Sharon Gayter has logged more than 24,000 race miles and has set several world records, but she does not plan to stop running any time soon.
The Englishwoman’s latest long-distance test is the Liwa Challenge, an ultra-marathon across 200 kilometres in the desert of Abu Dhabi’s Western Region.
“I started ultra-running with the 24-hour and the 100km races, and when it became easier I wanted to do more than that,” said Gayter, who arrived in Abu Dhabi on Saturday and is among the 60 elite runners who started the inaugural race on Monday.
“In the 24-hour races, there are people around you who can give you anything you need, but here in the middle of the desert you need to think about what you carry. It is a new challenge and I love that feeling.”
Gayter, 51, has competed in several desert races including a 160km event in the Egyptian Western Sahara, a race similar to the Liwa Challenge. She has competed in Morocco, Iceland and Libya, run 250km across the Grand Canyon and taken part in high-altitude races.
Gayter could not run half of a mile prior to taking up running, but she completed the London Marathon 20 years ago and things took off from there.
“I loved that feeling of running further each time I competed the marathon,” she said.
“Prior to that [the London Marathon], I did 17 miles and at that time to do the 26 miles was a challenge.
“Once I did it and when I knew I could do it, I wanted the same feeling – to be challenged further than the distance I ran. I wasn’t fast enough for the marathon, but I could go further and that’s the time I thought ultra-running suited me best.”
Gayter completed a 50-mile race and then a 100-mile race before setting her sights on the 24-hour race.
She entered the Guinness Book of World Records by running the length of Britain, 837 miles (1,347km) from Land’s End to John O’Groats in 12 days, 16 hours and 22.03 minutes on September 15, 2006.
Gayter, a sports science lecturer at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, north-east England, holds the world record for distance running on a treadmill in seven days, covering 517.3 miles in 2011. The previous best was 468 miles set by Lee Chamberlain in 2009.
“The Liwa desert is a different challenge, which is running on soft sand. When I raced in Libya, it was different. It was a mixture of gravel, rocks, sand, and different terrain,” Gayter said.
“This one on soft sand is going to be a lot harder than the other desert races.
“I live near a beach and have been training on the beach, but it’s nothing like the soft sand in the desert. But that’s the nearest I could get.”
There is no prize money in these races – in fact, it costs her money to travel for the races.
“Sometimes my students ask me about the prize money and I tell them if I am lucky I will come back with a little trophy,” she said.
“I have never been to Abu Dhabi and here you get to run, and that’s my challenge. I would never see Abu Dhabi like this without this event going ahead. So that’s what interested me.
“I will try to run non-stop and do it is quick as possible. I am not trying to say that I am fast, but want to do it to the best of my ability.
“The first challenge is to finish, and the next will be if I could challenge the others. The priority, however, is to finish, even if I am last.”
She believes the best part of the challenge is that this terrain is unknown to any of the runners.
“No one has left a benchmark in this race because no one has done it before, so you don’t know how hard it is and you don’t know how draining the sun is going to be,” she said.
“What I have in my head is it will take around a day and a half or two days to complete this race. Each desert race has its unique features. The unique feature here is the sand.”
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