Sophie Woods speaks about the challenges she overcame while completing the notorious Via Alpina across eight European countries
A couple of weeks into her record-breaking 2,000km run through Europe’s alps, Sophie Woods feared she might die. Woods and her photographer had just scaled a peak in Switzerland, when a severe thunderstorm engulfed them.
“The lightning was going off around us … there was nowhere to shelter in place [and] all the rocks around us were conductive,” Woods tells the Guardian, from her home in Andorra, nearly two weeks after she became the fastest person ever to run the Via Alpina, a 2,000km network of alpine trails through eight countries.
