\u201cThey were horrendous,\u201d Woods said. \u201cI never wanted to have a meltdown as much as when I was surrounded by horseflies. When you run through these paddocks and there\u2019s a bunch of flies, they swarm around you. It\u2019s not the end of the world but then they come with you, you can\u2019t outrun them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a big climb to do, I was already at the end of my tether and I suddenly noticed that there was this swarm starting to gather around me. Then they started landing on me. They started biting me and you can\u2019t stop.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in tears, screaming at them, and in the end I grabbed a bunch of ferns with each hand and just started whipping myself with it. I spent an hour going up a climb just doing that. I looked completely nuts but it worked and it kept them off me.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was absolutely horrendous; it was close to the end of the day and I was really, really tired. It still makes me panicky thinking about them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Woods set herself a 30-day target to complete the route because she had no desire to run for any longer than that, but that timeframe meant extremely long days. Woods and her husband initially expected her to take 14 or 15 hours to complete each daily leg, but often those numbers topped 17 or 18 hours. She would set off at 3am and would not reach the support van where she, her husband, Salt and the dog slept until nightfall. That meant the issue of sleep deprivation started to compound.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was getting really weave-y and my eyes would just keep shutting on the trail, I would curl up on the side for five or 10 minutes and that restarts you, just long enough so that I could get to the van and then put my head down for 20 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThey were horrendous,\u201d Woods said. \u201cI never wanted to have a meltdown as much as when I was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[50,13078,82,1782,54542],"class_list":["post-111473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-alps","tag-alps","tag-hiking","tag-sport","tag-standard","tag-womens-sport"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/117035902146293107","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}