JUST BEFORE 4PM on Monday, May 19, Will Goodge crests the final hill on his 3,841km journey from Cottesloe Beach in Perth to Bondi Beach in Sydney. Flanked on either side by hordes of runners who joined him for the final stretch of the journey, he makes his way down Campbell Parade and onto Bondi Beach, with nothing left to keep his feet turning over but adrenaline and sheer power of will.
By that point, Goodge had been running for 34 days and nine hours, averaging around 110km and 15 hours on his feet every day. He crosses the finish line arm in arm with his father, amid a rapturous crowd and releases a deep sigh of relief. He has done it: he is now the fastest person to ever run across Australia, shaving a full five days off the previous record.
The day after completing his run, Goodge visits the Men’s Health office to debrief. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he says, while lumbering towards our studio. “I can’t move very fast at the moment.”
Goodge shattered records and expectations with a kind of stubborn endurance that prompts a reckoning of what the human body is capable of. Now, with the run behind him and his feet swollen to the point that shoes feel like vices, he admits it will take some time for his body to return to normal.
“I can feel it,” he says with a laugh, the exhaustion still etched into his voice. “During the run, I would wake up and know I had to carry on and persevere, but now my body knows it’s out of it. It’s like, ‘OK, we can kind of complain a bit more now.’”
Swollen feet, non-existent toenails and shredded skin are all part of the collateral damage, according to Goodge, but he won’t have much time to rest. Only a day after our interview, he jets off back to Europe just in time to attend the weekend’s Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix – he’s gotten into the habit of crossing items off his bucket list lately.
Goodge last spoke to Men’s Health the day before embarking from Cottesloe Beach. At the time, he told us that he’d “like to hang my hat on something and say that I’m the best.” Now that he is indisputably, irrevocably the best, Goodge describes the feeling of accomplishment as pure elation. “To put something out to the world, say you can do it, give your absolute all and then actually complete it is amazing,” he says. “I feel extremely proud of what I was able to achieve.”
But that accomplishment didn’t come easy. If you followed Goodge’s Instagram throughout his journey, you’d have noticed that his feed has been populated by daily shots of the runner cracking beers, smoking cigarettes, doing brand advertisements, and, in one case, enjoying a meal from the comfort of a bathtub. In every case, the 31-year-old always had a smile on his face, with his outward demeanour giving the impression that the challenge wasn’t all that difficult.
So, was it as easy as it may have looked? “No,” Goodge says flatly. “But that’s my style of doing things. If I express how I’m really feeling, it’s like giving truth to those negative thoughts. I’m pretty good at internalising stuff and battling in my own head. I don’t like whining, I don’t see the point in that. There’s no good that can come from the release of negative emotions. I prefer to try to be positive.”
“Having a beer at the end of the day just kind of normalises things a bit for me,” he continues. “Having dinner with the crew on the nights I could and taking myself out of what I was doing gave me some decompression at the end of the day and prepared me to sleep, wake up and face it all over again.”
The physical exertion required to run across the country is monumental. Although, as Goodge says, the mental toll is arguably even greater once the weight of endless hours on your feet and the gravity of how far you have to go starts to gnaw at you.
“I spend a lot of the time overthinking, to be honest,” he admits. “Normally, I don’t do that, I’m like real chill. But out there I’m constantly thinking about my time, my splits, what my distance is at, how close the next stop is, where the flattest bit of road is. That stuff is constantly rattling around inside my head and it’s hard to escape.”
Despite the intense physical and mental fatigue – not to mention boredom – there wasn’t a single point in his journey when Goodge felt like giving up. “I couldn’t have given up,” he says. “I had like a prison mentality where I thought the only way to get out of this is to finish it. I don’t leave any bandwidth for throwing in the towel.”
His strategy for keeping his head in the game? Breaking down the daily runs into smaller efforts. “It gets awful at times and you feel like you just can’t go even one step further, that the end is too far away to even consider, but I just try to break it down,” he says. “You just have get through to the first stop and then through to the second stop, then the sun will start coming up and you’ll start feeling better when that happens. And before you know it, you’re through the day.”
Over the last month, the nation has rallied around Goodge, spurring him on to break the record. But he has also drawn his fair share of critics who simply don’t believe he’s doing what he says he is.
Since he got into ultrarunning in 2019, Goodge’s performances have been heavily scrutinised by a small – but very vocal – segment of the ultrarunning community. In 2023, when he completed a transcontinental run across the United States, Goodge drew the ire of London-based sports writer William Cockerell, who plainly accused Goodge of cheating.
Cockerell was adamant that Goodge was secretly using a practise known as ‘watch muling’, under which multiple runners wear the same tracking watch at different intervals, sharing the load of the effort while still giving the appearance of a lone runner completing it. The writer argued that Goodge’s tracking and heart rate data, which occasionally showed that his heart rate gradually declined throughout the day while his splits were getting faster, was proof that the runner was cheating.
Goodge denied the accusations, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Cockerell. The critic soon flew from London to the States and caught up to Goodge via car in the middle of rural Oklahoma, to assess the runner’s progress in person. After a number of unfriendly exchanges, Cockerell eventually departed with no proof that Goodge had done anything untoward, but remained adamant that something wasn’t quite right.
While has never been proven to have cheated, the accusations have tarnished Goodge’s reputation and resurfaced during his run across Australia, gaining traction on social media. In anticipation of the backlash, he put a number of measures in place to prove the validity of his runs. “I tried to make this as open as possible for people to see I’m not cheating,” he says. “I’m out in the middle of nowhere running, yes, but I’ve got a tracker on me, I’ve got my watch, it’s being filmed the whole time, random people can pull up and see me running on the side of the highway.”
Still, some weren’t convinced, with fresh accusations levelled at Goodge. “No matter what I do there’s still going to be people who say my heart rate’s too low, or my tracker was moving at 80 kilometres an hour,” he says. The latter is true. There were segments of Goodge’s Australian run where he would suddenly move with superhuman speed – including one 400-metre split where the runner seemingly broke the world record with a 23-second time.
Goodge puts these inconsistencies down to poor GPS service in the Australian Outback, and the fact that he and his team would occasionally travel by car at the end of the day, to get from his finishing point to the night’s hotel or campsite. “I left the tracker on at all times, and when I finish the day we get in the car and go somewhere else for the night and come back to start at the same point the next day,” he says.
The cheating accusations are something Goodge tries to ignore. “For the most part, I just shake it off. It is what it is. It comes with the territory,” he says, but the assault on his integrity, coupled with the exertion of his runs, did weigh on him.
“It did get to me one day,” he admits. “There was some press stuff going out about it, and I can’t remember what day it was, but it was my biggest day of 120km. It was like ‘alright, well, if you think I’m cheating, I’m going to give you a good reason to think I am and post up a really high score’.”
For Goodge, working even harder is a means proving his doubters wrong. “I’m quite bullish in that way,” he says. “I like fronting up to stuff and I don’t want to always give a voice to those claims, but if it comes to a head I’m not afraid to give a little F you back, and that’s in the form of running harder.”
What comes next after you’ve achieved all you set out to do and proven to be better than anyone in history? A period of rest, first of all. When we ask Goodge if he’s already looking for his next challenge, he’s quick with his response. “No way,” he laughs. “I’m going to be off drinking for 35 days.”
While that may be an exaggeration, Goodge knows that it will take time for his body to recover. “When I did the US run, it took me probably eight months to feel like going for something again,” he says. “I’d go out and do some shorter runs and get into the gym, but you feel like your body is lacking that bit of oomph you need to actually push for something.”
He’s giving himself space, but Goodge does already have a few runs booked in and more challenges on the horizon. “I’m going to be doing the Berlin and New York Marathons,” he says. “And then there’s some potential for a project in Iceland in August, which will be really cool. It’s nothing I can actually announce yet, but if that goes ahead, that would be exciting.”
When we spoke before his cross-continental run, Goodge told us that he’s “never really seen myself as a brilliant athlete, I’m just someone that can grind out and suffer pretty well.”
When we repeat those words to him, Goodge says he has changed his tune. “No, I think it’s changed now,” he reflects. “I think I’ve proven to myself – it’s taken a while – but I feel like I’ve put myself in a different category now and I can finally be like ‘yeah, I’m pretty good at this’.” That he is.
