©swissultra

Claire Smith likes to test her limits. Her interest in pushing the boundaries of Iron distance triathlon started a decade ago and has led the Brutal Events founder to take on the kind of next-level challenge which finishes with a 262-mile run. Yep, last year Claire completed the ultimate endurance test: the swissultra Deca triathlon. That’s ten times the full ironman triathlon distance: swimming 24 miles, then cycling 1120 miles, and finally (how?) running 262 miles. Continuously.

The Deca triathlon is a sanity-questioning distance. So why did she do it? How did she do it? And why is she planning to be the first British woman to complete what she considers to be the toughest of the Deca challenges, the one-day Deca (more below), in November? I quiz the 43-year-old self-titled ‘back of the pack plodder’ to find out.