After running two marathons, Caroline Drury, 46, decided to up the ante and tackle one of the most gruelling endurance challenges around. This November, she will participate in the Great World Race, putting her body and mind through the epic trial of completing seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.
“It’s not going to tickle. It’s going to be incredibly uncomfortable,” the Manitoban says. “But that’s why I’m signing up to do it.”
Time zones don’t exist for the purposes of the race. The group of 60 runners will sleep on flights between destinations, then they will land and start their run, sometimes in the middle of the night. They’ll endure extreme temperature variations, sleep deprivation, and back-to-back flights across the globe with no rest-and-recovery between.
Wolf’s Fang on the north coast of Antarctica is the first stop.
The run will be held in subzero temperatures on a course of slick blue ice and compacted snow—a skating rink, essentially.
But the frozen continent is not the destination Drury is most concerned with. “What I’m most worried about is running in Cartagena, Colombia, which is going to be probably 40 degrees Celsius with 100 per cent humidity,” she says. “Apparently, it’s brutal. I’m imagining it to be the worst, most uncomfortable running I’ve ever done or will do in my life. And then hopefully, it’ll be marginally better.”
When people find out Drury’s running the Great World Race, they assume she has been fit all her life.
“It could not be further from the truth,” she explains.
“I just scrapped it out. I pieced it together, small success after small success. And it’s possible for everyone.”
For Drury, the journey to the Great World Race started early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Whitehorse, she was living in Toronto and focused on her career in arts administration when the lockdown started. Health and fitness had taken a back seat through her adult years, and Drury, who was approaching her fortieth birthday, experienced an epiphany of what she calls “radical accountability.” She and her husband realized they had no one to blame but themselves if they couldn’t get into the best shape of their lives while the world was shut down and every excuse was moot.
They gave up their daily lockdown pizza and wine cold turkey, and Drury started an eight-week fitness challenge three days later. She didn’t diet, just ate whole foods and followed the workouts. She lost nearly 20 pounds. Then, she wondered what else she could do. “I decided I wanted running to be more part of my life,” she remembers.
“So, I ran my first marathon.”
Discovering fitness and running changed everything for Drury. She got certified as a personal trainer, launched fitness and nutrition apps, and became a fitness influencer on Instagram where she posts details about every workout and training session.
I am most excited about learning who I am in the midst of running those marathons back-to-back.
It was the process of running—including meticulously tracking workouts and nutrition—that helped her fall in love with training.
“For most women, the drive in fitness is to have your body look good, which is awesome. We all want to look good; we all want to feel good. That’s a very natural thing,” she explains. With running, the focus was different. “It became, ‘What can my body do?’ It was so empowering.”
With her greatest challenge before her, Drury is focused on linking together wins to create a chain of strength and momentum to help her through the Great World Race.
“That’s how you create success, and that’s how you create your moment, by linking small successes,” she says. “One good meal linked to a good workout, linked to a good post-workout meal, linked to drinking enough water.”
While running those seven marathons, when she’s exhausted physically, mentally and emotionally, she will rely on her chain of successes to help her put one foot in front of the other.
“I am most excited about learning who I am in the midst of running those marathons back-to-back,” she says. “There’s no question to me that my body is going to do it because I’m going to train. The mind is the unwieldy part… Running one marathon, you can go to a dark place. I wonder what’s going to happen when I run seven?”
Despite the unknowns and the brutal conditions that await, Drury is confident in her ability to finish the race. “There’s nothing in me that believes that I can’t do this,” she adds.
“I believe everyone is capable of doing this.”
Photography: Raez Argulla
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