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A woman was pulled out of Britain’s most gruelling ultramarathon after receiving death threats over her fundraising for Afghan women and girls.
Sarah Porter was nearly a third of the way through the 108-mile Montane Winter Spine Challenger South endurance race when organisers made the “difficult decision” to withdraw her due to threats to her life in relation to the charity she runs helping women and girls in war zones.
Speaking to the Guardian, Porter said she was disappointed. “My immediate feeling was just one of shame really.”
“I was very emotional,” she said, “just born from the perspective that I really felt like I’d let down the girls that I was running for and I’d 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’re enduring.”
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 “unhappy people, threats, comments, a lot of hatred as a result of the work that we do” with her charity InspiredMinds!, which finds humanitarian uses for AI, during a time when “we’re also seeing a huge and very scary regression of women’s rights for the first time in our history”.
She added: “So this is not exceptional, we were aware this was a possibility.”
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’s most remote moorland. The progress and location of runners can be followed on the race’s website, through a tracking device, and after the risk assessment it was deemed safe for Porter to run.
“I set off on the race, everything seemed fine,” she said. “I 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’d consulted with my security team and everybody felt that that was the best solution.”
Porter, an amateur runner, said she had been attracted to the race because it is known as Britain’s most brutal ultramarathon, taking place in mountainous terrain along the Pennine Way, from Edale in Derbyshire to Hawes in North Yorkshire.
She said she bore no ill-will to the organisers. “I can’t do anything but respect them for the way that they dealt with things,” she said. “If anything it’s just made me feel much more determined to carry on and continue doing [future races].”
Her GoFundMe page is still open for donations.
The organisers of the Montane Spine Race said: “On 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.
“We understand that this is disappointing for the runner in question, but the safety of all our participants is always our primary concern.”
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.
