Meet National Geographic’s Adventurer Of The Year
Her name is Mira Rai, 29, and she’s a trail runner from Nepal. She can run in grueling mountain races up to 68.3 miles long.
Photo credit: Richard Bull
Rai unwittingly began her training by helping her mom carry necessities like salt and oil from the market to their home in the hills of eastern Nepal. And she would run the 45 minutes to school, too, typically on an empty stomach.
By age 12, she couldn’t afford to stay in school. So she joined the Maoist rebel army in the early 2000s at the age of 14. “I wanted to do new things. In the village, there’s no chance, every day watching goats, planting corn or millet, and then working in the fields every day,” she says. Â
Photo courtesy of Mira Rai
In the army, she met people who encouraged her to join her first race. To her surprise, she crushed it. That was the start of her career as an athlete.
Photo credit: Richard Bull
Today, Rai boasts a stunning string of wins, including a new course record at France’s Mont-Blanc 80 kilometer of 12 hours and 32 minutes, and a second place finish at Spain’s Ultra Pirineu, a 110-kilometer race with a 6,800-meter vertical incline.
Photo credit: MK-Photographe.com
“My grandma, she worked hard, my mom, she worked hard, but they didn’t have a chance to do something, to get respect,” Rai says. “I went around the world, which nobody ever got that chance, from my family or village.”
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