Sara Cox Children in Need challenge: Radio 2 presenter on walking and running 135 miles across the North from Kielder Forest to Pudsey in Leeds
Radio 2’s Sara Cox is about to embark on a huge challenge across the North of England for BBC Children in Need. She talks to John Blow.
Sara Cox has perhaps endured in broadcasting due to being so indefatigable both in work ethic and her cheerful disposition. These qualities are about to be put to the test.
The radio and television presenter, 50, will take on the distance of five marathons across five days from Monday to Friday, covering 135 miles from Kielder Forest on the Scottish borders and finishing in Leeds to raise money for the BBC’s annual Children in Need campaign.
She will be travelling on foot with mascot Pudsey, taking him to the West Yorkshire town after which he was named – the hometown of graphic designer, Joanna Lane, who created him - in Radio 2’s longest ever challenge.
“I'm not Mo Farah, I'm not going to be running these each day,” says Cox over video call. “I'm going to be doing a mixture of running, walking, a light trot and then just stumbling along doing ugly crying on the telly whilst possibly swearing quite a lot.”
The only issue right now is her knee, but she says “I'm just gonna have to crack on and and do it.
“I'm a bit of a swot. Nothing gets you to the gym like the thought of letting down lots of children, not raising money for charities, you know what I mean? National humiliation and letting everybody down.
"That really does make you pep up and pop your trainers on and go to the gym. I'm doing a lot of strength work at the gym to try and support this knee and get my legs nice and strong and my glutes nice and strong, my hip flexors. I didn't even know I had hip flexors until a few weeks ago.”
Cox is, of course, a household name who presents Radio 2’s Teatime Show and its Book Club, and has been a solid presence on air and television screens since the 1990s.
She is doing her best to handle the extra attention of the challenge, during which she will be talking to her colleagues live on air, while listeners can keep up with her progress in video highlights across the station’s social media channels.
Meanwhile, a BBC TV crew will follow Sara’s journey for a behind-the-scenes documentary.
“Believe it or not, even though I'm on the radio showing off every day, I'm just doing that to my listeners and we're just like a little gang. When it comes to it, I'm quite shy and I don't really like a fuss and so there's a lot of fuss when you take on a challenge like this. And for me, that's been the toughest bit,” she says
A good analogy, she says, is when you’re pregnant.
“Everybody looks at you with a mixture of excitement and sympathy because you are about to go through something quite painful, even though it'll be a joyous and beautiful thing. Also when you're pregnant, every woman who's pregnant just thinks, I've got to get this baby out of me at some point. You can't back out. You can't be like, ‘Nah, I'm all right, I'm not going to give birth, I'm just going to keep the baby there’. And that's a bit what it feels like now, like I can't back out. I've just got to get as mentally and physically prepared as I can.”
The Bolton-born presenter will need to as she is due to traverse the lengths of Northumberland, Durham, North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, running, jogging and walking through sweeping moorland, steep ridges and the rolling hills of northern England.
Fellow presenters Paddy McGuinness and Vernon Kay have been offering advice following their own fundraising challenges in the past– an Ultra Endurance Cycle in 2024 and Ultra Ultra Marathon in 2023 respectively – but some other words of wisdom have come from former WWE wrestler and actor Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
"Yes, he's my best friend,” she says sarcastically. “We've not kept in touch funnily enough. I didn't get his digits.
"Dwayne was very lovely. I said, ‘Any advice?’ He went, ‘Yeah, you’ve just got to keep going because you think how bad will I feel if I don't keep going?’ Thanks, Dwayne, for that insight.
"He seemed quite impressed by it, and quite overawed by it, so I was like, it must be a decent challenge if The Rock thinks it's quite scary. I did try and get him to come along and join in. He was having none of it, said he was busy. Whatever.”
Being a DJ, people might be wondering what she’s going to have in her headphones as she pounds the trails.
“I need music all the time, or radio, just to stop the stop my internal monologue from yakking on,” she says. “I'll have Radio 2 on quite a bit but when I need it, I will have Baddadan by Chase and Status, I will have some drum and bass on there to keep me going.”
It is not just the spectre of “national humiliation” which keeps her motivated but, of course, the good that raising money will do – and the last BBC Children in Need raised £52,700,000.
Cox says: “When you've got three kids who, touch wood, are in good health and you've not really needed the charities that come under the Children in Need banner, you feel like you owe the universe something. So it will be an amazing chance to do that, to try and raise money for all these little charities that you don't really know are there until you watch Children in Need.
“Somebody said something to me the other day… he said, with his daughter who needed cancer treatment, this charity really helped them. And he said, I had no idea they were there till we needed them and I think that's the point of Children in Need. It just shines a light on all these incredible charities that help so many kids. So I think that, along with the pork pies and chocolate, will be what will be keeping me going, really.”