William Goodge - In The Beginning

If you want to understand the remarkable man William Goodge has become — not simply what he has achieved, but what drives him, what built him — watch this episode of PRESS RECORD.

This is a story about how loss can change us, not only for the better, but forever.

Join Phil and Will as they sit down as friends and look back at the chaos of that first John O’Groats to Land’s End run they filmed together — the unlikely journey that became the seed for everything William has achieved since.

That original film, An Act of Will, is now available on YouTube for the first time, here on PRESS RECORD.

▶ WATCH AN ACT OF WILL HERE: [INSERT YOUTUBE LINK]

In The Beginning there was Loss.

Before the records, before the extraordinary distances, before Will Goodge became one of the world’s most recognisable endurance runners, there was a young man trying to understand the death of his mother.

And he ran.

IN THE BEGINNING brings the original film into a new conversation, allowing Will today to encounter the younger man he once was — his words, his pain, his determination and the questions he was only beginning to ask.

Together we explore what happened next.

Why does someone continue to seek suffering when suffering is no longer necessary?

What happens when the thing that saved you becomes the thing that defines you?

Can loneliness become a source of strength?

And after unimaginable loss, is it possible that what remains is not pain at all — but love?

But this isn't really a film about endurance.

It's about a son and his mother.

It's about friendship, masculinity, loneliness, self-destruction, joy, purpose and the strange things human beings discover about themselves when they keep putting one foot in front of the other.

What makes this episode of PRESS RECORD different is that neither Will nor I is looking at his story from the outside.

We were there at the beginning.

The archive becomes a third voice in the conversation — sometimes contradicting memory, sometimes illuminating it, and sometimes allowing the man Will has become to look directly at the boy who began running all those years ago.

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