Rosie Swale Pope’s a grandmother who set out to run around the world to raise awareness of prostate cancer after it claimed the life of her husband completed her epic five-year, 20,000 mile journey.
Rosie Swale-Pope is an archetypal British survivor, the sort of woman to break both legs, think, “Bugger this,” and carry on marching. Her epic, solo voyage had taken her through Europe, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, America, Greenland and Iceland. It was, she says with glorious understatement, “a fun run that got out of hand”.
Swale-Pope, 61, began her journey in October 2003, a few months after her 73-year-old husband, Clive, died of prostate cancer. “I wanted to do something,” she says. “I’m an ordinary charity runner. I was looking at a map of the world and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll do a marathon.’ But then I thought, ‘No. I’ll run round the world instead’.”
So she set off from Wales with nothing but a small cart of food and equipment, funded by the rent from her house. She endured countless ordeals: extreme cold and searing heat, frostbite, pneumonia, being knocked unconscious by a truck, running out of food in Alaska, a breast-cancer scare in Chicago, breaking five ribs in Iceland and two other fractures.
“I walked 8-10 miles a day with it,” she says of a hip fracture that has left her on crutches. “I ran 18 miles into Cardigan and had a sore leg. I assumed a couple of ibuprofen and a good sleep would do it, but in the morning I couldn’t stand up.”
She powered on, though. “I remembered I’d nearly lost my life eight times on this journey,” she says, “and I was doing it for fun and a reason.” Besides, it was her own silly fault anyway. “I was devil-may-care,” she says, “belting down hills because I was nearing home and wild with joy.”
Swale-Pope’s positivity is overwhelming; her energy, incomprehensible. She doesn’t behave as if she’s just dragged a cart 20,000 miles — “far more energy than when I left. Age is stupid,” she says — but she certainly looks as though she has. Her body is tough and toned like a weather-beaten salami, her skin the colour of burnt sand, her hair, blonde and straggly and cut roughly into spaniel flaps. “Oh, the hair!” she says, smooshing it up. She attracted quite a crowd when she washed it a mile and a half outside Tenby to be ready for her reception. “I am a soft, weak-willed, decadent woman,” she warns. “Right as we speak I have red-painted toenails.”
On a good summer’s day in Russia, with a light cart and no one to talk to, she would top 30 miles. On a bad day, it would be 500 yards, digging herself out of the snow and moving her equipment bit by bit. “This is the scenario at -62C,” she says. “You’ve only done a mile and you wish you could do a few more steps, but it’s slightly too late in the afternoon. Then your hands freeze, and if your hands freeze, you cannot undo the zips, so you cannot tend to your feet. You have three seconds to use them.
“I would get in the rig, which was then measuring 60 by 30 inches. Everything would be frozen inside — forget toothpaste, all the normal things: everything is frozen — and I would massage my feet, put some oil on them, stick them in the wet sleeping bag.” She would wake up in the morning, “eyelashes frozen shut, frozen breath like Miss Havisham’s lace curtains on the ceiling”.
She was often scared. “Every night I’d face the bears and the wolves,” she says. Her way of coping with wild animals was “mostly attitude”, and once her fear subsided, she could appreciate the lovely surroundings. “The stars, and the fabulous forest of Siberia and the aurora borealis. No one else on the expedition except you, with the howling of the wolves, and the blizzards and the storms. It’s extraordinary.”
Sometimes she would not see anyone for weeks at a stretch. “Loneliness is like a knife wound,” she says. “I got lonely, but you’re very busy, running, cooking, surviving. You have to get over it.”
“Extremely inconvenient” is how she describes falling on the ice in Iceland, breaking her ribs. “I was a hundred miles from the nearest house. I thought, ‘Come on.’ I walked two miles, step by step.” Someone found her and patched her up. There was also “frostbite, getting knocked unconscious and falling unconscious through eating raw spaghetti, because it isn’t very nourishing and I couldn’t use my cooker,” she says.
“In Russia, I ate spaghetti with reindeer hair in it for days and days, and I nearly starved to death in Alaska.” She was once airlifted to save her toe. But, like Forrest Gump, she just kept on running. “Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t make it,” she confesses.
And perhaps she didn’t care — there was, after all, something else goading her on. She didn’t do it “as a challenge or to test my limits”, she says.
She did it because she was heartbroken, and because she couldn’t let cancer win. “It started out of sorrow and heartache and a wish to turn something round,” she says. “You can always turn things round, and if you can’t, then someone you love can do it for you.
“I’m a very poor and minor example. People do this all the time for people they love. So it was for cancer awareness. The way to honour Clive’s love was to grab life. I saw Clive’s face and saw all the things he was aiming to do, things he would never do. I knew I should live life to the full.”
Such as her encounter with a naked man with an axe, for example? “No, that’s wrong,” she says. “There was a naked man with a gun — just a nutter. But the axe man was lovely. I’d slept 1,300 nights in the open, and at 3am I was thinking, ‘How lovely and peaceful’, and this man jumped out of a tree with an axe. He wasn’t a nasty man; he just nearly cut my ear off with the axe by mistake when he gave me a bear hug because he was so impressed — he’d never seen a woman sleeping in the forest.”
Strangely, she felt safer as a woman. “If I’d been a tough soldier or two people, perhaps I’d have been more attacked. People were good to me, even people who might be bad in other ways. Two convicted murderers told me how to light a fire in the rain.”
Swale-Pope has had plenty of practice at astonishing expeditions. She took up marathon running at 48, has run across Cuba and Romania and even done the Marathon des Sables in the Sahara. In the 1970s she attracted widespread attention by sailing to Australia and back naked with her first husband, Colin Swale, and her young daughter Eve. She gave birth to her son James on board. “I’ve had a magical life,” she says.
She obviously hasn’t got over her sadness, but at least she has masked it with this get-up-and-go. What did she miss, when she was out in the cold with the winds whipping and the wolves howling? “Hugging the people I love,” she says. “And a glass of red wine.”
You can read more about Rosie’s amazing journey at
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Wow, what an inspiration, I took up fun running in my 50′s and have done three 10km’s. Think perhaps I need a bit more training before setting off around the world.
[...] Rosie Swale Pope. Rosie completed a 20,000 miles of walking all by herself. The 61 year old grandmother started her journey back in 2003 when her then husband [...]
What an amazing story, thank you for sharing!