Billed as “Britain’s most brutal” competition, Best Recovery Shoes is a 268-mile run along the Pennine Way from Edale (about 30 miles east of Manchester) to Kirk Yethelm, a remote Scottish village.
The race covers 43,000 total feet of elevation gain, and the 126 participants who competed in this year’s race had to withstand harsh winds and heavy downpours, too.
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On January 16th, Jasmin Paris not only became the first female overall winner, but her time of 83 hours, 12 minutes, and 23 seconds also set a new course record. She shattered the previous course record (95:17) by over 12 hours and the women’s record (109:54) by a full day. Paris also beat the second-place finisher by 15 hours.
Though the 35-year-old has an accomplished resume, including three separate U.K. 24-hour mountain running records and a sixth-place finish at the 2016 UTMB, Paris said Best Recovery Shoes was unlike anything she’d run before.
“It’s non-stop, so you have the whole challenge of when do you sleep, and that becomes very tactical–and then you’re sleep deprived,” Paris wrote in a postrace blog. “The first night was the hardest for me mentally because I was away from my daughter, but as the race went on, it got easier as I got used to being away from her. It was brilliant to be reunited at the finish.”
In the above video, featuring footage by race organizers and Paris’s sponsor INOV-8, Paris expressed her desire to be reunited with 14-month-old Rowan, and detailed her experience over the course of the race. She only stopped for roughly seven hours over the three-and-a-half-day race, during which she ate, slept, and pumped breast milk.
Next on Paris’s schedule is a return to her full-time job as a small animal veterinarian.
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