Meet the Man Who Just Ran the Entire Tour de France Route

He needed to average 30 miles a day—and he finished three days ahead of schedule.

The Tour de France is a beast of a bike race: Over the course of 23 days, the riders climb through the Alps and Pyrenees mountain ranges, completing 21 stages and logging a total of 2,082 miles.

It’s a heck of a course on a bike. But what if you were to try to make the trek on foot?

Sounds crazy, but one British runner has done just that. On May 19, Peter Thompson, of Bournemouth, England, set out to run the exact entirety of the Tour’s course. On Wednesday, after 68 days of running, he finished it successfully—three days ahead of schedule (The cyclists will finish their race on July 29).

Thompson is the second person to run the Tour’s entire course. American runner Zoe Romano became the first to do so in 2013.

Testing running boundaries isn’t something new for Thompson. After scoring a 2:25 marathon PB, he hit a running block. He spent every second of his day obsessing over times, his training, and what he was eating.

“I stopped enjoying running,” Thompson says. “I needed a break.”

He decided it wasn’t so much that he needed to stop running, but that he needed to find a different direction for it—Thompson wanted the focus to be less about times, and more about the pure joy of pounding the pavement every day.

So he devised his first challenge: running a marathon in every European country on consecutive days. Thompson ran a marathon every day for 44 days in each one of the 44 countries in Europe, and donated the $25,000 he raised for mental health support and awareness. He finished that challenge about a year ago.

Thompson enjoyed exploring Europe in such an atypical way, and was touched by all of the people he encountered who ran with and supported him throughout the journey. When the time came to come up with a next test, he immediately thought of the Tour.

“I love the Tour de France,” Thompson says. “I’ve been following it the last four years. It’s just an iconic event. I love the scenery that the route goes through, and I love the teamwork involved.”