Forget relaxing on holiday; more travellers opting for physically punishing adventures in some of the world’s toughest places.
For Sara Storey, the World’s Highest Marathon offered a chance to do something nobody had attempted before.
“I’ve done quite a few ultramarathons and multi-day races, some of them quite tough, but I’d never experienced an event where so much effort was required even to get to the start,” she said.
She was one of 16 runners who signed up for the World’s Highest Marathon in Chile earlier this year. The 26.2-mile (42.195km) race began on Ojos del Salado, the highest volcano in the world, at an elevation of 6,893m (22,615ft). In extremely low oxygen, temperatures of -30C and winds up to 100km/h (62mph), participants first had to climb for around 11 hours just to reach the start line. Only five made it there – and then came the small matter of completing a marathon at altitude.
“Altogether, I was moving for nearly 30 hours,” she said. “It took so much out of me. I feel that in the battle between the volcano and me, it was a draw, because I’ve never been so close to my physical limits as I was then. Having said that, would I do it again? Absolutely. I want people to see what an ordinary 47-year-old woman can do when she puts her mind to it.”
Forget relaxing on holiday; more travellers opting for physically punishing adventures in some of the world’s toughest places.
For Sara Storey, the World’s Highest Marathon offered a chance to do something nobody had attempted before.
“I’ve done quite a few ultramarathons and multi-day races, some of them quite tough, but I’d never experienced an event where so much effort was required even to get to the start,” she said.
She was one of 16 runners who signed up for the World’s Highest Marathon in Chile earlier this year. The 26.2-mile (42.195km) race began on Ojos del Salado, the highest volcano in the world, at an elevation of 6,893m (22,615ft). In extremely low oxygen, temperatures of -30C and winds up to 100km/h (62mph), participants first had to climb for around 11 hours just to reach the start line. Only five made it there – and then came the small matter of completing a marathon at altitude.
“Altogether, I was moving for nearly 30 hours,” she said. “It took so much out of me. I feel that in the battle between the volcano and me, it was a draw, because I’ve never been so close to my physical limits as I was then. Having said that, would I do it again? Absolutely. I want people to see what an ordinary 47-year-old woman can do when she puts her mind to it.”
At UTMB World Series, one of the world’s leading organisers of trail running and mountain races, business is booming. Since launching with a single race around the Mont Blanc Massif in 2003, it expanded to 25 ultramarathon events in 2022 and now hosts more than 60 races globally. Annual participation has risen from 50,000 in 2022 to 170,000, most of whom aren’t elite athletes but highly committed amateurs.
“People become engineers of themselves for these races,” said Florian Lamblin, executive director of UTMB International and an ultrarunner himself. “They are trying to achieve something complex and, at the end, deliver something extraordinary, which is running up to 30 hours in nature.”
British mountaineer Gavin Bate, founder of specialist adventure travel firm Adventure Alternative, led the logistics for the World’s Highest Marathon. He sees the rise of this kind of travel among non-professional athletes as partly a reflection of advances in training and sports nutrition. But he also believes something deeper is at work.
“It’s about connection with nature – for a lot of people, the gym environment doesn’t really cut it,” he said. “We are living in a world… where we understand the benefit of a connectedness with nature. Many people working in the outdoor adventure sector are experiencing a tsunami of people coming to engage with these activities for mental health reasons.”
Sports psychologist Dr Josephine Perry, who works with extreme endurance athletes, calls them “organised adventures”. She sees them as a natural progression as runners move from marathons to triathlons, Hyroxcompetitions and then ultramarathons. The type of people attracted to them, she says, fall into two camps.
“There are those who love running and want to be outdoors doing it,” she said. “Then there are those who are very good at running but find the focus on perfectionism in road running dull.”
She said that the variable nature of ultramarathons and trail races mean that they cannot be reduced to times and splits in quite the same way as road races, making them more interesting for many participants.
“The ultimate gain at the end is not speed-related metrics: it’s about how cool the course was, what you saw along the route and the stories and adventures you bring back,” she said.
The Marathon des Sables is often described as one of the world’s toughest footraces (Credit: Getty Images)
Then there’s the extreme challenge of the Barkley Marathons in Tennessee, widely known as “The Race That Eats Its Young”. One of the world’s strangest and most brutal ultramarathons, the unmarked race sends runners through punishing terrain with only a map and compass, and it’s common for nobody to finish. Shrouded in secrecy and myth, Barkley has become legendary in endurance sports culture.
In Europe, the annual Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc allows you to clock up three countries in a 171km (106 mile) race around the Alps. Others push the format into stranger terrain: The World’s Deepest Marathon took runners through a zinc mine in Sweden in 2025, while The World’s Highest Marathon will return in 2027, this time in Bolivia. You can even run a marathon on Everest, following a route that begins at Everest Base Camp and leads through the Sherpa trails of the Khumbu Valley. For those chasing something longer still, the Iditarod Invitational includes a 1,000-mile (621km) winter route across the Alaskan wilderness.
For marathon runners and super-fit adventurers, it seems that nowhere on the planet is too remote to have an extreme adventure. The only question is whether you’re tough enough to take it on.
