Like one of the top rated comments to this article in the Telegraph tonight, I immediately assumed this marathon was being run in some foreign country where they do things differently. But it’s along the Pennine Way, the chain of hills called the backbone of England, that runs from Staffordshire in the south of the Peak District, dividing Lancashire from Yorkshire into Northumberland to the Scottish border.
A British woman has been withdrawn from an ultramarathon after receiving online threats to behead her.
Sarah Porter was 30 miles through the 108-mile Montane Winter Spine Challenger South endurance race along the Pennine Way when organisers made the decision to withdraw her because of safety concerns.
Porter was undertaking the challenge to raise money for young girls and women in Afghanistan and received death threats online, with some social media posts appearing to suggest she would be decapitated on January 11.
The race itself includes remote areas of the UK moorland where runners can be alone for hours at a time, with viewers on the website able to track the progress of participants via a GPS tracker.
“When the link [to the GPS tracker] was disabled it changed everything,” Porter told the RunUltra podcast.
“And then the threats started coming in and it’s quite dangerous and they’re [people online] talking about executing you on Standedge and they’re talking about the fact that you’re going to be on your own overnight and they were very serious threats. Those threats also went through to the Spine team. . . I really felt like I’d let down the girls that I was running for and I’d really got this narrative in my head and psyched myself up that what I was doing was just so insignificant in comparison to what they’re enduring.
“By the time I got to Standedge a team from the Spine race met me and said they were withdrawing me from the race and said ‘you need to get off course’.
Porter explained how she offered to continue under a pseudonym and asked if there was anything she could do, but was told she could not continue.
The organisers of the race said: “On Saturday the 10th [of January] we made the difficult decision to remove one of our participants from the race following a personal safety threat, we have been working with all the relevant authorities and believe there is no wider threat to other participants on the course.
“We understand that this is disappointing for the runner in question, but the safety of all our participants is always our primary concern.”
2 Responses
A relay team from an elite commando unit in the army should have been running alongside.; to make it quite, quite plain that any would-be beheaders would be obliterated.
A similar comment in the Telegraph suggested a telephone call to the gentlemen in Hereford (SAS HQ)