ED NOTE: We’re sharing this 2016 profile on Samantha Gash following her appearance on the 2017 season of Australian Survivor, and also as we call for nominations for the 2017 Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards.
If you’re an Agenda Setter, or an emerging leader in tech, legal, design, not-for-profits, or something else, get entering here.
Samantha Gash plans to run at least 50 kilometres a day when she starts her 3800 kilometre run across India later this month.
It’s an ambitious feat but one I’m pretty confident she’ll achieve, having followed her career from corporate lawyer to ultra-marathon runner and now motivational speaker.
The 31-year-old is making the journey in partnership with World Vision to raise awareness for education. She’s set a minimum fundraising goal of half a million dollars but says the key focus of the effort is to share content and stories of people across the country through her Runindia.org website. From there, she’s inviting people to participate from home, creating their own 12 week journey via the challenge website to complete certain distances, such as running between locations ranging from 13 kilometres to 316 kilometres, individually or as part of a team.
So how does a corporate lawyer became a woman who regularly runs hundreds of kilometres nonstop?
Gash says she started running in high school to help ease the stress and pressure of her final year exams. Later while working in a corporate law firm, it became an outlet for managing a career she realised wasn’t for her. She completed her first marathon in 2008 and decided running 42 kilometres wasn’t enough — she wanted to complete a 100 kilometre race. From there the endurance challenges got bigger: in 2010, she became the first woman to run 4 x 250 kilometre desert ultra-marathons in one calendar year — included in Namibia, China, Chile and Antarctica. She ran 379 kilometres nonstop across the Simpson Desert to raise money for Save the Children. She also completed an epic 1968 kilometre run across South Africa in 2014 to raise money for young women to get support to feminine hygiene products.
Two years ago she told a friend who was working at World Vision that she wanted to run across India and link the project to exploring the barriers to education for children. He got her in front of World Vision’s partnerships team, and their ambassador team. “The last two years I’ve become a familiar face in the World Vision office,” Gash says, as she’s put in the work required to prepare for such a major trip. Gash will visit 18 World Vision areas on her run, and a number of World Vision Communities during her six rest days.
Gash explains that her goal is not merely to complete the run, but rather to help initiate change in enabling more children to have access to education. She believes the way to create such access is to explore the reasons why children can’t go to school – something she’ll see first hand while running, and share via her website. “That’s my purpose, and at the moment I’m doing it through running. I don’t know that running will always be my vehicle, but that’s it right now,” she says.
So how do you train for an actual cross-country run?
Gash concedes she’s not an Olympian, and needs to spend a significant portion of her time preparing for the trip, including marketing and putting processes in place to document the journey. As such, she trains efficiently. “Running is what I’ll do there, the training is the smallest component of all the things required to put this on. The training I do is specific, but it’s highly efficient,” she says. “My goal is to have a strong body that can take the loading, but I’m not an Olympian, it’s about sustainability over the 12 weeks. I don’t want to be a destroyed human being when I get back!”
The morning we talk she she was up at 5am and in an altitude chamber running for an hour, simulating conditions 3200 metres above sea level. She also has a treadmill in a hot yoga studio, where she trains for an hour in 38 degree heat, and she completes three weights sessions a week.
Gash says she’s not training for long hours, and offers some advice to anyone who wants to get into running (especially busy women) — simply get outdoors, and give yourself the time. “Being outdoors and running has made me more mindful and a calmer individual. That’s been my way of being able to be a bit more zen in my day to day life,” she says.
“It’s always that leap to give yourself permission to have that time. There’s always a zillion reasons why going out 40 minutes in the morning is a bad idea. Maybe it’s better to have that extra time to sleep, maybe you have kids. But you don’t have to go out for long amounts of time to experience the benefits. Sometimes I just go out for 20 minutes.”
Meanwhile, she’s still growing her corporate speaking business and, having achieved so much already in her just over 30 years, is writing her memoirs, due to be published in 2017.
This is one inspiring woman. Follow Samantha Gash’s journey here and get involved.
UPDATE: Sam completed the run across India in 76 days, in November 2016.