A CHARITY fundraiser who ran 40 marathons in 40 days with a 42 kilo fridge strapped to his back has learned he was running with a broken leg.

Scans showed that Tony Phoenix-Morrison had fractured his femur ten days into his endurance run from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

The 49-year-old granddad, from Hebburn, South Tyneside, who has raised £90,000 for The Sir Bobby Robson Foundation, went for emergency tests following this year’s Great North Run, days after completing his challenge.

He had woken up the morning after the half marathon with excruciating pain in his back and leg, and found he could not walk.

Scans showed that he had fractured his femur early on in his endurance challenge, which meant he had run about 30 of the marathons with a broken leg.

He said: “It never ceases to amaze me how painful the fridge is to carry about.

“You don’t get used to it. It is traumatic.”

But despite his injury, he has now revealed plans to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa with a fridge on his back.

Mr Phoenix-Morrison, known as Tony the Fridge, said: “I want to do Kilimanjaro with the fridge, great fun.

“As soon as I can convince them that I will get to the top and back down again I’ll be doing Kilimanjaro. The most fun one that I want to do is The Great Wall of China.”

In a BBC documentary, Inside Out North-East and Cumbria, tonight (Monday, October 28) he talks about what motivates him to keep undertaking gruelling challenges.

He said: “It’s not really about the fridge. It’s about a burden. I felt the loss of the people that I love to cancer. I felt the burden of that, I still do.

“When you have people taken from you through illness or sudden death it stays with you forever and I’ve always been carrying that burden.”

He also describes the death of his father in a car crash when he was aged 12 as a defining moment in his life.

Mr Phoenix-Morrison said: “This one day I just started running, and I ran and ran all the way to Hexham 30 miles to where I used to camp with my father.

“The feeling I got when running was that I wasn’t anywhere, I never knew where I was going I didn’t consider that and I didn’t want to look back at where I’d been so I kind of lived in the now.”

The programme will be broadcast on BBC ONE North-East and Cumbria at 7.30pm.