Running: Edmonton marathoner makes record run

Monday, April 02, 2007 - 11:45 PM

First person to run 1,600 kilometres in six desert marathons in one year.

Edmonton marathon runner Sandy McCallum is headed to the record books after completing her sixth desert ultramarathon in one year.

McCallum, 43, finished the 240-kilometre Marathon des Sables across the Moroccan desert Saturday. This makes her eligible to be entered in the Guinness World Records book as the only person to complete six desert marathons in one year.

“I have set a new world record...and it feels pretty good,” McCallum says in an entry for her blog on edmontonjournal.com.

"I finished the Marathon des Sables on Saturday with my best time and placing ever in that race. It is a nice way to wrap up the year.”

She says she ended up in 18th place out of 104 in the women’s category and 260th place overall out of 750 athletes.

She ran the week-long race with a badly sprained ankle and says she is having trouble walking.

“I cannot tell you how good it is going to be to get home,” she says. “I have been in Africa for a month...and on the road for longer than that. It has been a long year of highs and lows...both mentally and physically. It will be nice to just chill for awhile.”

The race was hit with tragedy last week when a member of the French racing team died overnight after a long and grueling stage of the race. His death was discovered when his tent mates tried to awaken him.

“The entire camp has taken the news very hard,” McCallum said at the time. “You can tell the race organizers are devastated. The entire medical team was standing by to help out anybody that had difficulty in dealing with the announcement. The runners were all shocked. I had to cry. It is absolutely devastating.”

It was her sixth desert marathon since April of 2006 adding up to more than 1,600 kilometres. It was also her second desert marathon in an African desert in a month. Earlier in March, she completed the 190 kilometre Lybian Challenge.

Her previous races in the past year were the 221-kilometre Grand Raid Sahara in Mauritania, Africa, in January; the 240-kilometre Sahara Race in Egypt in October, 2006; 240-kilometre Atacama Crossing in South America’s Atacama Desert in July, 2006; and the 240-kilometre Gobi March in China’s Gobi Desert in May 2006.

A former national reporter with Global Television, she has a passion for the desert and enjoys competing in temperatures reaching 50 C. In 2005, she became the first woman in the Western Hemisphere to have raced a combined total of more than 1,600 kilometres through the hostile Sahara Desert in a number of races over several years.

Her next challenge will to ride a camel around the Sahara Desert — which would also be a world first.

“Now I can set my sights on my original goal...which is to circumnavigate the Sahara Desert by camel,” she says. “I would like to be the first person in the world to attempt the feat...which would take about a year and a bit to accomplish.”