Run the world Is this the finest endurance runner ever?

Ultra-marathon runner Ragna Debats is gearing up for the world’s toughest challenge, writes Jim White

When she won the Marathon des Sables last April, Ragna Debats felt a little unfulfilled. After running quicker than any other woman across 250km of the Sahara in 40C heat, carrying all her supplies on her back and with sand threatening to invade her every pore, the Dutch athlete thought maybe she could push herself a little more.

“I’m somebody who likes challenges,” she says, with possibly the greatest of understatements. “I like to look for new things, really like to put myself in the hardest of conditions.”

So she decided that next she would enter the toughest ultra-marathon in each of the seven continents (adding a 230km jog around some volcanoes in Central America along the way). What more, she would complete the set within a year, finishing in Antarctica in November. Oh, and she would take her partner, the Spanish ultra runner Pere Aurell, their five-year-old daughter Onna and the family dog Bru on the road with her.

“It’s an emblematic thing: seven continents, nine races, extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme conditions,” Debats says. “This is unique, no one has ever done it before.”

And there may be a reason for that. The 40-year-old adventurer is speaking to The Sunday Telegraph from Argentina, where she is preparing for the next challenge on her itinerary, the Aconcagua Mountain Trail run, which starts next weekend.

Running 100km close to the very peak of the Andes, this is no ordinary race.

She and Aurell – together with the cameraman recording their feat for a television documentary – had only a couple of days earlier finished a marginally less strenuous race to attune their bodies at extreme altitude ahead of the run. It took some attuning. The cameraman was so struck with altitude sickness he did not make it to the highest point, when Debats and Aurell summited at over 6,000 metres (nearly 20,000 feet), roughly five times the height of Ben Nevis.

“It was a really different experience physically to what happens when you normally run,” she explains. “Normally the heart rate goes up. At that altitude it doesn’t.

“Add to that the fact that respiration is more difficult it means it is really tough to get enough oxygen into your system. You have this terrible sense of pressure, everything seems to be pushing you down into the earth. Your legs aren’t getting enough blood; your co-ordination declines, you can hardly move. Also, it is getting so steep, at times you can only scramble on your hands and knees.”

It sounds a right laugh. And if that were not enough, there was something else too.

“It was also very cold, very windy. At the top we were running in thick thermal underwear, long socks, running tights and a big down jacket. A lot of people who enter the race take crampons, but we were travelling light so we didn’t. But yes, there was a lot of snow we had to deal with.”

Not that the difficulties seemed to slow Debats. While many of the other competitors took more than 10 days to complete the vertiginous course – staying in mountain refuges along the way – she and her partner did it in three. They were anxious, she explains, to get back to their daughter, who was being looked after by a friend in the valley below.

“I thought this was the perfect time to take her with us round the world, as she starts school next year,” Dabats says of Oona. “So it would not be right to leave her for too long.”

If Debats’s gazelle-like ability to cope with mountain conditions seems an unexpected trait for someone born in a country as flat as Holland, what makes her facility all the more remarkable is she has been running for only just over 10 years. That she started at all came about by chance.

Her initial ambition was to be an equestrian. But in 2007 she gave up her job working at a stables in Holland and headed to England to study at the University of Birmingham, where she honed her brilliant grasp of English.

While in England, Debats took advantage of the Erasmus scheme and went on an exchange to Valencia University for a year. One day some fellow students invited her to run with them in the nearby mountains – and she never looked back.

“I felt I’d found what I’d been looking for,” she recalls. “Then somebody said I should do a trail race through the mountains. It was 23km, longer than I had ever run before. I was completely destroyed, but I loved it. That was 2009 and it changed my life.”

She started to run further and further, higher and higher, faster and faster. Soon she was running full time, a competitor in the elite skyrunning competition, which features races on paths above 2,000 metres. In 2018 she completed an astonishing treble: she won the Trail World Championships, the Skyrunning Championships and the Skyrunning World Series. She did not just run either. She put her experience to practical use.

Together with the manufacturer Merrell, Debats came up with a specific design for the shoes she wore to win Marathon des Sables, made to keep the desert out. “It worked,” she says, “everyone else had bad blisters, I had no sand at all in my shoes.” They are now being produced for anyone to buy, and she is wearing trail shoes she helped design as she takes on the races of what she is calling the Rolling Mountains Challenge. Not that she has too many pairs with her.

“We have to carry our own luggage as we go from race to race,” she says. “So we have packed very light. We’ve just got one bag each to last the year.”

Importantly, however, each race she enters will be just that: a race.

Debats does not believe in simply taking part; she is out to win. She believes only victory will give her challenge proper validity.

“I was not satisfied. I was nowhere near my best,” she says of the first race of her series, the Hong Kong Vibram 100k, which she finished last month. “I came third.”

Not that she can avoid scrutiny: every step of the way on her extraordinary journey is being recorded for a documentary that will be aired on Catalan television and then, she hopes, across the world.

“The cameraman is filming all our emotions, positive and negative,” she says. “I hope it gives an insight into what we are doing.”

What she and the family will be doing after recovering from next week’s run is hiring a camper van and heading 3,500 miles north, through South America, to their next challenge, the Volcano Ultramarathon Costa Rica in April. This is a race that can make the Marathon des Sables look a doddle.

“It seems a long time until the next one, but we have got to drive there,” she says. “And you never know, we might find a race or two to enter along the way.”

‘Your legs are not getting enough blood, your co-ordination declines, you can hardly move’