Ultra-marathon sensation Sunmaya Budha blazes a trail for women to follow
Three days before the Hong Kong 100 Ultra Marathon in January, Sunmaya Budha was racing against time to reach the city due to visa delays. She was nearly 3,000km away, in Nepal's mountainous Jumla district. She first had to catch a flight from its tiny, weather-dependent airstrip to another city, then to the capital, Kathmandu, and finally onwards to Hong Kong.
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Within 48 hours of landing, however, Budha did not just run the 103km race along the Sai Kung Peninsula and across Hong Kong's forests, beaches and hillsides, but also
scored a record-breaking victory . In what sports commentators called 'devastating for her competitors', Budha finished the women's run in 11:11:47, breaking Chinese runner Xiang Fuzhao's 2020 record of 11:28:21.
'I was incredibly happy setting a new record after a few setbacks the previous year,' says Budha, 26, on a warm spring day in Kathmandu. She is rushing again, this time flying to Italy the following day for a training camp, before competing in the Chengdu Trail Race 60km, which she would go on to win. 'It makes me realise the importance of hard work,' she says, 'and that nothing is impossible if you are determined.'
Sunmaya Budha during a 2023 Nepal Trail Series run in Kathmandu. Photo: Nepal Trail Series
Budha has had an indomitable spirit her entire life. She
rebelled against the teen marriage still practised in Nepal's remote villages and
revolted against social norms that restrict girls from following their chosen career paths. Budha is now Nepal's fastest woman ultra-marathon trail runner, third in Asia and 13th globally in the female 23-34 age group, according to the International Trail Running Association's performance index, which puts her in the world's top 0.01 per cent in the field.
In Hong Kong, where she frequently travels for races, Budha has become a force to be reckoned with. Six of her seven races in 2023 were in the city. She won the North Face 100 Ultra Trail Challenge Hong Kong 100km race and Lantau 50 (27km) in the same week in December, having won the 50k TransLantau race the previous month. She also won another half marathon and two 50k races in March and April that year.
Those wins seemed prophetic. Around 2018, Rémi Duchemin from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc Organising Committee said he saw Budha 'winning the world's greatest races in the coming 10-15 years, zero doubt'. Meanwhile, Lithuanian runner Gediminas Grinius described Budha as 'calm, serene and sometimes shy, but on the trails, she is the killer – silent killer'.
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