From addiction to endurance: Spencer Matthews on redefining limits and finding purpose

In this exclusive interview with the Champions Speakers Agency, one of the UK’s most candid and driven celebrity speakers, Spencer Matthews opens up about his remarkable personal transformation – from battling addiction to completing 30 marathons in 30 days.

Best known for his television appearances and now celebrated for his entrepreneurial and endurance achievements, Spencer shares the mindset shifts, lessons in mental resilience, and life-changing power of preparation that have fuelled his journey.

Whether you’re chasing a goal or looking to reset your life, his reflections offer raw, real-world inspiration.

Q: What was the biggest challenge you overcame whilst running 30 marathons in 30 days?

Spencer Matthews: So, yeah, you know, when you’re in camp for 18 hours and the temperatures are kind of soaring to, you know, high 40s, it’s quite problematic to find comfort.

So, you know, you’re either in this kind of greenhouse-style tent where you’re outside of the UV, but it’s even hotter than outside, or you’re kind of outside, you know, covered up, which makes you hotter still.

So, a lot of the time there wasn’t any phone reception either. So, you’re not kind of banging out emails or calling your loved ones, you know, as often as you’d like. Maybe you’re just there.

And I suppose the good thing about it is you are able just to focus on that. You know, like for me, as a mental exercise, my reality just became: I have 30 of these to do and 30 days is going to be like this, and that is that. You know, there’s no debating it, there’s no changing the goalpost, there’s no… that is just, that’s real, that’s happening, we’re in, let’s go.

And, you know, I was fortunate to have trained in a heat chamber for about 12 hours in two-hour chunks where I could get really comfortable with discomfort.

And I think that is a huge… it’s been a huge life lesson for me.

You know, I used to, and I still love comfort. I think it’s human nature to love comfort, right? But there has to be a balance between comfort, discomfort and pain, even.

It’s impossible to grow, in my opinion, unless you suffer and learn.

And that’s part of the reason that I’m attracted to ultras because the feeling of pushing the boundaries of what feels normal, firstly to me, is really exciting, makes me feel very alive. And secondly, that ultimate feeling of success is really addictive.

And I have an addictive personality. So, you know, I’d much prefer to be addicted to success, pushing myself, driving myself forward, change, growth, than alcohol, drugs, whatever else it may be.

You know, I get people sometimes that say to me – and they mean it in an insulting way – they’re kind of like, “Well, you’ve just replaced one addiction with another.” And that is absolutely right. And I would… that would be my advice to all addicts if they’re able to do that.

You know, if you’re able to put down the bottle and pick up a pair of running shoes, I know which one I would choose. So, it’s completely transformed my life: health, fitness, wellbeing.

You know, I’m your stereotypical 36-year-old who has suddenly realised that my health is really important and I do a lot now. I take a lot of action to try and make sure that I’m living the healthiest life that I can.

And it’s very empowering, actually, and it gives me a lot of purpose. It’s good. Preparation is the antithesis of jeopardy. Essentially, when you go into any potentially dangerous situation… jeopardy feels like entertainment, right?

Particularly coming from a television background. So, I’m fully aware that when I do these things, people want to see me suffer, you know, and I’m sure that we would raise more money if I were suffering.

But ultimately, if you are very well prepared – and this goes for anything: starting a business, relationships even – just like if you are conscious and prepared and you understand the task at hand, you are more likely to succeed and less likely to be coated in jeopardy. Which isn’t really why we were there.

You know, whenever I would get messages saying, “Well, this looks easy, it looks like you’re enjoying yourself,” that is – albeit slightly short-sighted – it’s a compliment. Because obviously, all that says to me is you’ve worked for months and months and months to pull off this month.

The challenge doesn’t start on the 27th of July or whatever it was, the 29th of July to the 27th of August – that’s the end of it.

I spent the majority of the year preparing to make it as easy, in inverted commas, as I could. That’s the point of the preparation.

It’s the first time in my life really that I had prepared in that way. I’ve always been a “wing it” kind of guy. I winged my wedding speech, which was stupid. I winged my A-Levels, which was stupid. You know, I’ve winged a bunch of stuff in my life and always thought… I always kind of saw that as a superpower.

And it’s not. Not preparing for things is stupid. And if you can prepare for something, whether that be your GCSEs or your first marathon… do you know, I’ve run a marathon before on no sleep, having come straight from a nightclub.

My first marathon I ran on no sleep, having come straight from a marathon with no preparation. And I ran it, and I completed it, and I got my medal, and it was fine. But it was an incredibly painful experience.

Instead of being something to celebrate, you know, I was in bed for four days afterwards, ill, because my body had never taken on something like that.

Whereas now, you know, I’ll gladly just lace up and go and run a marathon on my own with a bit of music and go to work afterwards. You know, it’s no big deal anymore because I have prepared myself to be able to do things like that.

So, yeah, good preparation: antithesis of jeopardy. And nobody actually wants jeopardy. Well, the viewer might want jeopardy – we don’t want the jeopardy.

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Q: What did completing 30 marathons in 30 days teach you about mental resilience?

Spencer Matthews: I think mental resilience is important, and it’s something that, without trying to rev people up, I’ve kind of… I haven’t had to teach myself. I’ve always kind of had mental resilience in spades.

I lost my brother when I was very young, gave me quite a thick skin, and also made me realise that, you know, life can be pretty unfair at a young age.

And, you know, I was never the person to go to if you had a problem or an issue, because I would find it unusual that people would think that what they were going through at work would be a serious issue type of thing.

You know, I’ve always been quite a resilient, you know, get-up-and-go kind of person. I had a father who I’m incredibly close to and always have been, but he was quite a stern Northern guy.

There was very limited space for weakness in my family, and, you know, I think it’s a funny way of looking at things because, you know, I’m a little bit like that with my boys and I kind of know that I shouldn’t be. But also, I think it’s quite a good lesson.

So, you know, it’s about… everything is about finding balance. So, with the 30 in 30, it was rough, as I’ve already said, because it was very difficult for me to say, “Well, this is possible because so-and-so has already achieved it,” which means that a human can do it.

Therefore, I think I can do it. Given that it was a world first, there was always that little bit of doubt. So, I suppose crushing that out of my mind was important for me and just going into it realising that, you know, success is going to be… could be quite life-changing for me.

You know, I’ve had all kinds of perceptions of me that I’m not very proud of. You know, as you touched on earlier, the demons are pretty real in my case.

You know, I abused alcohol for many years and have come from a kind of alcoholic stage in my life through all the way to being a world record-holding endurance athlete. And that has been a journey and it’s required some mental resilience.

I think the term “mental resilience” is thrown around so much. What it comes down to, really, is discipline, in my opinion.

Like, you know, I think you can teach yourself all you want to try and not care about things – if you’re an emotional person, you’re going to care about them. You’re going to be affected by things.

The things that prompt change, I believe, are discipline and action. You can be motivated, you know, like this, but if you’re not disciplined then you’ll never create change.

So, if you want to grow your mental resilience, I personally would implement action that is uncomfortable quite regularly into your routine.

So, I would push myself to train in a way that would previously have been uncomfortable. I would get up maybe an hour to an hour and a half earlier than I ordinarily do. I would have cold showers instead of warm showers. I wouldn’t touch my phone for the first two hours of the day. Even if it’s raining, I would go running.

I would push myself into areas of discomfort and try to enjoy it. You know, do it with a smile on your face.

Run in the rain listening to a song that you love. You know, it doesn’t have to be grey and gloomy. So that would help with mental resilience.

And I think, you know, I’ve often thought that my perception of boundaries is kind of limitless – to a point, obviously. Age 36, I can’t suddenly go and become a Formula 1 racing driver if I wanted to. You know, that requires years of training and talent, natural talent, which most people don’t have.

But in terms of pushing yourself to achieve things, I think that boundaries are just perceptions.

Like, you know, when I started CleanCo, as an example, I raised, over the course of the first three years, nearly £30 million from the biggest private equity houses and venture capitalist funds in the world with no experience at all of ever doing anything like that – because I decided that I was the man for the job, right?

And like, I think it’s difficult to… and I hope my confidence isn’t being confused with arrogance. There’s a very fine line between the two.

I think if you can train yourself to feel confident and believe in yourself – despite that sounding a bit fluffy and fuzzy – it’s a huge superpower.

If you go into things believing that you’re capable of it, it gets rid of the perception that you can’t do it.

You know, like I was having a conversation with a girlfriend of mine the other day. I took 325 people running the other day just because I put a few Instagram stories out saying I’m going to run a half marathon on Sunday morning from Battersea Park to this pub in Twickenham.

And, you know, if you want to join me, come join me. And like 300 people turned up and we all ran together as a group. And it was incredible.

Loads of people had never run a half marathon before. We kept the pace nice and normal, very conversational, and it felt like this incredible time.

And somebody in the office was just like, “I could never run a half marathon.”

And I just said, “Why do you think you couldn’t run a half marathon? It’s you who doesn’t want to run the half marathon – it’s not that you can’t do it.”

You know, like hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, every single year run half marathons. Some of them couldn’t run a kilometre until they decided to make positive change in their life.

I think I would have really struggled to have run 5K six years ago when I was, you know, very overweight by my standards. Grey, you know, ill, smoking heavily, drinking heavily.

Of course, you can’t go out and run a half marathon if you’re making these choices in your life that ultimately aren’t healthy.

You have to drive positive change into your life if you want to achieve the things you want to.

This exclusive interview with Spencer Matthews was conducted by Chris Tompkins of The Motivational Speakers Agency.

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