Erchana Murray-Bartlett succeeded after 5 months in accomplishing the two missions she had set for herself: to run from north to south Australia doing one marathon a day and, most importantly, to raise funds to raise awareness about Australia’s loss of biodiversity.
150 consecutive marathons
If you try to put them one after the other it comes out an absurd distance, and that is 6,300 km, a distance that allowed her to eclipse the record set last year by Briton Kate Jayden, who had completed “only” 106.
Running without interruption (apart from rest, of course) also and especially means doing it in all physical and environmental conditions. For example, the debut was not the most promising: in the first few weeks Erchana strung 3 injuries, one after another.
A very promising athlete, after failing to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, Erchana thought of giving herself an ambitious new goal: to raise funds to raise awareness about the loss of biodiversity, which is particularly severe in Australia, which-partly because of its isolated location from all other continents-has unique flora and fauna compared to the rest of the world.
In all conditions
The environmental conditions encountered by Erchana-in Australia particularly extreme, especially now that it is the height of summer-have forced her to run under torrential downpours and in temperatures as high as 36 degrees, so much so that she has experienced every physical discomfort, from sunburn to blisters to various aches and pains and especially-as she jokingly puts it- stings from every insect in existence.
Which did not stop her from arriving in Melbourne after 150 days, after collecting $ 70,000 in donations, after consuming 5-6,000 calories a day to feed herself adequately and after wearing out 10 pairs of shoes, not least because her feet had swollen so much in the meantime that they were an extra number.
And especially after collecting the most rewarding personal prize: the new women’s world record for number of consecutive marathons run.