FtC sports
The Highs and Lows of Ultra-RUNNING and Adventure Racing
Breaking Ground with Red Bull Athlete Fernanda Maciel By Sasha Frate
Fernanda Maciel is a renowned athlete in a demanding, beautiful, lonely, empowering, and grueling sport— ultramarathoning. An ultramarathon is any footrace that is longer than a marathon and is categorized as either a timed or a distance run. Some timed ultramarathons can take up to a week to complete and see runners camping, hiking, and navigating through wild terrain and a range of altitudes. At the age of eight, Fernanda was a competitive gymnast and traveled the world through Olympic Gymnastics. She moved to the U.S. to train two years later and became a capoeira fighter and a jiu-jitsu champion and found herself running trail races. Brazilian born and currently living in France, Fernanda is now an ultramarathoner and an adventure racer, and has participated in international 600-kilometer adventure racing since the age of twenty-three. To complete these complex endurance races, Fernanda has kayaked, mountain biked, run trails, snowboarded, and summited and descended mountains. Through her hard work, determination, and resilience, Fernanda became the first woman to run the Camino de Santiago Compostela, in which she ran 860-kilometers in ten days. She also placed second on the Ultra Trail Mount Fuji, which was a run of 169-kilometers. When not running mountains, Fernanda worked as an environmental lawyer and has also been an environmental instructor with Outward Bound International. Her love for nature is clearly not something she pursues only for herself; Fernanda also encourages others to discover and protect our collective natural environment. Face the Current was excited to learn more about this extreme, intense, and arduous sport, and Fernanda Maciel was the perfect person to show us the path. Fernanda discussed her upbringing; her project, White Flow, that provides aid to communities in which she races; and the way she harnesses the meditative qualities of running in flow-state to achieve success. While humans might not be able to actually move mountains, Fernanda has shown us that it is indeed possible to run them.
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Photo Credit: Jordi Saragossa
