“I’ve always loved Australia as a country. I remember watching Bondi Rescue as a kid. Obviously, Steve Irwin is a goat.” It’s a charmingly simple explanation from Will Goodge for why he chose Australia as the stage for his latest transcontinental running attempt. But dig a little deeper and the choice becomes more poignant. As an 11-year-old visiting Australia for the first time, Will was already plotting a permanent move. “I was always pressing my mum and dad to move. My dad was actually too old at the time but my mum was a nurse. It was like the golden ticket and I was always bothering her, like, ‘Can we move to Sydney?’”

That dream of emigration never materialised, but Will’s fascination with Australia endured. Now, at 31, he’s just become the fastest person to run across the continent, completing the 3,800km journey from Perth to Sydney in a record-breaking 35 days.* That’s four* days faster than Chris Turnbull’s previous mark of 39 days, eight hours set in 2023. It involved running an average of 110km per day. That’s roughly two-and-a-half marathons every 24 hours.

*Okay, things get a little weird here. Will just told RUN247 that he might have got the math wrong (day one actually being day zero) and he now believes he completed the run in 34 days and eight hours, five days faster than Turnbull’s record. Suffice it to say, Guinness is in the process of validating Will’s record, so expect this to get resolved pretty quick.

However you look at it, it’s a monumental achievement that represents the culmination of years building towards this moment. Despite completing remarkable feats like running 48 marathons in 30 days across England’s counties, running from John o’Groats to Land’s End, and becoming the fastest Brit to cross the United States, this Australian achievement marks his first official world record.

“It’s all been building towards being able to announce myself as someone that’s actually really pretty good at this stuff. Maybe up there with the best,” Will says. “I know it’s quite a small circle of people that actually do the real version of cross country, but it’s a nice one to have. I do feel really good about it.” That “real version of cross country” isn’t just bravado—it’s a recognition of joining an extremely exclusive club of transcontinental runners. But for Will, the motivation runs deeper than records or recognition

The Making of an Ultra Runner

Seven and a half years ago, Will was a 23-year-old semi-professional rugby player with little direction. “I didn’t really have much guidance, he says. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to be doing. I love rugby and I wanted to pursue it, but I was also getting knocked out all the time, which in its own right just isn’t a fun way of living.”

And he despised running. “Running for me at the time was a punishment. It was like when you messed up in a game, or you spoke back to the coach: ‘Go do laps, mate.’ So, I hated running. I would never do it.” Then tragedy struck. In 2018, his mother Amanda, who Will says didn’t drink or smoke and was “the healthiest one in the family”, lost her battle with cancer. The loss created what Will describes as “a huge void in all of our lives”, but it also sparked an unexpected transformation. “When she left this physical earth, it was a big space to fill and I didn’t really know what I was going to do. But what I did clearly know was that I couldn’t just throw my life away based off of that. That would be disrespectful to her,” he explains.

Unable to sleep, Will found himself running at all hours. “It might be 2:00 in the morning—I’d go for a run and I’d go through some of those battles of loss. But what I found was I always felt a little bit better when I got back.” The Christmas after his mother’s death, Will made a decision that would change his life. “I tried to avoid [that Christmas] at all costs. It’s like, ‘What can I do to not wave any red flags?’ I’m obviously struggling with that and so I was like ‘okay, I’ll run a marathon’ because I’ll be able to be out there for a few hours—well more than a few hours—and destroy myself for the whole day. So that might take my mind off things.”

He raised money for the UK’s Macmillan Cancer Support, and the response was overwhelming. “There was just like this light-bulb moment, and I’ve got friends and even some strangers saying that it was really beautiful, what I did. So I very quickly took that to an extreme.” (Will has raised funds for the Cancer Council of Australia, Macmillan again, and the American Cancer Society on this latest challenge.)

The Outback Crucible

Planning a transcontinental run might seem impossibly complex, but Will’s approach is refreshingly straightforward. “You can quite simply do it by pretty much literally clicking Bondi Beach on Google Maps and doing the search by car from Cottesloe Beach,” he explains. But he is quick to thank one person who knew the route better than most: Chris Turnbull. The pair had “two or three long conversations” during the planning stage, with the Aussie sharing his tips.
And then the day came to put theory into practice. On Tuesday 15 April, accompanied by some of Perth’s running community for the first 10km, Will took his first strides towards Sydney. Supported by a four-person crew including his 69-year-old father, lead crew member and former Marine Jason Brooks (”militant and objective”), and content creator Diego Garcia, Will set off across some of the world’s most unforgiving terrain. Completing the Dirty Half Dozen, Will’s friend Grayson Hart joined the posse for the last third of the pilgrimage.

Sharing this journey with his father was “really special”, Will notes. “Sixty-nine, turning 70, still a stud—he was dropping me juice boxes off his bike … And now we’ve got those memories forever, which is incredibly cool.”

Surprisingly perhaps, the first stretch—when Will’s body should have been in its best shape—was the hardest part. The first nine days were “basically hell on earth”, he says. “I couldn’t sleep at night. I was hallucinating quite a lot through the night, tossing and turning, like you have this deep pain within your bones. You lay in one position, it hurts one thing; you move over, and then it hurts something else. And you feel like it’s inescapable.”

A significant Achilles issue plagued him for four or five days, but Will’s philosophy is to push through: “It’s amazing what the body will do when you continue to push it. It raises a load of red flags and tells you to stop. But if you’re valiant with it and you keep pushing through and change things up slightly, it does start to bend the knee and then figure itself out.”

Beauty in the Brutality

Despite the physical torment, Australia revealed moments of stunning beauty. “There’s something extremely special about being out in nature that long, seeing the sun rise and set for 35 days straight, watching a full moon cycle, seeing animals in their natural habitat,” Will says.

One particular moment stands out: “We had this moment where we went through and there were all these birds of prey. There were like a thousand of them above our heads and usually when you see birds of prey they’re all on their own. It was some kind of mating thing that was going on and it’s just like you would never see that in normal life or in a zoo.”

The emotional extremes were constant. “It never really seems to be in the middle, like, ‘Okay, mundane.’ It seems to be like ‘This sucks. Why am I doing this? What the fuck?’ and then just incredible beauty or incredibly happy moments or elation. You might be listening to a certain song and you get goosebumps, or I’ll have memories of my mum and sometimes that will push me forward.”

Fuelling this machine required consuming 8,000–9,000 calories daily—“a full-on eating competition at the same time” as logging all those kilometres. Each day would begin with cereal and coffee as part of a regimen that included everything from breakfast sandwiches with bacon, egg, cheese and avocado to “pastries and cakes” and constant meals of protein and carbs (wraps, tuna pasta and steak with rice featured prominently).

For the first half of each day’s distance, that food would be eaten on the run. “We do walkthroughs,” Will explains. “I like to get the first half done and if you’re stopping, it’s wasting time. So, I’d be carrying this food with me, eating it and then passing, like if I had a bowl or whatever, off to the crew.”

Birthday on the Bitumen

Midway through his Australian odyssey, Will celebrated his 31st birthday on the side of a remote highway. “The crew made me a DIY hat. They got me a cake and put some candles on it. So that was really nice because outside of my 30th last year, which I did celebrate, I don’t really celebrate birthdays that much,” he recalls. It wasn’t even his first transcontinental birthday celebration. “Ironically, the year before, my 29th, I was in Oklahoma when I was running across the US and the crew did a similar thing where they did a nice dinner and stuff.”

The absurdity wasn’t lost on him. “It’s cool because it brings a certain amount of normality to an absolutely abnormal situation. They’re like ‘Happy birthday!’ and they’re singing to me and I’m on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere … So yeah, it’s one of those moments where it’s really weird, but I’m super grateful.”

The Finisher’s High

Will covered vast stretches where he didn’t see a town. After crossing the unforgiving Nullarbor Plain, he was supposed to go through Ceduna but instead found a dirt road shortcut that saved him two kilometres. So Port Augusta in South Australia—over halfway across the country—became the first town he saw after Perth.

After a month of wilderness, menacing road trains and the same four or five faces to look at—notwithstanding the occasional hero’s welcome in towns along the way—arriving in Sydney was overwhelming. “Coming into the finish is a bit of a sensory overload. Now there’s noise, there’s more pedestrians, cars, there’s human beings around, lights. And yeah, it’s a bit overwhelming and over stimulating.”

Several hundred people met him in Centennial Park to run him to Bondi Beach, but it was crossing the finish line that provided the ultimate reward. “That finishing feeling is like pure ecstasy. If you could bottle that up, you’d be a very very rich man, to be honest. But that’s also why you do it because you can’t get that feeling unless you’ve been through something so big, for so long. So that’s my drug that I keep going back to, basically.”

Addressing the Haters

Will’s achievements haven’t been without controversy, with some questioning the validity of his data and performances. His response is characteristically direct: “I get it. It comes with the territory when you’re doing this kind of stuff. Also, I can be quite a jarring personality. I don’t fit the mould of what traditional ultra running is. I’m pretty brash. I have a life outside of just running every day.”

Which is his way of acknowledging that he’s a former model whose Instagram feed also features envy-inducing travel and fashion images. There are plenty of shots of Goodge shirtless that show off his spectacular abs, which probably doesn’t help.

Past accusations have included charges that Goodge’s heart rate is impossibly low across large swathes of his ultra running (but not on shorter events) and that there are times when his Garmin InReach GPS tracker is moving suspiciously fast. Will says he’s tried to be as transparent as possible, publishing live data from the Garmin, his Coros Vertix 2 watch and the Whoop bracelet he was wearing.

He explains the times his tracker looks like it’s moving in a car as exactly that, as he travels to the end-of-day campsite: “I’ve seen things written about how sometimes he was traveling at 80km an hour and it’s like, yeah, because we didn’t always camp exactly where I finished.”

“That’s why we have the spray can,” he says. “You put it on the road, stop your watch, and then you set a Google pin for it, send it into the group so we know where to go the next day, then you go to camp.”

The ABC recently published a comparison of Goodge’s and fellow trans-Australian runner Nedd Brockmann’s data, gathered on similar stretches of their respective efforts, on days with similar temperatures. It shows Will running for longer (14 hours, 40 minutes across 113km vs Nedd’s 11 hours, 25 minutes across 106km) and at a slower pace (averages of 7:47 vs 6:28). Both athletes spent the majority of the sample days in Zone 1, with similar heart rates, the Brit averaging 110bpm and the Aussie 114bpm.

Will notes that he’s not running fast, so it’s reasonable that his heart rate shouldn’t spike. “I'm moving at quite a slow speed, usually around 7 minutes, 30 seconds per km [7:30 pace] Obviously, to pretty much anyone, that's pretty slow, but it's just a constant effort.” “There’s so many variables that go into this stuff. If we’re talking about heart rate, I need to be in Zone One ideally as long as possible. Also, it’s very hard to get out of Zone One when your legs hurt so much and your feet are fucked because you literally can’t push.”

There are also plenty of other reasons heart rate data could be skewed, Will says. “Am I singing my heart out to Mariah Carey? … Maybe I just had a cigarette. Maybe I’m eating and walking or eating and running.” “I think people that are really in this sport and really do it wouldn’t question it because they understand what it’s like out there. But there’s some people that just want to be self-proclaimed data analysts and can’t believe that it’s real, so they don’t want to—and they just don’t like my face.”

The Running Across Australia Club

There’s plenty of love coming Will’s way too, though. What particularly moved him was the support from fellow transcontinental runners, especially Chris Turnbull, whose record he had just broken. “Him coming to the end point was especially special for me. He said he was at work at his office and he was like, ‘I want to come shake your hand as the new chairman of the Running Across Australia club.’”

Brockmann was also among the first to offer his congratulations by posting, “Incredible my man. You deserve it all mate. What a feat of human endurance, thanks for the daily inspiration and reminding us all we can always do more!! King Goodge!”

This mutual respect among the tiny community of continental runners is profound, Will says. “You just have this mutual appreciation for people in this small club of running across countries. Like it’s so big and it’s so self-destructive that if you know someone’s actually willing to do it and willing to give it a crack, like you actually want to help.”

Events Horizon

Despite his body feeling like it’s “been hit by a very small car that’s just hit me in the legs”, Will is already tentatively planning his next adventures. A mysterious crew project in Iceland awaits in August: “I can’t announce what that is, but you can probably put two and two together and figure it out yourselves.”

That will be followed by the Berlin and New York marathons as “fun runs” while he prepares for a “fast” marathon next year and possibly his first Iron Man. He says he’s been loving cycling and doesn’t see himself as exclusively a runner. “I’ve never been too attached to anything. Like I do these big running things, and have done consistently for six years, but if something comes up that interests me in a different space, then I’ll probably just attack it in the same tenacious way I’ve done this.” For now, though, Will is content to reflect on joining that exclusive club of transcontinental record holders. From being a grieving 23-year-old who hated running to the fastest person to cross Australia—it’s been quite a journey. As he puts it: “Seven-and-a-half years ago I had zero per cent chance of being here and now I am.” And somewhere, his mum would be proud.