Ioana Barbu was running a 200km (143-mile) race through the imposing and remote Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan when things took a turn for the worse.
A huge storm drifted in, pelting her with hail and sending temperatures down from 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) to between five and 10 (41 and 50 Fahrenheit) in a matter of minutes.
High winds had blown the course markers away from the race trail, and many competitors developed hypothermia and were forced to drop out. But Barbu was still fixated on running — so much so that she had not noticed a wild dog chasing her until she felt its bite.
“I’m just running along. First thing I first I knew of this dog, it had his teeth in me,” she told CNN.
Although adrenaline numbed the pain, she could see blood coming from a wound in her leg. Barbu grabbed her hiking poles to put distance between her and the animal, shouted loudly to scare it away, and used her GPS tracker to alert the race medics to her condition.
Almost 10,500 feet above sea level and 5 kilometers (3 miles) away from the end of a grueling race that had already taken five days, she decided to push on, knowing that a rabies vaccination would only be available once she got out of the mountains.
“I keep joking that the dog did me a favor because with adrenaline kicking in, I did not mess about on this uphill — it got done quick,” she recalled.
Last year, Barbu became the first person to finish the Beyond the Ultimate (BTU) Global Race Series in one calendar year — running 940 kilometers (584 miles) in four races across hostile and remote terrain in the Arctic, jungle, mountains and desert in self-sufficient, multi-stage ultra-marathons. She also completed BTU’s two other races, in the Kenyan wilderness and the Scottish Highlands, also making her the first person to finish all six BTU races in a year, and covering more than 800 miles.
But 37-year-old Barbu, who works in TV and podcasting, only started running by chance, after speaking to British TV personality Spencer Matthews while on a break from recording his podcast.
“He was training for this Beyond the Ultimate Jungle Ultra [marathon], and that’s all he’d talk about,” Barbu said. “I Googled it, looked at it, went, ‘Oh, I’d love to do something like this someday.’ He just looked at me and said, ‘I’m two months older than you. Why not now?’ So I just literally signed up and gave myself seven months to train for it.”
After finishing her first race, Barbu was connected with a coach who specialized in prepping runners for ultra marathons, and set herself a new goal: to become the first person to race the whole Global Race Series in a year — tackling harsh conditions in remote locations including Swedish Lapland, the Namibian desert and the Peruvian jungle.
“I was in this ridiculous situation — [normally] people train for one race a year. I was using one race to train for the next,” she said.
Before she started, Barbu didn’t realize that in the last 12 years, many athletes had tried the challenge and failed.
“Ignorance is bliss, because had I known that, would I have backed myself less?” she said.
Still, she committed to training like a pro athlete, with strength training, running, and fortnight-long altitude acclimatization treks, alongside working full time.
In addition to running long distances over multiple days, the list of potential hazards that runners could encounter in the BTU series would be enough to put many off: wild animals, snakes, insects, rivers, mountains, mudslides, and the risk of hypothermia and dehydration.
“In the jungle, you get told about all the snakes and all the creepy crawlies and things like that. And then in the desert, there’s snakes, bushes that are dangerous, highly poisonous,” she said, adding that wading through mud, rivers and vegetation meant that trench foot was also a concern.
To prepare for the freezing temperatures of the Arctic, Barbu acclimatized by taking ice baths, and for the sweltering desert and humid jungle, she used heat chambers. She also worked with London Southbank University, which was gathering data for research on human adaption to extreme conditions, to better understand how to prepare her body for the strain it was about to undergo.
In the Arctic, for example, “if you get too cold, you get hypothermia. If you get too hot, you get hypothermia. Because if you start sweating, that gets cold against your body, and doesn’t dry up again,” she explained.
Barbu was also aware that spending so much time and energy racing would mean she needed to prioritize her mental health.
“A third of racing is your physical training, a third of it’s your mental game, especially when you’re 60 miles into it and everything hurts. One thing that’s guaranteed is things are going to hurt when you’re going to that 100-mile mark. That’s just normal, because we’re human, but it’s like, at that point, you really rely on the mental game. And then a third of it’s just your admin and knowing your kit and knowing what to do. You can’t just wing it,” she said.
In 2025, Barbu finished her challenge, making the podium in every race except the one in Kyrgyzstan, where her finish time was impacted by the dog bite.
“It’s taught me I’m so much stronger than I thought I was,” she said of her accomplishment. “Also, it’s really rewarding to set yourself a goal and work towards it — there’s strength in that, and there’s a lot of power in that.”
Source: edition.cnn.com