In an exclusive interview, the first woman to complete the Barkley Marathons explains how she beat the 100-mile course
she became the first woman to complete the race widely seen as the most devilish, daunting, and toughest of them all. “I felt I was going to reach the finishing gate, or collapse right in front of it. There was a tunnel of roars on either side. But I couldn’t focus. It was all a bit blurry.”
There is no time for sleep either – save for a three-minute power nap before the last of the five loops – which unsurprisingly led to hallucinations. “I saw quite a lot of people in black macintoshes,” she says. “They were climbing the same hill as me, always a certain distance ahead. And it was bizarre, they all had a sinister foreboding feel to them.
“It’s the toughest thing I have ever done. Afterwards I just dropped. I needed to breathe for five minutes hard before I corrected because I’ve never been so oxygen deficient.”Along the way she fuelled with pasta, porridge, rice pudding and her secret weapon – bananas. “Bananas are the one thing that really works for me when I’m doing these crazy long things,” she says.
This is the second time Paris has made global headlines, having become the first woman to win outright the gruelling 268-mile Montane Spine Race, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish borders, in 2019. So what compels her to continually probe the boundaries of the possible?“I still find it really exciting to push myself, especially when I don’t know whether I can do something,” she says.
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