LAURA WHYMS – Camino de Santiago FKT – Runner’s World, March 2026 issue
When you complete a journey along the Camino de Santiago, a route of pilgrimage that finishes at the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in northwest Spain, you are traditionally given a certificate of accomplishment which states that you have ‘visited this most sacred temple for the sake of pious devotion.’ For Laura Whyms, a school teacher from Kent who lives in Madrid, it was a little less pious devotion, a little more zeal for an FKT. By completing the ‘French Way’ – a 784km route from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to the Spanish cathedral that is believed to hold the remains of the apostle James – in 13 days, two hours and 14 minutes, she set the fastest known time for an unsupported woman to cover the trail.
Considering that the Camino de Santiago has been highly popular since the 10th Century, it’s surprising that more runners haven’t felt a calling to the multi-day challenge. Laura saw mostly cyclists and walkers along the way – some who had begun their journeys from as far afield as Belgium and Germany – and only began to think about setting a record because the existing best time turned out to be eminently beatable. She doesn’t rate herself as a particularly fast distance runner, though she is a past winner of the Jordan Marathon. ‘The reason for that is there were only about 14 women who had entered,’ she confesses. ‘I finished in three hours forty-something, which is not a typical woman’s winning marathon time. But I won the equivalent of about £1,200, so it was definitely worth doing!’
That her Instagram handle is @onceinalifetimetraveller should give a strong hint at Laura’s hunger for adventures abroad. The 37-year-old has been teaching in international schools for the past 10 years, in Jordan and Malaysia as well as Spain. She got into running after experiencing the 2015 London Marathon as a spectator. ‘I was just completely inspired by the thousands of people doing it, and it meaning so much to all of them,’ she says. She picked the Camino de Santiago because a friend had enthused about their run along it, it was reasonably handy to reach from her home, and she wanted to raise money for two charities: Street Child, which works to get children into education in low income and disaster-affected countries, and Doctors Without Borders, which provides medical aid in countries affected by conflicts or natural disasters. So far she has brought in close to £6,000 through her challenge.
She decided to do the run self-supported – that is, no crew to help with fuel, rest and injuries. She wore a 15-litre running vest with less than 4kg in it including a litre of water, which she refilled at the regular taps and fountains along the route. She had gels, electrolytes, basic medical kit, a power bank for her phone, one change of clothes plus three pairs of socks, and flip-flops for when the trainers came off at the end of the day. She had booked advance accommodation in hostels and campsites along the way, covering an average of about 60km a day. Travelling so light kept things simple, while also sometimes adding extra difficulties: ‘In the evenings, when all I wanted to do was sleep, I would be drying my clothes with a hair dryer so they would be okay for the next day.’
It sounds like it was sensible to pick a long distance trail that has been well trodden for a full millennium. She says she always felt safe as a woman on her own, and found the logistics of the journey ‘super easy’.
‘If you wanted to, it would be possible to do it without much forward planning at all,’ she says. ‘There’s food and water easily available all along the way, and you could just turn up and find accommodation available. I did it in peak season, early September, and although parts of it were busy, most of it was really quiet.’
Along the way, travellers collect stamps in what’s known as a ‘pilgrim’s passport’ – a nice souvenir, although when Laura arrived at the office in Santiago for her final stamp, they initially thought she had got her dates wrong. ‘Then they congratulated me when they realised I was serious and had ran it!’ As for less attractive keepsakes, she was remarkably lucky to finish the trek having collected just one blister.
In hindsight, it wouldn’t have been too taxing for her to knock a much bigger chunk off the FKT. She only had 20km to do on her last day, so could theoretically have finished the night before. ‘I don’t think I could have run any faster, but I could have made my days longer,’ she says. ‘I did think, “Shall I go for it and try and do 85k on the last day?” But I would have been finishing in the middle of the night, and I didn’t want that quicker time enough to not enjoy the journey as well.’
It sounds like she found a perfect balance between toughness and fun. ‘The thing I thought about the most, while I was doing it, was that I wanted to show people that you don’t need to be a top athlete, or a celebrity, or have a coach, to be able to do these really cool challenges,’ she says. ‘So much of it is mental rather than physical. I did those distances because I told myself I was going to do those distances.’ Amen to that.
givewheel.com/fundraising/8602/784km-13000m-up-one-crazy-run-across-spain
