Why tackling the toughest footrace in the world will be 'alright' for Emily Moore
Triathlete Emily went from being told she’d never walk again to running marathons and power-walking ultras
If you enjoy this article, check out the other inspirational stories on this newsletter.
Just last week, we featured Helen Ramwell’s story of running through Nepal in memory of her ultra-running father.
You can read that story here:
You’ll never run alone - how Helen Ramwell ran through Nepal in memory of her dad
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The toughest footrace on Earth.
Soaring temperatures, scorching sand, six days slogging through the desert.
The Marathon des Sables (MDS) is not a race to be messed with.
For many of the runners who take on the roughly 250km (155-mile) run through the Sahara in Morocco, it provokes a mental as much as a physical battle with themselves.
So when I ask Emily Moore, a triathlete and ultra runner with experience of multi-day events, how she is feeling about the challenge as she prepares to tackle MDS in April, her answer is somewhat surprising.
“It’ll be alright, won’t it?,” she tells the Running Tales Podcast.
And while that reply might initially seem supremely blasé, it is based on a history of Emily overcoming adversity in whatever form it arrives.
From running across Nepal to learning to swim in order to complete her first triathlon, Emily has thrived on challenging circumstances.
It is a mindset that grew out of a knee injury diagnosis that she would not only never run again, but would need support to even walk.
From ‘Budd’-ing runner to fearing she’d never walk unaided:
A young Emily always enjoyed long-distance running, with an obsession for South African track star Zola Budd forging a love of not only the 1,500m but of barefoot running.
But as she grew older, running faded from Emily’s life and following an accident when she was just 19 it looked like it would disappear altogether.
By the age of 21, Emily was facing the prospect of having to walk with elbow crutches and had been told she’d probably never walk unsupported again.
“I was determined my life wouldn't be that,” she said.
“I just started off running 5ks and then 10ks.
“When I was growing up, my first PE teacher at school had done the London Marathon. And she came in with this silver blanket - I must have been five or six - and I just wanted one.
“I was determined I was going to do the London Marathon.”
Despite her deep desire to succeed, learning to run again wasn’t an easy process.
Emily said: “It was really hard. Really hard.
“I tried all sorts of different things to help. I tried trainers that were built up and I remember running in a pair that were supposed to be a really supportive shoe.
“And I could never get past 5k with them. It hurt so much all the time as my arches were low due to my injuries. I remember my dad telling me you don't support an arch by putting a pillar underneath it.
“So, I started running with zero support - back to the whole Zola Budd thing.”
Eventually, Emily was able to slowly increase her mileage, adding an extra five per cent distance to her runs each time.
One unexpected benefit of the often lamentable time it can take to get a London Marathon place, was that it allowed Emily to slowly progress towards her goal.
By the time she lined up at Greenwich to take on the race, Emily was ready.
“The knee held up and I had a brilliant time,” she said.
“I remember Blackwall tunnel being like Armageddon. You went down there, and it's the only place where no-one can see you, and everybody walks. It was just so strange.
“But I really did love every single step and every minute of the London Marathon.”
Such was the level of her achievement, her knee surgeon even came along to support her, cheering her on as she passed mile 25.
Berlin, Pisa and Edinburgh marathons followed hot on the heels of her London landmark, with all four falling within her first year of marathon running.
Also on Running Tales:
You’ll never run alone - how Helen Ramwell ran through Nepal in memory of her day.
Super Mario - The Ironman who always finishes with a smile on his face
Time for triathlon - better learn how to swim:
More running and marathons followed, but Emily soon found herself seeking out a fresh challenge.
When a group of work friends started chatting about running and cycling, Emily found she had the fastest marathon time among them but her speed on a bike was well down on that of her new found rivals.
Her competitive streak kicked in and Emily’s training soon started to feature far more cycling.
“That then led to learning to swim because I couldn't,” she said.
“As soon as you're cycling and running, everybody then says, ‘when are you going to do a triathlon?’
“So in 2014, I learned to swim as an adult. I then did my first Ironman that August.”
Her Ironman achievement was the first of a series of triathlons, but despite increasing her distance cycling and swimming Emily’s longest run had stuck resolutely at 26.2 miles.
That all changed in 2022, when a friend - Zoe - sent her a link to the Glasgow to Edinburgh Ultra. The message was meant as a ‘maybe, we should look at this’ idea, but within half-an-hour Emily had signed up to the 57-mile race.
When the pair eventually took on the run together, they made the mistake of setting off at marathon speed. After 30 miles, their “pace dramatically slowed” and before long they were even being overtaken by those walking the event.
“It was really quite demoralising,” Emily said. “But what we realised is that the average pace of those power-walking was the same as ours.
“We'd been running and we'd exhausted ourselves, and then had literally nothing left in the tank and were just dragging ourselves along.”
After completing last year’s pilgrimage to the London Marathon, Emily decided it was time to explore a different way of running.
Accompanied once more by her friend Zoe, she competed in the Thames Path Ultra Challenge. But instead of running the event, they decided to power-walk it throughout to see how their performance stood up against those running.
Emily told Running Tales: “It was so hot and we just walked the whole thing. And what we noticed is that for the first 20 miles, everybody was overtaking us.
Of course, they were. We were walking. But actually, once we got to the 20-mile stage, we then just carried on and we just kept the same pace.
“Our average pace across the race was the same. We didn't drop, and we both finished really strongly and in a great place.”
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Walking from Capital to Country - Emily’s Nepal adventure:
Emily’s power-walking experiment was to continue in November 2023, when she took on the inaugural Capital to Country Ultra Marathon in Nepal - a five-day, self-sufficient, 123-mile race starting in Kathmandu.
In preparation, she spent last summer power-walking along the north Northumberland coast, wild camping and surviving on fish and chips.
Once in Nepal, she found she was finishing each gruelling day only an hour or two behind the race leaders - and that her power-walking technique was allowing her to take in much more of the culture and history of the area.
“I can't tell you how much I loved it,” she said. “Absolutely loved every minute of it, even the long day, which there seemed to be a lot of elevation on.
“The first day I only finished an hour after the leg winner [Helen Ramwell], and she’s an incredible runner. And I think the biggest difference was an hour-and-a-half overall.
“The first day, I had thought, if I'm within three hours of them, then that's fine, because I knew they were phenomenal runners.”
While walking, Emily was able to take in a Nepalese wedding and to spend time looking at monasteries and historic sites.
She even made friends with a local man who was operating as the race’s back marker - although only after an initial encounter in which she almost attacked him with her trekking poles.
“It was really funny,” she said, “because no-one told me on the first day that there was going to be this back marker.
“I'm a woman in a different country. I know that I've got a tracker on me, but I know that, also, I'm not anywhere near any of the other runners.
“I'm just following these white arrows made out of flour - and there's this guy just behind me.
“‘You want water?’ he said, and I thought, ‘I don't even know who you are. I'm not taking water off you’.
“And he got really close. At one point, I actually thought I could hit him with my walking pole. It'd be all right if he gets too close. That was my plan. I was just going to hit him.
“Then I saw the race organiser's wife, and I was said ‘do you know who this muppet is, he’s following me?’
“And they were like, ‘yeah, he's the back marker’.”
After their initial encounter, Emily became firm friends with her back marking shadow: “He was brilliant because he was so proud of his country.
“We went to a wedding, which was brilliant. On day one, everybody else had finished, and I got in and said to them, ‘did you hear the music? Did you go to the wedding?’ They were saying, ‘no, we're in a race’.
“I went to temples, there was a military barracks and he would show me lots and lots of different things. So, I had very different experience.
“We would walk through villages and everybody would stop and talk to us. He was so interested in telling me about his country and then telling them what we were doing.”
On the last day of the event, the pair walked past a charity school, where her new friend’s brother was the headmaster. As they did so, the children inside peered out of the window and then rushed outside to see the unusual westerner who was passing by.
“They absolutely covered me in these dried, crushed rose petals. I smelt like Turkish Delight, which was lovely. I will never wash my top. I've got it preserved and framed because it's covered in the red rose petals, which was my blessing from the school.”
Emily’s experience in the Himalayan foothills also proved to be a spiritual voyage of self-rediscovery.
She had first visited the region 28 years previously on a youth expedition, meeting friends who have lasted a lifetime. Shortly afterwards, she met the man who was to become her husband and the father of her two children.
But with the Covid pandemic looming in early 2020, her marriage came to end - an experience Emily describes as “like grief almost”.
She said: “I then decided that I wanted to do something and I wanted to go back to the Himalayas, and to almost find who I was again.
“I'm a working mum of two and so you can get lost a little bit. In the playground, I'm Iona's mum or I'm Mouse's mum. And you almost lose your identity.
“I suppose I'd lost Emily, and so I wanted to go back to Nepal to find her again and just reconnect with me.”
Emily said she ended up crying on the first day of the event as she sent videos home to her children, while finding herself again in the shadows of the mountains.
“It probably sounds silly, doesn't it?,” she told Running Tales. “But I wanted to reconnect with the woman I was before I got married and had kids, and I definitely found her.”
Becoming ‘Grace Jones’ - the past Emily would say I’m fierce:
Another part of Emily’s power-walking policy was that she had already decided to take on the Marathon des Sables.
Fearing she would not be able to run in the heat of the Sahara, she felt walking would be her best tactic to conquer the desert.
The Emily who has always found a way is once again to the fore: “It's mental, isn't it? Let's be honest. I've entered MDS.
“I'm going in April, and it’s supposed to be the toughest footrace in the world. Someone said that to me, and I was like, it'll be alright, won’t it?
“What could go wrong? They said, ‘you're in the desert’.”
So, what would the Emily who was told she wouldn’t run again think of her future self, the soon-to-be Queen of the Desert.
“She'd think she was Grace Jones. She would think she is fierce.
“People talk about Beyonce. Whenever you say to a friend who is wearing something nice that they look great, they will say, ‘oh, this old thing’. And I say, Beyonce wouldn't say that. She'd say it looked rubbish on the hanger, but it looks incredible on me.
“Well, I'm not Beyonce, but I'm Grace Jones. And I think Emily who was told she couldn't walk or wouldn't be able to walk, she would be like, that's Grace Jones.
“That's pure Grace Jones. It's going to be an experience. The running is the sideshow. The meeting people, the experience, the being in the desert, the camaraderie, the laugh - and I do have a really loud laugh - those are what it is about.
“That's what I'm looking forward to most is the meeting people and the experience of it and sharing a tent - probably with people that snore - and just making friends for life.
“The old Emily, she'd be very proud. Perhaps a little bit shocked.”
Surprised maybe, but you can be sure she would somehow know everything is going to be alright.
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