A Christchurch-born runner whose parents once wrote her sick notes to get her out of school cross country has become the fastest person ever to cross the Alps on foot.
Sophie Woods, 42, finished the Via Alpina in Monaco on Saturday night, 29 days after setting out from the Italian port city of Trieste on 4 July. The route runs roughly 2,000km east to west through eight countries and racks up climbing equivalent to going from sea level to the summit of Mount Everest 12 times over.
The previous fastest known time was 35 days, set by British runner Jake Catterall in 2024. Woods took six days off it. The quickest woman before her, Dutch runner Tessa Caspers, had needed 38 days. Woods now holds the outright record, not the women’s one.
Her route took her out of Italy and into Slovenia, then Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and France before dropping to the Mediterranean at Monaco. She ran between 15 and 18 hours on most days, starting at 3am, and in the final stretch cut her sleep to somewhere between an hour and a half and two and a half hours a night to protect the margin she had built.
“I am ecstatic but knackered,” she told the BBC after finishing. “The last couple of days I did on one and a half to two and a half hours of sleep to really push at the end. That tipped me over the edge a little bit.”
On Instagram the day after she finished, she wrote, “I’m absolutely ecstatic. I still can’t believe that we did it,” according to CNN.
What makes the run unusual is not just the distance. Woods came to the sport late and by accident. She told RNZ’s Checkpoint she had no interest in running as a child in Canterbury and actively avoided it.
“I definitely was not always a runner. My parents used to have to write me sick notes for cross country when I was at school,” she told the programme.
“I played a lot of team sports, but I hated running and I hated hiking. We used to do so much of it when I was a kid.”
The change came more than a decade later. “But I started running in my mid-twenties just to lose some weight and kind of just fell in love with the sport and then fell in love with trail running because you get to go and be in the most incredible environments and just moving through them with your own body is a really special experience,” she said.
Her attempt landed in the middle of one of the hardest European summers on record for anyone trying to move through the mountains. Temperatures across the continent pushed past 37 degrees in places while she was on the trail. She ran through two heatwaves, a thunderstorm she described as terrifying, a swarm of horseflies, and wildfires that forced a five kilometre detour off the marked route.
“The heat has been relentless,” she wrote in one post from the trail, describing cooling herself down with crushed ice drinks and sleeping in the support van in a pool of sweat.
Woods was running in the supported category, which in fastest known time terms means a crew can meet her with food, gear and a place to sleep. Hers was her husband George, a friend and photographer, Zoe Salt, and a dog named Nila. Her husband gave her the trail name Freight Train, following the American custom of adopting one for a long route.
The physical toll arrived early and did not let up. She told the BBC the first week was horrendous. “Everything was swollen, everything was sore. I was sure I was going to pull 15 million muscles. Week two wasn’t great either and then week three, I felt like I was getting fitter. It was like I was eating mountains for breakfast.”
Anyone who has walked a long alpine track will recognise the part she says actually broke her down. It was not the climbing.
“Dealing with two heatwaves was pretty intense, and you’re climbing thousands and thousands of metres each day,” she told Checkpoint. “Ultimately, the climbing isn’t really the problem, it’s the descending that absolutely does your body in.”
Woods says she never came close to pulling out, and that the record had been the goal from the start rather than something that emerged once she realised she was ahead of schedule. “I didn’t want to be running for more than 30 days, 30 days is enough. I knew that I was strong and capable. But this has taken it over and beyond that,” she told the BBC.
She is also clear-eyed about why a self-described non-runner ended up quicker over 2,000km than anyone who had tried it before. Speed over a single day was never the point.
“I might not be the fastest person out there but I know how to do big, long days in the mountains and just keep moving when everything hurts,” she said. “Ultra-running is about preparation, mental strength and being able to continue to persevere when things go wrong.”
That is the quality the Via Alpina rewards. A month of consecutive 15-hour days on technical ground punishes anything done carelessly on the first week for the whole rest of the route. As she put it in one of her posts, whatever you do on day two is going to reflect on you at day 22.
The record also sits in a wider pattern. Women have been closing on and passing men’s marks in ultra-endurance events over the past few years, in events where the deciding factor is not top-end speed but the ability to keep eating, keep moving and keep making sensible decisions on very little sleep. Woods has now taken one of the most demanding of them outright.
Her account of the whole thing, in the end, was fairly straightforward. Being tired was worth it.
“I mean, who gets to do this?” she told Checkpoint. “Like to be in a position where you’re not only fit enough, but also have the support and belief of everyone around you to go and attempt to run through the Alps for a month. Even when things were bad, all I would say is like, nothing grows in the comfort zone, and I would look up and I would see these incredible views. And how could you not enjoy that?”
What do you make of Sophie Woods’ run across the Alps, and does it change what you think is possible on foot? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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