Ioana Barbu was running a 200km race through the imposing and remote Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan when things started to get worse.
A huge storm approached, hitting it with hail and causing temperatures to drop from 35ºC to between five and 10ºC in a matter of minutes.
Strong winds had ripped away course markings from the race trail, and many competitors developed hypothermia and were forced to withdraw. But Barbu was still fixated on running—so much so that she hadn’t noticed a wild dog chasing her until she felt its bite.
“I was just running. The first thing I knew about this dog was when he sank his teeth into me,” she told CNN.
Although the adrenaline dulled the pain, she could see blood coming from a wound in her leg. Barbu grabbed her hiking poles to create distance between herself and the animal, screamed loudly to scare it, and used her GPS tracker to alert race medics to its condition.
At almost 3,200 meters above sea level and 5 kilometers from the end of a grueling run that had already lasted five days, she decided to continue, knowing that an anti-rabies vaccine would only be available once she was out of the mountains.
“I keep joking that the dog did me a favor because, with the adrenaline pumping, I didn’t waste any time on this climb — it was done quickly,” she recalled.
Last year, Barbu became the first person to complete the Beyond the Ultimate (BTU) Global Race Series in a calendar year — running 940 kilometers (584 miles) in four races through the Arctic, jungle, mountains and desert in multi-stage, self-supported ultramarathons.
She also completed the other two BTU races, in the Kenyan wilderness and the Scottish Highlands, also becoming the first person to complete all six BTU races in one year, covering over 800 miles.
But Barbu, 37, who works in TV and podcasting, only started running by chance after chatting to British TV personality Spencer Matthews during a break from recording her podcast.
“He was training for this Beyond the Ultimate Jungle Ultra [maratona]and that was all he talked about,” said Barbu
“I Googled it and looked at it and thought, ‘I’d love to do something like that someday.’ He just looked at me and said, ‘I’m two months older than you. Why not now?” So I literally signed up and gave myself seven months to train.”
After finishing her first race, Barbu was introduced to an expert trainer and set a new goal: to become the first person to run the entire Global Race Series in one year — braving harsh conditions in remote locations including Swedish Lapland, the Namib Desert and the Peruvian jungle.
“I was in this ridiculous situation — [normalmente] people train for one race a year. I was using one race to train for the next one,” she said.
Before starting, Barbu didn’t know that over the past 12 years, many athletes had attempted the challenge and failed.
“Ignorance is bliss, because if I had known that, would I have trusted myself less?” she said.
Still, she committed to training like a professional athlete, with strength training, running, and fifteen-day altitude acclimatization hikes alongside her full-time job.
Snakes and insects
In addition to running long distances over several days, the list of potential dangers runners could encounter in the BTU series would be enough to discourage many: wild animals, snakes, insects, rivers, mountains, landslides and the like.
“In the jungle, you’re warned about all the snakes and all the bugs and things like that. And then in the desert, there are snakes, bushes that are dangerous, highly poisonous,” she said, adding that crossing mud, rivers and vegetation meant trench foot was also a concern.
To prepare for the freezing temperatures of the Arctic, Barbu acclimatized by taking ice baths, and for the scorching desert and humid jungle, she used heat chambers. She also worked with London Southbank University, which was collecting data for research into human adaptation to extreme conditions, to better understand how to prepare your body for the exertion it was about to face.
In the Arctic, for example, “if you get too cold, you get hypothermia. If you get too hot, you get hypothermia.”
“Because if you start to sweat, it feels cold against your body and doesn’t dry out again,” she explained.
Barbu was also aware that spending so much time and energy running would mean she would need to prioritize her mental health.
“One-third of the race is your physical training, one-third is your mental game, especially when you’re at mile 60 and everything hurts. One thing that’s guaranteed is that things are going to hurt when you get to the 100-mile mark. That’s normal, because we’re human, but at that point, you’re really relying on the mental game. And one-third is just your organization and knowing your equipment and knowing what to do. You can’t just wing it,” she said.
In 2025, Barbu completed his challenge, reaching the podium in every race except Kyrgyzstan, where his finishing time was affected by the dog bite.
“It taught me that I’m much stronger than I thought,” she said of her achievement. “Plus, it’s very rewarding to set a goal for yourself and work toward it—there’s strength in that, and there’s a lot of power in that.”
