Alex Page is willing to do nearly anything to see the world, including signing up for a marathon with just 24 days’ notice in order to visit North Korea.
Speaking to PEOPLE from Kazakhstan, the 23-year-old recounts how he came to run a marathon in the East Asian country in July 2025.
He says he first heard about the marathon through one of his extreme traveling groups. A few people in the group had visited every country except North Korea and were looking for a way to cross it off their list.
While at a hostel in Mongolia, Page met a man who was part of the first tour into North Korea after the country reopened in February 2025. Intrigued, Page decided to figure out how to get there himself.
Once it seemed feasible, he figured out the logistics, working with a travel company to get approved for the marathon. Since Americans can’t visit North Korea with a United States passport, Page tells PEOPLE he used his dual citizenship as a Mexican citizen to obtain visas and approvals.
“I found out I needed a visa to China as well, because the only flights to North Korea go from Beijing, or there’s a couple in Russia, but the only popular one is through Beijing to Pyongyang,” Page shares. “I needed a Chinese visa to go back from North Korea into China from there.”
“There were so many questions of: ‘Is this even possible? Am I gonna get flagged for making content? Am I going to get flagged for being American? Am I gonna be flagged for not having a visa to China?'” he recalls.
On top of the stressful travel arrangements, Page also had to think about training.
“At that time, I was in decent marathon shape,” he says. However, training for a marathon while backpacking in Europe is a much different experience.
“I honestly don’t really know how I did it,” he says. “Mixing travel with actually exercising and my job of content, then all those, it’s like so hard to do at once.”
Photo of North Korea.
Alex Page
In his video about the marathon, Page showed himself training in heavy winter jackets while staying in Russia, sometimes with the weather dropping 30 degrees below zero.
Then, it came time to put his efforts to the test.
Actually running the race was the “single craziest experience of my life,” Page shares. “It felt like we were the star athletes in the Olympics, which is wild because I’m like an amateur runner going to do this.”
The race started in a stadium, packed to the brim with spectators, who Page says were “doing synchronized claps and chants.”
“Then the professional North Korean runners came out all in uniform, all extremely muscular. They were almost all in flat shoes that looked pretty normal. Then they ran a 2:25 marathon time,” Page shares.
Alex Page in North Korea.
Alex Page
“The race started, everyone cheered, and we went off after the opening ceremony, and then within a mile, all the pro runners were completely gone,” Page recalls. “The biggest part of this whole experience was the spectators, because there were thousands and thousands of North Koreans coming to watch this race lined up on the sidelines.”
Page was high-fiving the people on the sidelines, noting that they were just as surprised to see him there as he was to be there.
“There are no foreigners that live there, other than a few embassy workers. It is extremely rare, and especially for kids who are under 6, they had never seen a foreigner because [the country] was closed,” Page explains.
He notes that the people “were so excited and so smiley and the energy was infectious” during the race.
“The first half of the course had a ton of spectators. Then I hit the marathon wall and was very far outside the city,” he continues. “The course was an out-and-back, and so it was probably at mile 17 or 18, most of the back half of the course, for 10 miles, I was completely alone. I didn’t see any other runners.”
He notes that there “were only 26 foreign participants in the full marathon,” and he “was the only American to have competed.”
Alex Page’s picture of North Korea.
Alex Page
“While I’m in this state of mind with almost no other people around, it was such a surreal experience to see all the different buildings. It could not be replicated in almost anywhere else in the world,” Page says.
Page ended up finishing with a time of 3:51. In total, he spent six days in the country, the day he flew in, the day he ran the marathon and four additional days of exploring different parts of Pyongyang with a tour group.
“Pyongyang to me was an awesome city, it was very nice,” he says.
“Relatively speaking, the marathon felt pretty normal, which is why it was an even more interesting experience,” he adds. “Our hosts were so nice to us. It was a really interesting trip.”
He also notes that they “had no problems with us filming almost anywhere.”
City in North Korea.
Alex Page
While he “ran all over the city,” he made it clear that there’s “a very big distinction with what we got to see, and the rest of North Korea.”
“If you leave the city, you need permits. If you’re North Korean and you come into the city, you need permits,” he explains. “We saw the Pyongyang people, the Pyongyang part of North Korea, [which is] so different from what the rest of the country is like.”
The marathon is just part of Page’s TikTok series, where he documents his travels to unexplored and off-the-beaten-path places. So far, he has visited 43 countries and hopes to visit all 195. With the marathon, he crossed one of the hardest countries to visit, North Korea, off his list.
Recently, he says he “spent a lot of time” in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, and then went up through China, Mongolia, Russia, North Korea, South Korea and Japan.
“Every country has something so interesting and worth visiting,” Page shares. “Some have higher barriers than others, and I’ve been really interested in finding cool stuff that other people aren’t doing.”
His advice for those who want to follow in his footsteps is to explore places different from where they grew up.
“If you haven’t really been outside the U.S. much, it’s absolutely worth doing,” he says. “I’ve learned some of the best life lessons that I could have never learned from school. Especially a level of being self-sufficient and independent.”
”When you come back from a trip, especially if you dive into the culture for multiple months, [you become] so much more of an interesting person.”