Run, Eddie, run

Actor and superior-grade comedian
Eddie Izzard can add “athlete” and
potentially “politician” to his C.V.

FISMARATHON MAN: Eddie Izzard

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“Compared to Terry Fox,” says Eddie Izzard, “I did absolute rubbish. He, with one prosthetic leg, ran 143 marathons in 143 days. So everything compared to him is just a pale imitation.”

The British stand-up comedian and actor is being unduly humble. Last year, to raise money for Sport Relief (an offshoot of the charity project Comic Relief), Izzard—known for his ruthlessly elegant cross-dressing rather than any cross-training—ran 43 marathons in 51 days.

“They asked people who are well-known in the U.K., but not sportsmen, do you want to do something? If sportsmen do amazing, sporty things, no one quite cares so much. But if non-sporty people do it, they go, ‘Wow, how did that happen?’ I’m quite a determined idiot, so I just set this up and off I went.”

Now Izzard is contemplating entering the grueling Ironman Triathlon. “I’d already made this joke that I was going to be in peak fitness at 90, as something to aim for. And I saw a guy of 80 on television who’d completed the Ironman. If he’s doing it at 80, we can do more than we think we can do. The logic is, if we’re going to live to 100, and a lot of us are, we’ve got to get out and train as if we’re eating, as if we’re breathing. Then the last 30 years of your life could well be very active, as opposed to getting more and more sedentary.

“We are not designed for cake, watching telly, Playstation or loads of stuff we do. Five million years of development in these bodies, 2,000 years of putting on shoes. We’re designed for barefoot running and hunting wild animals. When we were kids, we ran about, and when we’re adults, we sit in an office—we made that up. Our bodies and our histories did not. Our history says, keep fighting and being a warrior and killing those animals so you can eat and fighting off the other tribes—because unfortunately we have this tribalism thing that seems to go with us. It’s better that we work away from the tribalism, but I think we need to keep the hunter-gatherer ethos up.”

Civilized behaviour

Marathons aren’t the only kind of running Izzard has planned, and his dislike of tribalism is a key factor here. “I announced two years ago in Newsweek that I would run [for office] in 10 to 15 years, so I’ve decided now that in about 10 years from now, I’m going to run, I’ve been telling them in the U.K. So yeah, I will stand. I definitely will do an election, and it will probably be for the European Parliament or Mayor of London.”

Izzard, whose elaborate and often improvisational comedy routines draw heavily on historical facts and foolishness, hustles tirelessly for the recently trounced Labour Party in the U.K. He’s also a longstanding advocate of the European Union, one of the first people to spend a euro in London (“I went over to France, got some euros, came back on the Eurostar train and bought tickets for my own show for my stepmother”).

While hardly an unreconstructed Marxist (“I believe in people setting up their own businesses. I have my own business, which is me. I export myself around the world”), Izzard’s astute perception of politics and economics, the latter of great interest to the one-time accounting and financial management student, is founded in a simple but firm belief in a level playing field.

“I think everyone in the world, 6.5 billion people, would say, we want everyone else to have a fair chance, and if people don’t want other people to have a fair chance, then they’re obviously Nazis. Or extreme left-wingers of some type. But probably Nazis.”

“Everyone wants a fair deal, and if we’re going to do that, we have to get the continents working together in as fair a way as possible. We in Europe are the most set up, in the fact that we used to fight each other and be very separate, separate languages and all that, and we’ve been choosing since 1945 to come together to work in a club, to have rules, to take down barriers. We either join this thing, get in there and make it work, or we forget it, and then I don’t think civilization moves forward. Civilization has got to be about trying to get a fair deal for everyone in the world. That’s why I’m so passionate about it—because it’s just logical. It’s what humans do.”