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‘I had no sleep for the first 24 hours’ – a mother’s record breaking run from Malin to Mizen head <\/p>\nA mother of three who has claimed the Guinness World Record for the fastest female crossing of Ireland on foot has said it was \u201ca family record\u201d. <\/p>\n
Sophie Power (43), from Surrey, ran from Malin Head to Mizen Head in three days, 12 hours and eight minutes in May 2024. <\/p>\n
The previous record was set in 2012 by Mimi Anderson, with Ms Power having to run just under 170km every day. <\/p>\n
Ms Power has three children \u2013 Donnacha (10), Cormac (7) and Saoirse (7) \u2013 with her husband John, who is from Co Cork. The latest Guinness World Records holders are being unveiled on Thursday. <\/p>\n
\u201cI only found out about an hour ago that it will be in the book. My kids are going to be so excited, it\u2019s going to be in their library. They\u2019ll love it,\u201d she said on Wednesday. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe certificate is on the wall but they\u2019ll be so excited to see it in the book. It was such a special thing for them. They were so heavily involved. The boys were in the camper van. My daughter was down in Cork with her granny and grandad. I was thinking about running towards her and she intercepted me halfway as we got into Cork, which was amazing. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey see it as their record as well and I see it very much as theirs as well. It was a family record. My whole Irish family got behind it and supported it. It\u2019s not really my record.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms Power took up ultra marathon running in her mid-20s and set up SheRACES, an organisation to encourage women of all ages and abilities to run. In 2018, a photograph of Ms Power breastfeeding her then three-month-old son during a 106-mile race went viral.<\/p>\n
There had been no option for her to defer her place until she was fit to compete and it highlighted what she saw as a big issue facing women and mothers.<\/p>\n
‘I had no sleep for the first 24 hours’ – a mother’s record breaking run from Malin to Mizen head <\/p>\n
Last June, Sophie Power has just done something extraordinary \u2013 she ran 563km from Malin Head to Mizen Head in record time.It took her a record-breaking three days, 12 hours and eight minutes and she beat the existing record by an astonishing three hours. And it\u2019s not even her most gruelling run \u2013 not by long way.The 41 year-old mother to Donnacha, Cormac and Saoirse is an ultra runner and the morning after she finished running the length of Ireland she posted on social media: \u201cMy body had about 2 hrs sleep over 3 nights so is still in shock. Finally in a proper bed I still woke up last night every 30 minutes thinking it was time to go running again.\u201dShe tells In the News how on the first two days she ran in driving rain, on the last day, heading into Cork she got heatstroke. She injured her knee less than half-way through but she kept running and outside Longford she started hallucinating.An unsporty child she took up running at 26 and astonishingly her first race was the infamous Marathon des Sables, a seven-day, 250km run in the Sahara. She has run while pregnant and a photo of her breastfeeding mid-race went viral. She founded SheRaces, an organisation to encourage women of all ages and abilities to run.This episode was originally broadcast in June 2024. Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the image that completely changed my life, it went viral around the entire world,\u201d she said. \u201cBefore that image, I was CEO of a tech company and it was just a sliding doors moment to dedicate my life to getting more women and girls in sport and pivoting into working in sport.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms Power said she \u201cfelt destroyed\u201d after completing the Malin to Mizen Head run. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a really long recovery. You see lots of people doing these running challenges of a number of marathons over so many days but they\u2019re sleeping and recovering. I had two hours and 17 minutes of sleep in three nights because that\u2019s what it took to break the record. It was several months before I properly felt back to normal to get training again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A mother of three who has claimed the Guinness World Record for the fastest female crossing of Ireland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[18,2215,19,17,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-84475","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-for-you","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}