A female Scottish ultra runner has finished a 100-mile race so far ahead of the next competitor that she was home before he arrived at the finish line.
Anna Rutherford, 43, was competing in the first Castle to Castle Rat Race this weekend, which took runners from Bamburgh Castle in the northeast of England to Edinburgh Castle in the Scottish capital.
The runners set off at 7am on Saturday, July 18, and by the midway point, Rutherford, a lawyer and mother of three, had passed the male frontrunner and went on to spend the final 50 miles running alone.
Rutherford tells the BBC she even stopped to check on a man who was lying on his back on a golf course – he turned out to be stargazing – and still made it to the finish line in an impressive 17 hours, 23 minutes and 11 seconds.
The runner says that after arriving at the finish just after midnight, she went straight to bed at home in Peebles, less than an hour's drive from the center of Edinburgh, meaning she was almost certainly tucked in by the time male winner Danny Castro arrived in 19:18:11.
In response to a post on Facebook by race Rat Race Adventures, Rutherford praised the organizers' attention to women's needs along the route, including female-specific toilets with sanitary products: "MASSIVE congrats to RatRace for catering for women so well! I hope that came across - I was blown away!"
The last time we wrote about Rutherford, she had set a new FKT on the 214-mile Southern Upland Way, completing the cross-country route in 62 hours, 34 minutes, and 55 seconds – 17 hours quicker than the previous fastest female. That feat came only nine months after giving birth to her second child.
