CARRYING MORE THAN A FRIDGE

Published: 14/10/2026 | By: Alex Courbat

You probably saw the clip. Jordan Adams crosses the London Marathon finish line with a 25kg fridge strapped to his back, and everything he’s been holding in comes pouring out in front of the whole world. It looks like an overnight success. The kind of thing that happens in an instant, when the right camera catches the right moment and the internet does what the internet does. Except this moment had been eight years in the making. Eight years of cold mornings, credit cards, heartbreak and a frankly unreasonable amount of stubborn belief. This is what it cost to get there.

There are easier ways to run the London Marathon. Jordan Adams could have just pinned on his number, pulled on his trainers and blended into the tens of thousands of runners streaming through the capital. Instead, he put a fridge on his back, and the world stopped to watch, wondering why. 

The answer starts long before that start line. His mum, Geraldine, was diagnosed with a rare form of familial frontotemporal dementia in 2010, when Jordan was 15. He spent the next six years helping to care for her, watching the beating heart of his family be stripped of everything that made her who she was. She died in 2016, aged 52.

Two years later, Jordan learned that he carries the same genetic mutation. The future, which should have felt wide open for a young man in his twenties, suddenly came with a question hanging over it. Running was already his refuge by then, but this story is told elsewhere. This is what happened when it became something more: a way of speaking for his family, and of making people listen. 

It all started small, at least by Jordan’s standards. He put his name down for the London Marathon with Alzheimer’s Research UK, then Covid cancelled it. For most people, that would have been that. The race was off; the plan could wait. Jordan couldn’t. He mapped out a marathon around Redditch instead, with socially distanced supporters waiting at checkpoints along the route. It wasn’t the London Marathon he’d imagined, but he ran it anyway. And once he’d started, stopping wasn’t really in his nature. 

In 2022, he ran seven marathons in seven days, from Redditch to London along the Grand Union Canal. It was a challenge his dad paid for out of his own pocket, and it raised more than £18,000. Jordan was also beginning to speak at conferences, taking his family’s story to anyone who’d give him a microphone. Slowly, something that had once felt like the cruellest thing that could happen to a family was becoming a reason to get out of bed, lace up and do something useful.  

For a while, it felt like he’d managed to turn his circumstances on their head. He had a cause, a growing platform and a way to help other people. Perhaps, for the first time since losing his mum, the pain was leading somewhere. It lasted six months. 

Then his younger brother Cian learned that he was a carrier too, and the ground shifted all over again. All the work Jordan had done to turn their family’s experience into something positive suddenly sat alongside the knowledge that the same disease could one day affect his brother. There was no neat way to make sense of that. “The further we’ve got away from my mum living with and passing from dementia,” Jordan says, “the closer we’ve each got to living with it ourselves.”  

The implications were enormous, and painfully ordinary at the same time. Relationships. Mortgages. Insurance. A dad who could lose both his sons, and a sister who could lose both her brothers. All the things people assume they’ll have time to figure out suddenly carried a different weight. Nobody knew how Cian would take the news, or what the future would look like for either of them. 

The answer arrived in May 2023, in the form of one giant text message. Cian wanted to take things to the next level. They’d become the FTD Brothers, share their story online, get the media interested and run the entire length of the UK. Not a local loop or a week of marathons this time. The whole country. 

Their dad was hesitant, which isn’t like him. But he could see what the idea would demand: time off work, money they didn’t necessarily have and a logistical operation that would make a normal fundraising challenge look like a Sunday jog. 

So Jordan texted the one man in his phone book he reckoned was mad enough to back it: Nigel Watson, a local legend in Redditch and a former international athlete who has taken on the Marathon des Sables, one of the hardest foot races on earth. Jordan knew the idea needed someone who could look at an undertaking of that size and see a way through it. If Nigel hesitated, he thought, the whole thing might never get off the ground. 

They met at a café on a Saturday morning. Hesitate? By the time Jordan arrived, Nigel had already printed 31 routes for 31 days, covering the length of the UK. 

Thirty-one. 

Jordan had arrived with an idea that might have sounded completely unhinged on paper. Nigel had arrived with the beginnings of a plan. He’d also approached local businesses about sponsoring a day each and sketched out how they might actually pull it off. Suddenly, this wasn’t just two brothers talking about doing something extraordinary. It was something they could start building. “From there,” Jordan says, “we never looked back.” 

There was still the small matter of actually running it. The glamorous version of this story starts with a fridge. The real one starts with a plan on a café table and a full-time job painting and decorating that still had to be turned up to. 

Jordan trained through early mornings, late nights and every kind of weather. The hours that might have gone on seeing his mates or spending time with his partner went on miles instead. There were no cameras waiting at the end of those training sessions, no crowds cheering him through the difficult bits, no viral clip to make any of it look worthwhile. Just the work, the weather and the reason he kept showing up. 

And he’d be taking Cian with him, a lad who, when the plan was hatched, had never run further than a half marathon in his life. The prospect of tackling the length of the UK together was daunting enough physically. Emotionally, it meant something else entirely. Their mum had been taken by this disease, and now the two of them were building a campaign around it, knowing it could one day come for them too. They couldn’t change the genetics. They could change what they did with the time they had. 

The target they set themselves was £100,000, for a cause whose first five years of fundraising had added up to a little over £30,000. It was an ambitious leap, but by now ambition was becoming something of a habit. 

In April 2024, the brothers ran the London Marathon together, a stepping stone on the way to something much longer. Then, in July, Jordan went looking for a head start. He ran 100 miles in 24 hours around Arrow Valley Lake in Redditch, with anyone who fancied it welcome to join him for a lap. It was another chance to raise money, get people involved and give the brothers the best possible shot at that £100,000 target. 

It worked. By the time they stood at John O’Groats on day one, they’d already raised more than £50,000. Half the target, before the main event had even begun. 

Then came the main event: from the top of Scotland to the tip of Cornwall, 903 miles in 31 days, including 28 consecutive ultramarathons. For Cian, that meant close to 30 miles a day. There is something almost absurd about that distance when you stop to think about it. Thirty miles is a big day on foot for anyone. To get up and do it again the next morning, and the morning after that, while telling your family’s story and trying to raise six figures, requires a particular kind of determination. 

They finished, in Jordan’s words, with “a nice little taper” into Land’s End, having raised more than £100,000. The understatement is almost funny. They’d run the length of the country, appeared on BBC Breakfast four times and reached an audience far bigger than the 6,000 followers they’d started with. Back in Redditch, the community that had sponsored their days had rallied behind them. What had begun as a message on a phone had become a national campaign. 

Most people would have called that a finish line. Jordan came off the road with something else: an overwhelming belief that he needed to keep going and make this his life’s work. 

Two days later, he posted a video telling the whole family story. It took off. The audience grew, and so did the possibilities. Suddenly, people who had never heard of the FTD Brothers were hearing about Geraldine, their family’s experience of dementia and the genetic risk hanging over the brothers themselves.  

By Christmas, they’d raised just short of a quarter of a million pounds in a single year. It was an extraordinary result. It was also, for Jordan, a reason to ask what more he could do. The response had shown him that people wanted to hear this story, and that telling it could make a real difference. The question was how far he could take it. So, naturally, he came up with another idea. 

The weekend before Christmas, he would run for 72 hours around his local athletics track: 982 laps, one for every thousand of the 982,000 people living with dementia in the UK, the equivalent of 245 miles in three days. He describes it, simply, as “mental”. 

It sounds mental, too. Jordan slept in his best friend’s campervan beside the track, with no showers and no clean water. It was so cold that he ended up running the perimeter rather than the track itself. The hours dragged on, the conditions took their toll, and his body began to show the cost. By the time he’d got 455 laps in, he was completely exhausted and his wounds were close to infection. 

The challenge was supposed to be about pushing through, but there comes a point when pushing through isn’t quite enough. So the brothers opened it up to the community that had backed them all year. And they came through. 

They travelled from Newcastle, Bristol and London to take laps off him. Not just to stand on the sidelines, clap and tell him he was doing a good job, but to get out there and help. After a year of asking strangers to care about their story, Jordan now had strangers turning up in the freezing cold to carry some of the distance for him. 

He calls it the most beautiful moment of the whole journey. It’s easy to see why. For years, he had been trying to turn something devastatingly personal into something that could help other people. Here, in the cold beside a local athletics track, that effort came back to him in the most tangible way. People had heard the story. They understood what it meant. And they wanted to be part of it. By the end, they’d passed a quarter of a million pounds. 

A couple of days later, he sat down with his wife and told her he was going to quit his job to become the first full-time dementia advocate. It wasn’t much of a discussion. 

The decision sounds bold, even romantic, until you look at what it actually meant. Jordan calls 2025 “the year of delusional belief”, and he’s blunt about why. He had to sacrifice everything. He was already in quite a large amount of debt. He slept on hostel floors, put train fares on credit cards and spent every spare hour making content and travelling to events to meet the right people. There was no guarantee that any of it would pay off. 

His wife covered the bills and the mortgage for the best part of the year so he could take the risk. His dad, who’d already funded that first big challenge, sacrificed almost everything to keep the mission moving. Jordan was the one running the miles, but he was never the only one paying for them. 

Behind every challenge was somebody else giving something up. Behind every fundraising total was a family trying to make an uncertain future mean something. 

Slowly, the gamble started to pay off. Sports Direct was one of the first companies to get behind the brothers, giving them the chance to tell their story in full through marathons around the world. Other brands followed, and in August Jordan set up the FTD Brothers Foundation, built to outlast any single partnership. The aim was to create something with a life of its own, a way to keep helping families and raising awareness long after any individual challenge had finished. 

Then came the next idea – the idea: 32 marathons in 32 days across Ireland, to honour their heritage and the 12 Irish relatives the family had lost. 

By this point, Jordan had learned something about getting people to pay attention. The miles mattered, the money mattered, but so did finding a way to make people stop scrolling and ask a question. They’d gone from a local marathon to the length of the UK, from a frozen athletics track to an audience that stretched far beyond anything the brothers could have imagined. Now they needed a way to bring even more people into the story.  

That’s where the fridge came in. 

They’d been offered another London Marathon place for 2026, and it felt like the perfect launch pad. They would start in London, then take everyone who was watching with them to Ireland. Jordan wanted as many eyes and ears on the story as possible, and his mind went back to being a young man in front of the telly, full of excitement, watching someone on Tower Bridge being interviewed with a household appliance on his back. 

He’d been in awe of what that person was willing to do for charity. Years later, with a cause of his own and a bigger audience to reach, the memory came back. Why not test himself the same way? 

There was no grand symbolism at first. It was a bit of PR. A fridge on your back is hard to ignore. People are going to ask why on earth you’re doing it, and once they’re asking, you’ve got a chance to tell them. That was the point. 

So, from the start of 2026, Jordan got to work once more. He lived in the gym, clocked endless hours on a bike and walked around Redditch with a weighted backpack. In the build-up to the London Marathon, he did five Sunday long runs with the actual fridge strapped to his back. Passers-by looked at him “like I was a psychopath”. 

You can imagine the scene: an ordinary Sunday, an ordinary street in Redditch, and a man running past with a fridge strapped to him. It takes a certain level of commitment not to feel self-conscious doing that. Jordan did it anyway. 

All of it was preparation for one very public test. On Sunday 26 April 2026, Jordan would take that same 25kg fridge to the start line of the TCS London Marathon, with the hope that the spectacle would draw people towards the story behind it. The training had been relentless, but the opportunity was enormous – and nothing would get in his way.  

By the time race day arrived, though, he was running on less than he might have liked. He’d spent the preceding week driving donations and attention towards the cause, trying to make the most of the chance ahead. When he reached the start line in Blackheath and finally put the fridge on his back, he was more exhausted than he’d ever been at the beginning of a race. 

And now there was no more training to do, no more preparation to hide behind. It was time to run. Thank goodness for Cian.  

The first mile got warm quickly, and Cian took great delight in dousing his brother with water. He helped him through the aid stations, fetching water and keeping him going as the miles passed. It was practical support, but it was also something more. This was the brother who’d sent the message that changed the direction of their lives, the brother who’d taken on the length of the UK alongside him, now right there as Jordan attempted something that had seemed ridiculous when it was first imagined. 

Years earlier, his crowd had been a few socially distanced supporters at checkpoints on a route he’d mapped himself. Now two brothers who carry the gene behind their mum’s dementia were being cheered through the capital in her memory.

He felt good until halfway. Crossing Tower Bridge, he turned to Cian and admitted it was getting hard, partly blaming himself for having filmed and edited a reel on the bridge, which sent his heart rate soaring at exactly the wrong moment. From there, Cian and the crowd carried him. Runners passing by told him what he was doing was incredible, even while running their own marathons. In the quieter stretches, he thought about the road behind him: his mum, the difficult years and a version of himself who had once been consumed by all of it. He held back tears, and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

At mile 23, the cramp arrived though – and stretching out with 25kg on your back is no joke. He stood at the roadside. There was never any doubt he’d finish, he says. Cian helped him find the motivation for the final stretch, even reminding him, in the politest terms, of his podgy school days to get him gritting his teeth.

Then somebody reached out with a gel. Jordan told Cian to grab it. Of all the things a stranger could press into your hand at mile 23, it was a cramp killer. The timing was almost comically perfect. The pain eased, his legs let go, and the last stretch opened up in front of them. 

The noise rose one more time, that same wall of sound. Two brothers, side by side, one with a fridge on his back and the other lifting him in every way that mattered. Behind them, a canal, a country, a frozen athletics track and years of early mornings, credit cards and hostel floors. Ahead of them, the Mall, and the line. 

They crossed it together. And everything came pouring out. 

For anyone watching, it might have looked like the culmination of an extraordinary race. For Jordan and Cian, it was something much bigger. Years of grief, fear, frustration and determination seemed to converge in that moment. He had spent so long trying to turn his family’s experience into something positive, often wondering whether anyone was really listening. Now, as he crossed the line with his brother beside him, it felt as though the world finally was. 

The clip went viral, and it travelled. In an instant, an image of two brothers and a fridge was in front of people across the UK and far beyond it, people who had never heard of familial frontotemporal dementia, or of the two brothers from Redditch who’d spent years trying to make them look. 

There was little time to sit with what had happened, though. The next day, Jordan was running again, this time in Ireland, a marathon a day in each of the island’s 32 counties. The viral moment that looked like an ending to millions of people was, for Jordan, another starting point.  

The fridge had begun as a stunt, a ridiculous object designed to make people look twice. It did exactly that. But somewhere along the way, it became something more.  

For him, that weight was the years spent caring for his mum, losing her and trying to find a way forward with the knowledge of what his own future might hold. It was the grief he’d had to live with, the uncertainty he’d had to learn to live alongside and the determination to do something useful with both. The fridge came to represent the emotional burden he’d carried for so long, a burden that many people recognise in their own lives, whether through mental health struggles or the difficulty of navigating a family affected by dementia. 

Perhaps that’s why the image resonated so widely. People saw a man carrying an absurdly heavy object, but they also saw something familiar: the effort of carrying on when life gives you more than you know how to bear. You didn’t need to know Jordan’s story to understand the image. But once you asked why, you could begin to understand the person beneath it.  

The fridge made people listen. But it was never the story.  

The story was a teenager who lost his mum, two brothers who decided to confront an uncertain future together, a family that sacrificed to keep a mission alive and a community that chose to help carry the load.   

It was a dad willing to back an ambitious idea, a wife willing to shoulder the financial pressure, a friend who turned up with a plan and strangers who arrived in the cold to take a few laps. It was eight years of work that had brought Jordan to one extraordinary finish line, and a lifetime of experience that had given the moment its meaning. 

 And the story is still being written. The foundation was built to outlast any single partnership, and the challenges are a means to something bigger: raising money, making dementia visible and bringing hope to families who know what it means to live with the uncertainty Jordan and Cian face. The running will continue, but so will the work that happens when the running stops. 

25kg was never the true weight of everything they’ve been through.

It was one more step in the right direction in a race against time. 

The fridge made people look. Jordan’s story gave them a reason to stay. 

There will be many more challenges, many more ups and many more downs. But just like in London and throughout their lives one thing’s for sure – The FTD Brothers won’t back down. And their story won’t be forgotten.

The FTD Brothers aren't finished yet.