“We were really close,” Jess Furness said, pausing for a moment as she reflected on her older brother, Eddie. “I wanted to make sure I was doing a challenge that felt worthy of him.”
Eddie was more than just an older brother to Jess; speaking in a documentary remembering her sibling, she described him as a “father figure” and “someone always in her corner”.
Jess’ world changed in 2021, when Eddie died aged just 38 following an accident on a farm. “When I realised it was going to be his 42nd birthday, I thought that would fit with the 42 kilometres of a marathon. It almost felt like it was meant to be.”
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Running had already played an important part in Jess’s life, helping her navigate some of its most difficult moments. Growing up near Matlock, she lost her father at a young age, before her mum died from breast cancer while she was at university.
Speaking candidly to Daily Star Sport, Jess said: “Everyone else seemed to have their life under control, and mine felt so out of control…Even now, when bad things happen, it feels like everything is out of control and there’s no way of controlling it.
“That’s something I still grapple with day to day. You don’t know what the future holds. You’ve got to be okay with not knowing what’s going to happen.”
Running became her solace. The simple act of following a training plan and working towards a goal gave her something she could control when so much else in her life felt uncertain.
Jess added: “It’s a healthy way of helping you regain a little bit of balance and take control of your own life again. That’s something that’s helped me massively!”
Those early runs, which started as a way of finding stability, would eventually lead Jess towards a career in the sport. Now a presenter on The Running Channel, she wanted to use the thing that had helped her so much to do something meaningful in Eddie’s memory.
In 2025, Jess set out to run 42 marathons in a calendar year to raise money for charity. And so, on a bitterly cold New Year’s Day morning in Leamington, she took her first steps: “It felt like, as soon as I took that first step, it had begun.
“But as well as being scared about taking on that many marathons, I hadn’t been particularly open with people about my grief or my mental health. This was the first time I was really going to open up fully and share that with people, in the hope that it could help others as well.”
The scale of what she had taken on soon began to sink in. Jess had expected the physical demands, but hadn’t quite anticipated the emotional weight that would come with it, and, as a result, cancelled her fourth marathon.
“I hadn’t anticipated how much I would be thinking about everything,” she admitted. “There was the pressure of feeling like I’d be letting people down…
“I’d expected the start of the marathons to be a lot easier. I thought I’d just tick them off and that it would be later in the year when things got harder.”
It was a conversation with her coach that helped Jess find her feet again: “He rang me, and sometimes just having someone there to say, ‘It’s okay, we’ve got time’, and reassure you makes such a difference.
“I think that’s reflective of everything in life. Things seem so big when you keep them all in and hold everything to yourself. As soon as you share it with someone else, things can seem so much lighter.
“That really gave me a boost for the coming marathons and reminded me why I was doing it.” However, she was dealt another setback when a knee injury in Prague, her 14th marathon, forced her to rethink the schedule.
The injury forced Jess to take the entirety of May off; the calendar became increasingly cramped, leaving the daunting prospect of eight marathons in eight days.
She admitted the injury made her plans “really scary” after taking the entirety of May off, but Jess knew her body was capable of doing the distance: “Years ago, I’d done 250 kilometres in five days in Sri Lanka, so I knew I could do back-to-back days.
“But with the number of marathons already in my legs, I was quite fatigued, and it was also off the back of an injury. To train myself back up to doing eight in eight days, I started doing weekends of back-to-back marathons!”
And after the eight marathons came a moment Jess can truly savour – the chance to run alongside her siblings. “All three of them, both my sisters and my brother, had never run a marathon before.
“They’d all said they hadn’t really had any desire to run a marathon, but they felt that since I was doing 42, they should probably do at least one. I think they thought it was out of reach for them!”
Jess said she thought it gave them a “little snippet” of why she loved running so much and admitted seeing |them doing a marathon was probably the highlight of the year, really”.
It brought the challenge, which she completed a few weeks later, full circle.
What had started as a way to honour her brother had become an opportunity to share the sport she loved so dearly, which had helped her through the dark times – with others who might be looking for that same escape.
“I really wanted other people to be able to see that as well, and to know that you can start your day off in a good way and that it can make a real difference to the rest of your day.”
‘42. Dear Eddie, Love Jess’ is live now on The Running Channel YouTube. You can donate to the challenge HERE.