What a Woman!

Adventurer, 61, lands in Britain for last leg of her global run

She has been followed by wolves, received twenty-nine proposals of marriage — and on six occasions has nearly died. But a grandmother said yesterday that she was “full of beans” after arriving back on British soil on her record-breaking 20,000-mile run around the world.

After making her way alone across some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain, suffering frostbite, double pneumonia and a breast cancer scare, Rosie Swale-Pope, 61, is now believed to be on the verge of becoming the first person both to sail and run around the world.

She confirmed last night that she had checked with Guinness World Records, which had said it had no record of anyone having achieved the double feat.

As Rosie Swale, she achieved fame in the 1970s as a round-the-world yachtswoman, causing a stir by sailing through the Tropics in the nude. On her latest venture she was nearly swept to her death in a river in Siberia, and almost froze at minus 62C (-79F) in Alaska.

On one night she was confronted by a man wielding an axe; on another she was taught by two convicted murderers how to light fires in the rain.

But after wearing out 45 pairs of shoes in more than 240 weeks of running, Ms Swale-Pope was delighted to be home. “It’s fantastic to be back on British soil,” she said, adding that she hopes to be back in Tenby, West Wales, on August 25 — 1,789 days after she set out in October 2003.

“The most important priority now is to run the last 700 or 800 miles, and then to keep honour with this journey by writing a book.”

Her latest adventure began on her 57th birthday after the death of her husband from prostate cancer, in an attempt to raise awareness of the disease. After running across Europe, spending two winters in Siberia and crossing the United States, Canada, Greenland and Iceland, she caught a ferry to Scrabster in Scotland that arrived at 5am yesterday.

Ms Swale-Pope, who has two children and two grandchildren, carries all her possessions, either in a backpack or a cart, which she pulls by a harness around her waist.

Her many marriage proposals were probably from men who fancied the cart, not me, she joked. “I think most of them were simply because I looked strong and handy for hauling logs and things. I had nine in Poland alone.” In the US, where she found a lump in her breast but a biopsy gave her a clean bill of health, her trek caught the public imagination and she received an invitation to speak on The Martha Stewart Show.

But her most memorable experiences included seeing the Northern Lights after several days of snow blindness, and being run at by an axe-man one night in Siberia.

She recalled: “Suddenly there was a crashing noise and a wild-eyed man burst through the trees running towards me. I decided to stand my ground and before I could do anything he had grabbed me by the shoulder and I was enveloped in a vodka-smelling bear hug. It turned out that he was a woodsman and he was having a vodka party. He turned out to be quite OK — just a little worse for wear.”

In Russia, where the Siberian cold cracked all her fillings, she discovered that she had double pneumonia when she was taken to hospital after being hit by a bus. In eastern Siberia a pack of wolves followed her for a week. “I just behaved as if I was the boss. In the end I was grateful for their company.”

Despite her arduous journey, Ms Swale-Pope said that she needed no time off and would head for Wales without delay. “The purpose of my journey has been to highlight the preciousness of life,” she said. “I had to do something and this was a small thing really — just putting one foot in front of the other.”