Jack Faint: A tumour, a 4,000 km run, and the spirit of endurance

It is a weekday afternoon in Bengaluru. Five running enthusiasts have stepped away from work to meet Jack Faint, a British national who arrived in the city with his team earlier that morning. They have been following his running expedition, from India’s highest frontier at the Siachen Glacier to Kanyakumari, where the land meets the ocean, through social media and news reports. Like me, they have come with questions. There is another plan: a short 3 km run with Faint, from Palace Grounds to Vasanth Nagar.

Faint, who otherwise seems reserved, opens up once he hits the road. As we find our pace, the questions come quickly — about diet, endurance, recovery, running across diverse terrains, and the one everyone wants to ask, “What is it like to run with a tumour?”

Faint, 31, is no average runner. Six years ago, he was diagnosed with a rare, slow-growing brain tumour, called oligodendroglioma (see box). Yet he has continued to run marathons and ultramarathons while maintaining his tech job. Even now, he is on the final leg of his 4,000 km run down the length of India. By the time he entered Bengaluru through Devanahalli last week, he had been on the road for 60 days. He had averaged 50 kilometres a day and allowed himself only one day of rest.

Faint ran along highways, down mountain slopes, and through villages.

His tumour, while terminal, does not currently affect his daily life. It sits quietly inside his skull. Faint says, “I live a normal life. I have no headaches, nausea, or dizziness. But since the tumour is growing close to the optic nerve, one day I might lose my vision.” Yet what unsettles him most is its silence. It causes no pain, but it has changed him.

Seizure while cycling

Like most 25-year-olds in 2019, Faint felt “indestructible”. He smoked, drank, and did not take care of himself. “I was always chasing a good time,” says the man from Cheshire in the UK. Then, one morning while cycling to work, he had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. CT and
MRI scans revealed a tumour in his brain, and a biopsy confirmed it as a grade-two oligodendroglioma. This tumour grows silently and often only shows signs through seizures, his doctor explained.

Faint with his crew comprising close friends (Jordan Fairclough, Fred Ried, Daniel Robinson) take a break in Ladakh.

Shock, he realised, is memory’s glue — he remembers it more than the diagnosis itself. It took weeks to accept the news. During that “grieving period”, he confronted his life. Faint says that 12 to 18 months before his diagnosis, he had suffered from anxiety and depression and did not look after himself “in any way”. His doctor advised a lifestyle change: stop smoking and drinking, eat a plant-based diet, and meditate.

After the diagnosis, Faint was given two options: surgery to remove the tumour or regular monitoring. He was scared but chose the latter. Deciding he still had much to live for, he went ahead with a long-planned trip to South America with his best friend. “I only carried a couple of anti-seizure medications. I took no other precautions. I carried on as normally as possible,” he recalls. He hasn’t suffered a seizure since but still keeps the medications close.

Change in India

He and his friend decided to explore India after South America. They visited Goa, Mumbai, Chennai, Puducherry, Kolkata, Varanasi, Agra, Rishikesh, and Jaipur. Faint felt he “found himself again” and began piecing his life back together. Meditation helped him cultivate gratitude and joy despite his illness. He approached it as a survival tool, learning to observe his thoughts rather than be overwhelmed by them. He describes this phase as “a shedding of the old me”.

When the pandemic brought travel to a halt in early 2020, Faint returned to Manchester to live with his sister and her husband. He found a tech job and eventually became a ‘digital nomad’ (who works remotely while travelling). Seeking another meaningful change, he took up running and discovered the joy of movement. He progressed from casual runs to marathons and ultramarathons. For him, running was not an escape; it was proof that his body could still achieve extraordinary things. Once he realised he could push his limits, he could not stop. This led to his most demanding challenge yet: his current expedition, ‘Project India 2025’.

Faint posted a picture of Manju (yellow tshirt), the lead driver for the team, meeting his family in Bengaluru after a month, on Instagram. Videographer Benjamin Cooker looks on.

Faint notes that while many ultramarathon runners have completed the Kashmir-to-Kanyakumari route — including Rajasthan’s Sufiya Sufi in a record-breaking 87 days — he believes no one has begun the run from “the true northernmost tip of India”, the Siachen Glacier. He did not embark on this challenge to break records, but to salute India. When he was running ultramarathons around the world to raise money for cancer-related charities, he felt compelled to “go back to the country that helped me transform”.

Prep phase

Faint then logged long-distance runs to build the endurance needed for three months of continuous running. But he also needed a dedicated team to support and document the journey. He turned to four close friends he had met during his travels: Daniel Robinson (Dan), Fred Ried, Jordan Fairclough, and Devin Paisley. Ried, whom he met while attempting the UK’s Three Peaks Challenge, joined as a logistics manager. Dan is in the same role. Fairclough is a former physical performance coach of the Liverpool Football Club. His expertise in recovery, in Faint’s words, is “second to none”. When Paisley, the videographer, had to step away, Benjamin Cooker (Ben) joined on Day 50, fresh from documenting the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Rounding out the crew were two drivers from Bengaluru. The team found them through online research. They set off from the city in rented campervans and joined the crew in Ladakh on Day 12. The campervans became mobile homes, allowing the team to rest and cook their own meals — with a carb-rich diet tailored for Faint. Before this, the crew would split their luggage between two chase cars, and spend nights in lodges on the way.

Faint dug into his savings and also turned to crowdfunding to get the expedition off the ground.

Ready, set, go

The team wakes up in the wee hours. Faint begins with a few hours of running, then breaks to eat and let Fairclough relieve the strain on his muscles. After a nap, he heads out for another round of running. He runs seven to eight hours a day with minimal breaks. He considers running meditation in motion and uses the time to repeat positive affirmations. To keep Faint’s momentum going, the crew members sometimes run along with him for as long as 35 km.

He began his expedition at Siachen Camp, threading through Ladakh and Leh, before moving onward to Rohtang and Manali in Himachal Pradesh. The Himalayan section, he says, took the most out of him. Especially the Nubra Valley of Ladakh, a rugged region inhabited by monks, patrolled by soldiers, and thronged by tourists. At 3,050 metres, the altitude makes helicopter navigation difficult and demands acclimatisation. On stretches where he could not get permission to run, he had to make his way through the mountain slopes.

In Manali, he had a “special escort”. “I had dogs running with me, but one in particular ran alongside me for almost 30 km,” he recalls. The dog started following him after he crossed a “chaotic village” where a pack had tried to attack him. “Every time I turned around and saw the dog, I felt like crying. It was protecting me,” he says.

The mountains had more surprises in store. On Day 11, a tendon strain between his shin and ankle left him unable to walk. It forced him into his only rest day of the expedition. “I eased back in. On Day 12, I walked. On Day 13, I switched between walking and running,” he says. Each day, Fairclough worked on him with deep tissue and muscle release.

Strangers also kept his spirits high. Some ran short distances alongside him, while others cheered him on. In Chandigarh, he was welcomed with “full josh”. In Punjab, families invited the crew over for meals. In cities like Nagpur, Hyderabad and Agra, Faint was warmly received at schools, press events, and a sports and running conference.

Thirty-five days in, in Andhra Pradesh, the corn on his feet began to hurt, and he had to visit a doctor. He was recommended a medical procedure and a week of rest, but he decided to delay treatment until after the run. That day, however, he and the crew succumbed to a bit of “palate fatigue” from eating the same rice cakes, tuna, peanut butter, porridge, and oats they had been having almost daily. So they decided to eat out.

Bengaluru stop

The crowds cheering him on, or stopping to congratulate him, grew on Day 58 as he entered Karnataka, as it was the home state of the campervan drivers. “Usually the crew runs with me to keep me company, but the excitement on entering Karnataka was so high that even Manju, the lead driver, joined me for a short stretch,” he recalls. Though the heat was bothering him, he ran farther than usual that day, covering 84 km, fuelled by the energy around him.

The crew had visited temples in every city along the way, and in Chikkaballapur, they dropped by a spiritual organisation. Then, around Devanahalli, Manju met his father, brother, and son after a month. “People think the run is extraordinary. But the extraordinary thing is what people will do for each other when the purpose is real,” says Faint, reflecting on the contribution of his crew members.

He started his run from Bengaluru airport but was immediately slowed down by heavy traffic. Later that afternoon, the five local running enthusiasts joined him for a short stretch. Darshan J, who has a running group in J P Nagar, wants to “empower individuals to take control of their health through running”, and he feels Faint represents that spirit.

The crew was in Bengaluru for less than 48 hours, but it was a packed stop for them. After the community run, Faint recovered with massages and ice baths at a gym. They had planned to try a beer spot and sample some of the food recommendations they had received — from Meghana, Donne, and Hosur biryanis to idlis and butter masala dosas. But in yet another moment of palate fatigue, they went in for a pizza instead.

Exiting through Hosur Road proved one of the hardest parts of the expedition. Faint had to get past traffic, open sewers, and broken roads, so he decided to run through villages on the outskirts instead. “I got hit in my shoulder by the mirror of a tuk-tuk (autorickshaw),” he says. And shortly after, because of persistent technical problems, they had to leave behind the campervans and continue in pickup trucks.

Trained in hope

At the time of going to print, Faint was somewhere in Tamil Nadu. He expects to hit his final stop, Kanyakumari, on November 9, a week ahead of schedule. His parents, sisters, and girlfriend will be there to welcome him. After the run, he hopes to spend time with loved ones, write a book, release a documentary on ‘Project India 2025’, and give talks on personal growth.

Looking back, Faint says he wishes he could hug his 25-year-old self. “I want to tell him everything is going to be okay, and that, even in the face of illness, he will go on to live a far more wondrous life than he did before,” he says. Over time, he has come to believe that “we all have it within us to heal” — not by rejecting medicine, but by learning to adapt. The man who once drank and smoked can become the one who meditates and runs ultramarathons. The man who panicked at the diagnosis of a rare tumour can become the one who can run 50 km a day at high altitudes. Hope, he has learned, isn’t a feeling but a trained response.

And the tumour? It is still there. He lives with it every day, but it is no longer the ‘main character’. “I have a couple of scans scheduled in a month to check its progress,” Faint says.

All about oligodendroglioma

According to Dr Naveen T, director of Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology, Bengaluru, oligodendrogliomas are among the rarest primary brain and central nervous system tumours, and they make up only 5% of all cases globally. They are often diagnosed in adults aged between 40 and 50. There is a slight predominance among males, and the tumours are more commonly seen among non-Hispanic white individuals. At his centre, he sees about 10 new cases a year.

Despite its rarity, the five-year relative survival rate is 85%, and long-term outcomes are also favourable, with a 10-year survival rate of 72.3%. Dr Naveen advises against physical activity for patients prone to seizures. “However, those who have undergone brain surgery and show no symptoms can exercise in moderation, with their oncologist’s approval,” he says. This includes activities such as running. “Every case is different,” he explains.