022 RUNNERSWORLD.COM/UK SEPTEMBER 2019
ON THE MOVE
(top) Anna McNuff,
intrepid adventurer;
(bottom) in her rowing
days – second from
front; (right) a clean
pair of heels, for now...real human being and I’m really doing
it, and it’s hard and it’s awesome and
all those things,’ she says.
The 34-year-old daughter of Ian and
Sue McNuff, who both rowed for Great
Britain at the 1980 Olympics, she was
a Team GB rower herself between the
ages of 19 and 23 and won a bronze
medal at the European Championships
in 2007. An injury caused her to miss
the Under-23 World Championships,
she didn’t make the cut for the Beijing
Olympics, and left the sport. ‘I learned
so much from rowing but it wasn’t my
path,’ she says. ‘What I do now is so
much more me.’
She began working in marketing and,
conditioned by training programmes
and organised competition, did an
Ironman, some ultras and the Swedish
swimrun race Ötillö. ‘But what I really
wanted to do was just GO,’ she says. In
2013 she cycled across every state in
the US and one Canadian province –
11,000 miles in seven months.IT’S AMAZING, THE POWER
of a throwaway comment. One
morning over breakfast, adventurer
Anna McNuff revealed her latest
running plan to her boyfriend: 50
marathons, across the UK, barefoot –
‘barefoot Britain’ was the phrase that
had been stuck in her head since her
last challenge, cycling 5,500 miles
through the Andes in 2016 and 2017.
Given that her boyfriend is Jamie
McDonald, who had just finished a run
across the United States dressed in a
superhero costume, she might have
known he’d say something like, ‘But
100 marathons sounds better, doesn’t
it.’‘Dammit, it does!’ she agreed, and so
the stakes were raised. Her 2,620-mile
journey began on June 2 in Skaw on
the Shetland Islands, and as well as
mainland Britain, it will take in the
Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Northern
Ireland, Jersey and Guernsey, and a
slice of the Republic of Ireland. McNuff
finishes on November 10 in London.
McNuff, an ambassador for UK Girl
Guiding, has plotted her epic route
to reach as many Guide units as
possible, arriving in the evenings to
give motivational talks. ‘I want to bring
it to life for them, show them that I’m a
Like many of us, McNuff read
Christopher McDougall’s book Born
to Run, took in its message about the
benefits of minimal running, bought a
pair of Fivefingers shoes, ‘ran 10K and
absolutely destroyed myself’. Getting
ready to run this epic distance barefoot
has been a much longer process. ‘I’ve
essentially spent four and a half years
transitioning down from trainers.’
She says she isn’t an evangelist for
barefoot running – ‘You should run
in whatever you’re comfortable in’ –
but that was the element that changed
the challenge from being tough but
achievable into something scary. She
had already run a similar distance,
1,911 miles along New Zealand’s Te
Araroa trail, in shoes, in 2015. ‘I know
I could do this in shoes, so it’s bringing
in the bare feet that makes me take a
deep breath – that is next level,’ she
says. ‘There’s a fine line between
terrified and excited. You have to be
on that knife edge. I’ve got that “What‘THERE’S A FINE LINE BETWEEN TERRIFIED AND
EXCITED. YOU HAVE TO BE ON THAT KNIFE EDGE’