Eddie Izzard on her extra challenge this weekend to finish her monster marathon

Virgin Radio

29 Jan 2021, 12:08

Superhuman Eddie Izzard is nearing the finish line on her virtual monster marathon and stand up challenge. With three days left to complete her unbelievable A Run For Hope Challenge - she's given herself a final huge hurdle to tackle this weekend.

Eddie joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky and told him about falling asleep mid stand up post marathon: “I’ve done some of these before but we had to up the ante so that at the end of the marathons, which is proving tricky, I fall asleep about 10 times just for a split second.

"I'm in the middle of a line and the body will power down, like a car running out of petrol or your phone just giving up. So I run out in the middle of the line and I wake up saying the wrong things or bizarre things…

“I decided in the month of January to do this challenge of running marathons and normally I might run in different places, different cities, but it's COVID, so along with my event manager Sarah we just stay in a bubble and run at Riverside Studios, marathon after marathon, day after day on a treadmill.

“It's celebrating a different city each time... People can buy tickets at www.eddieizzard.com and they can donate there. They can buy the tickets and they can watch them anywhere in the world… over 50 different countries people have been tuning in from.” On her extra challenge this weekend, she said: “I thought I'd put an extra marathon in there before New York, just to be weird and try and encourage people to donate to the charity Make Humanity Great Again and so I'm going to run for the city of Aden in the country of Yemen that has not only COVID, but a civil war at the moment, and I was born in Aden.

"So I thought I'd do that in the morning starting running, not at 12 noon as normal but 9am, and I'm going to be running through to probably 12 midnight and do a gig in the middle and then go back to running.

“I’m quite good at being self motivated. I did come out as trans back in ’85, and that was a difficult thing, very toxic at that time and so if you go through that you can sort of go through everything but I can prove that anyone can do this.

"If you imagine a lockdown. If you imagine something horribly, you know terroristic thing was happening at the same time.

“So no cars, no nothing in your town city wherever you were, but there was medicine 30 miles away from you and you needed it for a loved one, for a member of your family, you would run, you would stagger to get that medicine and get back and get it to your people.

"It would not look pretty and it would be all over the place, but you'd get it done and it's the motivation, so I can self motivate in a kind of odd way.”

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For more great interviews listen to The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky, weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.