How an ultrarunner defied her fears to set a new world record
We all know winter – the season that brings shorter, darker days.
Consequently, during the winter months, training can look very different for many runners – especially women. A 2024 study conducted by This Girl Can found that 72% of women altered their outdoor activity routines during winter – up from 46% in 2023 – and that almost a quarter (24%) confined themselves to well-lit routes, or avoided certain areas completely (23%). As highlighted by the research, fear among women runners is heightened during the darker months, with many taking greater personal safety precautions or cutting out running altogether.
These findings are especially alarming when you partner them with the results of a 2023 study by Adidas, which surveyed 9,000 runners from nine different countries. Here, it was shown that 92% of women felt concerned about their safety while running – no matter what the month or time of day – and that over a third (38%) of women have experienced physical or verbal harassment on the run.
Studies such as these often gravitate toward women’s feelings while running on the road, in urban locations. But what if we were to focus on women’s feelings while out on the trails, in mostly suburban and rural areas?
That’s what Keri Wallace has done. Among other things, Wallace is an accomplished ultrarunner, mountain leader and co-founder of Girls on Hills, the UK’s only guided trail running company designed specifically to help women build the skills, confidence and curiosity they need to navigate mountain environments self-sufficiently. Wallace is also afraid of the dark and, sadly, has previously been assaulted while running.
Supported by Girls on Hills, Wallace devised a survey to assess runners’ anxiety levels when running on the trails and how winter darkness can exacerbate personal safety concerns in trail running situations. To take things even further, Wallace decided to confront her own fears through a trail challenge like no other: running the entire length of the West Highland Way – Scotland’s oldest national trail, measuring 154km and involving a climb of 4,312m – non-stop, solo and unsupported around the winter solstice.
We spoke with Wallace to unearth the survey’s findings and learn more about her immense trail running quest – which even saw her set a new world record.
Measuring fear in trail running
As someone who lives, works and trains in the beautiful Scottish mountains of Glencoe – and who authored the guidebook Running Challenges: 100 of the best runs in England, Scotland and Wales – Wallace is no stranger to epic trail running adventures on home soil.
However, last year, when considering which challenge to set her mind and feet to next, she noticed gaps in the trail running records. While many of the UK’s longest national trails had been completed solo, and in one go, by men, not all of them had been attempted in the same way by women. To complete these trails in one hit, you’d need to keep moving overnight – and as a bank of research has already found, running at night, especially alone, is a big barrier for women.
Even though Wallace, personally, feels more comfortable running through rural areas than built-up areas at night, she was eager to understand how others felt about running in certain locations at different times of the day.
Wallace wanted facts and figures – not just theories. So, through Gills on Hills, she set about surveying 1,000 trail runners, including men and women, to determine their anxiety levels when traversing urban, suburban and remote trails. The runners completed the survey anonymously and, on each count, were asked to score their anxiety levels from 1 (‘zero anxiety’) to 10 (‘too scared to go out at all’).
The findings of the survey were fascinating. For men in all trail running environments – urban, suburban and remote – the median anxiety score was 1 out of 10. In other words, ‘zero anxiety’. Just 12% of men felt some anxiety in urban areas, while only 4% of men felt anxious while running on rural trails. Women, however, had a median anxiety score of 8 out of 10 when running on trails in urban and suburban areas, which shows that, as Wallace pointed out, many women are ‘running afraid’.
As for trail running in remote environments at night, the majority of women gave this the maximum anxiety score of 10 out 10 – which means that most women are too afraid, full stop, to run on rural trails in the hours of darkness. However, the results were far more nuanced than they first appear, as the second-highest number of women gave a score of 1 for the same situation, denoting no fear when running on remote trails at night.
Women, then, sat at either end of the spectrum. As Wallace discovered, the fearless women (14%) reasoned that it was unlikely they’d come across another person – or a potential threat – in this environment, so they would happily and confidently run alone. The most fearful women (17%), meanwhile, worried about their personal safety if they were to venture out onto rural trails by themselves at night – but not, interestingly, because they thought that they’d get harassed or assaulted. Instead, they feared that they would fall over, get lost or have another accident, then not be located and rescued easily.
‘In some ways, this outcome was a surprise,’ said Wallace, who has a PhD in neurobiology and expertise in the science of fear and learned behaviours. ‘In other ways, not so much, because working with women in the mountains and in rural areas as a guide, I see a lot of these perceived barriers. For example: “I’m not confident at navigation”, or, “I’m not fast or fit or strong enough to cope with this”, or, “I can’t deal with the terrain and will hurt myself”. Running on the trails and in the mountains is just not something that we as women have always done or feel confident about. Those worries are around in the daytime and, I suppose, are exacerbated at night.’
Unlearning negative experiences
According to Wallace, much of the personal safety messaging around running that we now see can, counterintuitively, feed women’s fears and make them feel as though they need to act like ‘prey’. These are difficult messages and feelings to ‘unlearn’ – especially in urban environments where there are, still, too many instances of harassment and assault being reported. Even in the countryside, where the chance of encountering anyone on a run – let alone a ‘crazed lunatic’, as Wallace put it – is incredibly slim, we can still feel scared.
Wallace, herself, has been physically assaulted more than once – and in very different situations. On once occasion, she was groped just after finishing a half marathon involving thousands of people. ‘I was so shocked that it happened in such a busy situation,’ she recalled. ‘I had just crossed the finish line.’
On another occasion, Wallace was physically attacked by a man who had threatened to steal her car, from which she was unloading climbing equipment and refused to give up. He punched Wallace in the mouth before she ran off to avoid further attack, while he ran in the opposite direction. This incident occurred in a tiny, rural village on the edge of Dartmoor – ‘not a place that I associated with opportunistic crime,’ said Wallace.
The assault experienced by Wallace is shocking and, regrettably, not new. If anything, though, it made her realise than good and bad things can happen whenever and wherever, no matter how likely or improbable the circumstance, so there is no reason why we should fixate on – and be derailed by – ‘What if?’ scenarios that are fabricated by our fears.
‘We need to empower women to try to question the real risk of any situation. Look at bungee jumping, for example. You’ll feel scared and sick – and that’s part of it. But you know that when you jump off the platform you’re not going to hit the ground, because that’s what it’s designed for. So you acknowledge the fear in your body as being a natural response to the environment, then you sort of push on anyway.
‘For me, night running became a bit like that,’ continued Wallace, moving to her decision to take on the West Highland Way, through day and night, despite her fear of the dark. ‘When I took on this challenge, I knew that I was scared of the dark, but also that this fear is just a physiological reaction. In reality, the West Highland Way is quite a safe place.’
Conquering worries while setting a world record
And so, to the challenge itself.
A near-linear 154km (96-mile) route running from Milngavie, on the outskirts of Glasgow, up to Fort William in the Scottish Highlands, the West Highland Way is a popular trail frequented by thousands of runners, amblers and adventurers each year. But for a woman to cover the whole trail in one go, alone and unsupported in the dark depths of winter? That was unheard of – and something that Wallace was determined to do.
On the dry, cold and clear morning of Tuesday 2 December 2024, Wallace set off along the trail, two hours later than planned. Why? Because she is a mother of two young children, who wanted to be there when they woke up and make sure that they’d be looked after while she was running and her husband, who was working abroad at the time, was away. ‘But that’s real life, you know?’ said Wallace, pragmatically. ‘I mention these things because they all feed into the reasons we don’t see as many women doing unsupported challenges like this, because they’re logistically really hard to pull off.’
Wallace chose winter as the host season for her challenge because she knew that she could cope with running in colder conditions – and because she wanted to tackle her own anxieties and raise awareness of the impact of winter darkness on women’s running habits.
‘I very much planned to run out of Glasgow in the daylight, then get back into daylight before I got into Fort William at the other end, because they’re the places where I feel the least safe,’ she said. ‘I wanted to run in the mountains when it was dark – I didn’t actually want daylight when I was in the middle of nowhere. It was the first time that I’ve ever planned a run around my personal safety, because I don’t run through urban areas. It was a really new way of looking at it.’
As for the run itself, nothing could compare. While daytime conditions were pleasant, temperatures hovered around -3°C night, with darkness lasting for 17 hours. ‘The whole trail was frozen,’ recalled Wallace, whose first head torch ran out after just four hours. ‘My breath was frozen. My shoe laces turned into massive blocks of ice. I couldn’t actually undo my shoes to change my socks and deal with blisters, because I couldn’t even get my shoes off. Eventually, my feet got so bad that I stood in a river just to thaw out the ice. And then, of course, I had wet feet.’
Around 126km in, Wallace’s GPS watch ran out of power due to the cold. Then, to add further struggle to the energy-sapping venture, her ankle started to swell up, making her final stretch into Fort William more of a hobble.
Even so, Wallace still found wonder among the woes. She passed plenty of Highland cows along the way and even saw the beautiful aurora borealis. ‘It felt like a full-on, classic adventure, because I had the whole Scottish experience,’ she mused.
Wallace completed the West Highland Way, non-stop, by herself, with no support and mostly shrouded in darkness, in a time of 28 hours and 19 minutes. As far as anyone is aware, it marks the first-ever time that a woman has covered the full length of the trail in this way in winter – and possibly even in summer, too.
Proving women’s worth
As mentioned, Wallace endured 17 hours of darkness during her world record quest on the West Highland Way – but she didn’t see a single other person during that time. But, of course, that is not enough to eliminate the fear of potentially encountering a threat.
‘I didn’t see one person in the dark, yet I was still pretty scared a lot of the time,’ said Wallace. ‘I know that it stems from anxiety of the dark and I think we just take that with us and still think of our worst-case fears.
‘I actually felt safest when I was in open environments, like open forestry and rolling hills – and I guess that goes back to the evolutionary side of things,’ she continued. ‘There was no cover, so I could see around me better. As soon as I had to go through a tunnel or an underpass or closed woodland, or past a derelict building, it just fed my imagination that there was somebody lurking in the cover.’
Dealing with failing head torches, a dead watch, a damaged ankle, sub-zero temperatures and more, Wallace faced – alone – what many people would consider a panic-generating ordeal. But as Wallace has noted, anyone can build the confidence to tackle such situations as she did, calmly and practically, if they are given the tools and information they need to help them prepare for any eventuality.
‘I knew that I had the right kit with me and could cope with the cold and sort out my blisters,’ said Wallace. ‘And although I did worry about my torches, I had spares and a power pack. I was prepared for that.
‘I think that many women’s lack of experience in that aspect of running is inevitably going to feed that anxiety,’ she continued. ‘So, it’s not really low confidence that can be a barrier – what’s required to get started is a lot of preparation and information. That’s what I’ve tried to do through Girls on Hills, anyway – to provide a kind of jumping point, or a springboard, for people to go out and realise that they’re actually way more capable than they think they are.’
As Wallace’s feat proves, women are stronger than their fears – we just need to do the work to help them realise this.
While raising awareness of harassment and assault experienced by women trail runners, and the impact of winter darkness on women’s confidence levels and personal safety, Wallace’s project will fundraise for women’s charities that support victims of violence. In addition, Wallace will speak at this year’s Fort William Mountain Festival (13-16 February) and Keswick Mountain Festival (16-18 May), and join Black Trail Runners’ founder Sabrina Pace Humphreys for the Girls on Hills Women’s Winter Gathering in Scotland (8-9 March) to mark International Women’s Day.
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