A woman was pulled out of Britain\u2019s most gruelling ultramarathon after receiving death threats over her fundraising for Afghan women and girls.<\/p>\n
Sarah Porter was nearly a third of the way through the 108-mile Montane Winter Spine Challenger South endurance race when organisers made the \u201cdifficult decision\u201d to withdraw her due to threats to her life in relation to the charity she runs helping women and girls in war zones.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the Guardian, Porter said she was disappointed. \u201cMy immediate feeling was just one of shame really.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very emotional,\u201d she said, \u201cjust born from the perspective that I really felt like I\u2019d let down the girls that I was running for and I\u2019d really kind of got this narrative in my head and psyched myself up that what I was doing was just so insignificant in comparison to what they\u2019re enduring.\u201d<\/p>\n
Porter asked the Guardian not to be specific about the details of the death threats, over which police were contacted. She said she had encountered \u201cunhappy people, threats, comments, a lot of hatred as a result of the work that we do\u201d with her charity InspiredMinds!, which finds humanitarian uses for AI, during a time when \u201cwe\u2019re also seeing a huge and very scary regression of women\u2019s rights for the first time in our history\u201d.<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cSo this is not exceptional, we were aware this was a possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
A risk assessment with her coach, Jon Shield, as well as security experts and the organisers had been done before the race, in which runners can be alone for many hours along stretches of some of the UK\u2019s most remote moorland. The progress and location of runners can be followed on the race\u2019s website, through a tracking device, and after the risk assessment it was deemed safe for Porter to run.<\/p>\n
\u201cI set off on the race, everything seemed fine,\u201d she said. \u201cI then received notification from the Spine Race team that the situation had changed. They disabled my tracking device and when I then got to [the second checkpoint] Standedge, they said they were removing me from the course and that they\u2019d consulted with my security team and everybody felt that that was the best solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Porter, an amateur runner, said she had been attracted to the race because it is known as Britain\u2019s most brutal ultramarathon, taking place in mountainous terrain along the Pennine Way, from Edale in Derbyshire to Hawes in North Yorkshire.<\/p>\n
She said she bore no ill-will to the organisers. \u201cI can\u2019t do anything but respect them for the way that they dealt with things,\u201d she said. \u201cIf anything it\u2019s just made me feel much more determined to carry on and continue doing [future races].\u201d<\/p>\n
Her GoFundMe page is still open for donations.<\/p>\n
The organisers of the Montane Spine Race said: \u201cOn Saturday the 10th [of January] we made the difficult decision to remove one of our participants from the race following a personal safety threat, we have been working with all the relevant authorities and believe there is no wider threat to other participants on the course.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe understand that this is disappointing for the runner in question, but the safety of all our participants is always our primary concern.\u201d<\/p>\n
The full race, the Montane Winter Spine, one of the most elite races in the British calendar, extends a full 268 miles to the Scottish borders. The first runner to cross the line is expected on Wednesday, after a particularly tough start due to freezing temperatures and severe windy weather caused by Storm Goretti<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A woman was pulled out of Britain\u2019s most gruelling ultramarathon after receiving death threats over her fundraising for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-695674","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115894246754851266","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}