THE RUN WITHIN WITH JORDAN ADAMS 

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

Jordan Adams never set out to be a runner. He just needed to catch a bus. But when he lost his mum slowly, over six years, and his own future came with a question mark, running became the place he could finally put it all down. This Jordan’s story – the story of why he runs.

Every Wednesday, while he was at college, Jordan Adams looked after his mum in the morning. A carer was due at ten. His bus left at quarter past. The nearest stop was two miles away. If the carer was five minutes late, as happened often enough, Jordan was left with ten or fifteen minutes to get there. So he ran. 

There was no watch strapped to his wrist, no split times to chase, no carefully chosen trainers or training plan. Just a teenager hurtling down the road, heart in his throat, trying to beat a bus. And he remembers the feeling more than the distance – the thud of his heartbeat, the burn in his lungs, the strange electricity of asking his body to go faster than it wanted to and discovering that it could. Then came the relief of reaching the stop with seconds to spare, lungs heaving, adrenaline fizzing through him. At the time, it was simply a means of getting somewhere. 

Years later, he would realise that something had begun on those roads. Running had arrived in his life almost by accident, before he knew he needed it. Long before it became a way to raise money, tell his family's story or make people listen, it was simply a feeling: the sensation of moving forward when everything else in his life felt increasingly beyond his control. "That dash to get the bus was all ultimately the start of that feeling of how exhilarating running can feel," he says. It would be a long time before he understood just how much that feeling would come to hold. 

Running was never an obvious fit for Jordan. At school, he was more likely to have a ball at his feet than be pounding along a road. In football pre-season, he was usually at the back of the pack, a self-confessed "pudgy lad" who loved playing but had little interest in chasing people around a field. He was sporty, just not in that way. Growing up in Redditch, he wanted to have a go at everything: basketball, cricket, rugby, football, whatever he could chance his arm at. He was competitive, loved being part of a team and, more often than not, found his way into the side. His mum and dad, Geraldine and Glenn, would come to watch him after school, shouting him on from the sidelines. Sport was part of the rhythm of family life. So was his mum. 

Geraldine was impossible to miss. She was outgoing, generous and endlessly sociable, the sort of person who could talk to anybody and somehow make them feel as though they had known each other for years. She loved people, and people loved her back. When Jordan talks about her, the memories come in flashes – Craig David playing in the car when she picked him up from school, conversations with other mums on the playground, dancing around the kitchen. She was the beating heart of a family that had no reason to imagine it would one day have to learn how to live without her. 

Jordan’s childhood was full of love. His parents were there. His siblings were there. There were games to go to, family life to be lived, ordinary days that felt permanent because nobody had yet given them a reason to believe otherwise. Then Geraldine began to change. The woman who had never stopped talking grew quieter. Long spells of low mood appeared. Her memory began to slip. Glenn started making calls and chasing answers, and on 23 June 2010, after a long stretch of uncertainty, Geraldine was diagnosed with a rare form of familial frontotemporal dementia. She was 47. Jordan was 15, his sister Kennedy was 17 and his brother Cian was nine. 

That evening, their dad sat the three of them down and told them that their mum was going to be taken from them, and that all of them would have to play a part in caring for her. Imagine being 15 and hearing that. Jordan knew almost nothing about dementia. He felt hopeless. At night, he would lie in bed crying and praying that his mum would make it to his 21st birthday. His dad had given the family a window of six to ten years, and in Jordan's teenage mind that meant something relatively simple: she might lose her memory, but she would still be his mum. 

The reality was far more cruel. Over the next six years, he watched the woman who had made his childhood so bright be stripped of everything that made her who she was, until she could no longer walk or talk. While his friends made plans for the weekend, Jordan knew he needed to be home. When they began talking about university, he put the idea aside so he could spend more time with his mum, even though she was no longer the healthiest version of herself. "It forces you to grow up quickly," he says. It also rearranges what you think matters. And it changes how grief works. You begin mourning someone while they are still in the room, still your mum, still there and not there at the same time. That kind of loss does not arrive in one devastating moment. It comes slowly, over years, and it tests everyone in the house. Geraldine died in 2016, aged 52. 

Somewhere in the middle of those years, running had begun to find its way into Jordan's life. In 2015, while he was still caring for his mum, he signed up for the Birmingham Half Marathon. This time there was a reason to run. He wanted to honour Geraldine and raise money for Dementia UK and the Admiral Nurses who had supported the family. He finished the race and promptly wondered how anybody could possibly decide to turn around and do the whole thing again. The irony was not lost on him. 

After that, running went back to the edges of his life for a while. But once his mum was gone everything changed. He got a place in the London Marathon with Alzheimer's Research UK, and a family friend printed him a 16-week training plan from a PDF, which Jordan followed religiously. It was not glamorous. There was grim weather, difficult days and plenty of mornings when motivation simply wasn't there. Then Covid cancelled the official race, and he refused to let all that work disappear. He mapped out his own route around Redditch and ran the distance anyway, with socially distanced supporters waiting at checkpoints. He was shattered by the end, but the good feelings outweighed the pain "tenfold", and that, he says, is what he clung to. 

By then, running was no longer simply exercise. It was becoming a place. After losing his mum, Jordan buried his head in it. "It was a perfect kind of escapism for me," he says. "It was a place that I could go and switch off from all that turmoil and all that chaos that was in my own life." 

It did not make the grief disappear. It did not bring her back, or undo six years of watching, or make sense of what had happened to his family. But running gave him a rare stretch of time in which nobody needed anything from him. There was just the road, his breathing and the rhythm of his feet. For someone who had spent so long holding everyone else up, here was somewhere to put it all down. He could decide when to start. He could decide where to go. He could keep going when it hurt. He could stop when he needed to. For those miles, at least, the future could not reach him. 

But the future kept coming. Two years after Geraldine's death, Kennedy decided to be tested for the genetic mutation behind the disease, and she got the all clear. It was the first good news the family had had in about a decade. Jordan had always been adamant that he did not want to know. He wanted to put it all in a box and leave it there, because blissful ignorance seemed easier than living with an answer that could change the shape of the rest of his life. But his life was already spiralling. Depression and anxiety had taken hold, and underneath everything sat the same question he had been carrying since he was 15: what happens to me? His sister's courage nudged him towards finding out. 

On 12 September 2018, aged 23, Jordan learned that he carried the genetic mutation that causes familial FTD, the same disease that had taken his mum, and so many other members of his family. He describes it as one of the worst days of his life. Then, not long after, Cian learned he was a carrier too, and the story that Jordan had been trying to turn into something positive became, once more, a family's shared weight. 

That’s also when something started to shift for Jordan. If running had first given him a way to escape his thoughts, now it gave him a way to face them. He decided he had "a duty to become the person that 15-year-old Jordan, nine-year-old Cian and 17-year-old Kennedy didn't have". He could not change what had happened to his mum. He could not give his younger self a different childhood. He could not remove the uncertainty waiting ahead. But he could decide what he did with the knowledge, and running became part of that decision.  

What had once been a dash to catch a bus became a way of processing grief. Then it became a way of taking control. And gradually, it became something bigger: a way of making people look. Jordan began using the thing that had helped him privately to tell a story publicly. The miles became a message. The challenge became a conversation. Running could raise money, raise awareness and give people who knew nothing about familial FTD a reason to stop and listen.

And yet, for all that running has become, there is still a part of it that Jordan fiercely keeps for himself. The races can be public. The fundraising can be public. The campaigns can be public. But the ordinary run after a bad day is different. Sometimes he simply heads out for twenty minutes because he’s not feeling right. His rule is uncomplicated: give it ten minutes. If he still feels rubbish, turn around. Either way, he has probably done 20 minutes, usually around 5K, and he says he has never once regretted it. 

For years, he deliberately kept that part of running private. It was his space to cope. That has become harder as running and his work have grown more and more intertwined. The thing that once belonged entirely to him is now also how he tells his story and asks other people to care about a disease that has already taken so much from his family. He is honest about that tension, and gentle with himself about it. He is giving himself "a little bit of grace". 

Perhaps that is the most important part of Jordan's relationship with running: it has never been one thing. He describes himself as "a hundred mile an hour", and his life is lived that way because, when he stops, there’s too much time to think about the future and the reality he knows is waiting for him. Running does not make those thoughts disappear. It gives them somewhere to go. The road cannot change his genetics. It cannot give him his mum back. It cannot promise him or his brother more time. But it can give him ten minutes to breathe, to think, to feel everything and then keep moving. 

Running did not arrive in Jordan's life as destiny. It arrived in fragments: a dash for a bus, a half marathon for his mum, a run after a bad day. Somewhere along the way, those fragments became something he could rely on. 

And perhaps that is why he still runs. Not because it has made the uncertainty disappear, but because it has given him a way to live alongside it – privately when he needs to, publicly when it can help someone else. 

He just starts. 

And then he keeps going.