown of San Antonio, Texas, where he and his wife relocated three years prior, having initially moved from England to Canada. Holborn finished 83 seconds outside the three-hour barrier. Some debut.

After a second marathon, he switched to running on the trails. “Trail racing, it’s stop-start, stop-start, turning, switchbacks, up and down,” Holborn explains. “With my muscle memory over the years as a boxer, like HIIT (high intensity interval training), trail racing just suited me better”. Wins and records on the trails followed.

His training schedule was not as gruelling as you might think, typically 35 to 40 miles per week. “Everyone doubts their training, especially when you’re looking at what other people are doing,” he recalls. “I didn’t run as many miles as everyone else.

”The last few weeks before the race, I stepped it up to 55 to 60 for about three weeks”. He cross-trained plenty on the bike and included bodyweight exercises (i.e., squats) too. “Putting all that together, I wouldn’t change it if I did it again — it suited me perfectly”.

Holborn’s main reflection is that he tapered too much. “What I found is: I’m better running up to the event. I probably took too many days off,” he says.

“It did work in the long run, but for that one I felt very tired and slow,” he adds, analysing the first marathon in Antarctica.

“I felt I was putting in seven minutes flat pace (per mile), but I was getting eight minutes. It was difficult, the ice and the snow. You were slipping a lot and there’s a lot of uphill and wind on that course. So to come second, I couldn’t believe it”.

He finished almost nine minutes behind American Alan Nawoj, a battle which would persevere all week, but it got the best from both of them. “I’ve become good friends with him,” says Holborn, “even though we wouldn’t talk for the whole three hours (of the race). We were running each other down. All week he made me run quicker than I wanted to, so a lot of this is down to him!”

The decisive marathon turned out to be race two, in Cape Town, when Holborn ran 3:15:35 and finished more than 15 minutes ahead of Nawoj — a time difference the American never recovered.

Holborn says that running under hot conditions (28C/82F) “suited me better because, living in Texas, all my runs are mostly in hot areas”. Nawoj started faster, but across a lapped course, Holborn found his rhythm.

I ask him if this was a particularly tactical gameplan, giving himself an unofficial pacemaker. The answer is much simpler: “I came up with one idea and have stuck with it: don’t get out of breath”.

He elaborates. “If you are running and you can’t sing a song or make a sentence without gasping for air, you’re running too quick. Fair enough in the last six or eight miles, but I try to not get out of breath. It worked.

“Even from a young age in boxing, and every sport I’ve done, I’ve always found this second wind or reserve energy, and I’ve had another level. It takes me a long time to get warmed up, so I run slower, then once I get to about 18 miles, I feel like I can run at any pace and hold it.”

He overtook Nawoj at 17 miles — “I didn’t expect to see Alan again in that race,” Holborn says — and “finished really strong”. His wife was cycling next to him and they ran the last mile together. “I did something a bit silly, you get the buzz, your hairs stand up,” he says, trying to justify the thought process of finishing at six-minute-mile pace. Those who have run marathons know what he means. It is almost impossible to explain without being reductionist, a moment where emotions take over and the body goes on autopilot. Marathons are finished with the heart in the poetic sense, not physiologically.

After two races, he was leading the competition. Holborn says it is here when anxiety started to kick in. “Before, I kind of wanted to be competitive, and (while) I believe in myself, the thought of winning was impossible. I saw a lot of pressure on myself going into the next races”.

Of the seven, race three, in Perth, Australia, was his favourite. He unironically describes the conditions as “just perfect: a bit chilly, cold, rainy”. You can take the man out of Sunderland…

(World Marathon Challenge)

“I was running fast, feeling good. To run that (3:17:32) on tired legs, when we’ve already done 50 miles or something (was incredible). It just went quick,” he added. He and Nawoj started in a pack with Japanese runner Tomomi Bitoh. After two laps of a four-loop, 6.5 mile course, it was down to just Holborn and Nawoj.

Holborn “stepped the pace up and he (Nawoj) didn’t keep up”. He says, through a beaming smile, that his favourite part about winning was “because I cost my Geordie (Newcastle) friend a lot of money! I was raising money for Age UK Sunderland and he had said to my brother — without me knowing — ‘If he wins any, I’ll put $500 into the charity’.

Between races, Holborn managed to get six or seven hours of sleep on the plane. “It wasn’t the best sleep, but I managed to sleep,” he says, adding that “my body showed up for me,” not just when it needed to perform but when rest was required too. Holborn was flying from Cape Town to Perth when Sunderland won away to Middlesbrough in the Tees-Wear derby to keep their automatic promotion hopes alive. He had a good excuse to not be watching.

“As much as I love Sunderland, I was going to put my sleep first,” he says with a laugh.

The nutritional approach to the week can best be described as ‘yes’. He ate whatever food was there on the plane, found whatever shops were open in the cities (many of these races were late-night or very early-morning), bought protein powder in South Africa to consume after races and on flights. Holborn had a bag of fruit, nuts and protein bars too. “Chocolate, jams and butters — I was eating it. I would never eat that stuff normally,” he says, like an ultrarunning version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Holborn never took energy gels in training and thought they would not be needed because he didn’t intend to win. He felt a “bit silly” and underprepared looking at the nutrition others had in races, eventually consuming whatever was on offer at aid stations. His pre-race meal? Two Mars bars and two bananas. “That worked for me. So I’ll probably continue with that,” he says. After all, Usain Bolt set world records on chicken nuggets.

Nawoj beat Holborn by less than a minute in Dubai and Madrid — races four and five. Both times, Holborn let the American go out hard and tried to catch him, utilising the lapped nature of the course to track the distance between them at intervals (eight loops in Dubai around the Expo centre; 11 laps of the IFEMA F1 track in Madrid). In Dubai, he entertained himself by watching the stray cats. There was no stress about finishing second. “As long as I keep him in my sights and I don’t give up many minutes, that’s all I need to do,” he remembers thinking. “Don’t wear myself out”.

Holborn’s worst race — emotionally as well as the slowest time — was in Fortaleza, Brazil, the penultimate marathon. The mental and physical fatigue started to compound, the flight time (and rest between races) was shortening, and changing conditions made things brutal: from five degrees Celsius in Madrid to 29 when they landed at 4:30am.

“With the humidity, they said that that felt like 95 Fahrenheit. It was ridiculous,” says Holborn. As with all the races, within 90 minutes of landing, they were onto the shuttle bus to the start line and racing.

“I was stupid. I tried to keep up with Alan,” he says, and pushed to break him with a surge at six miles. “I thought I could see a weakness in him. He caught up and, around seven or eight miles, I just died with the humidity. Luckily enough, it happened to him as well.

“It was so hard, I thought, ‘I’m going to collapse today. I think this might be it’. I’ve run probably 130 miles up until this point. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up, because I’ve got another 20 miles or something to go. We got to a point where we were just shuffling, just trying to get through it”.

He and Nawoj started walking through aid stations (at the start of each lap) to take on water and electrolytes, increasingly taking longer to start running again. They crossed the line together in 3:34:15, with four other runners going quicker in that race. “I remember finishing thinking, ‘I’ll be in Miami tonight — a totally different continent! I’ll be running in 12 hours’”.

Holborn had, barring disaster or injury, an unassailable time lead. It did not stop the pre-race doubts. ”I stood on the line for the last one thinking stupid things: ‘Do you think I’ll even be able to run this marathon?’ I’d just done six! But I guess that’s what goes through your head when you’re racing, right?”

Holborn and Nawoj agreed to run together. The American pushed him 20 seconds per mile faster than he wanted to go, but by the final of the four laps, Holborn had enough left to finish hard.

“I came over the line, and I had a few family members there, from England, from different parts of the States. That was such an amazing feeling and then that’s when they told me, ‘You’re the first British person to ever win this competition’”.

Holborn finished with a Sunderland flag in his left hand, and his fist pump was a solid left hook — a fitting, fleeting glimpse of a past career and past life as he completed, and won, a challenge which was all about purpose and self-rediscovery. He briefly embraced his wife and daughter then, dripping in sweat, scrambled to put a Sunderland shirt on.

I end our conversation by asking him if he has anything else to add. “You want some advice? Come to the world champ,” he says, entirely joking, leaning back and laughing, as if he still cannot believe it.

“I’m just trying to get the point across to anyone who wants to listen,” he says. “You always hear people say: ‘Oh, I’m 40, it’s over’.

“It seems impossible and, for the first eight months of my training, I was like, ‘Damn, I gave up my best years. I wish I was the person I was (before)’. My coach keeps telling me (to) forget about that — it’s not coming back. Focus on the person you’re going to be. There’s nothing special about me.

“Everyone overestimates what they can do in a day but will underestimate what they could do in a year. Just keep at it and your body will adapt”.

Holborn thinks he will peak at age 45. There is no self-indulgent praise, instead gratitude for those who helped get him to the races and through them, support for others and a candid reflection on his past. Holborn is, wonderfully, as much of a people’s champion as a world one.

(Header photo: World Marathon Challenge)