Queen Of The Desert

How a working mom of two ran 250km across one of the harshest deserts in the world.

- Carin Bevan

Shelley Bolle doesn’t let anything hold her back: not even crutches. Back in 2007, she ditched a pair to ‘run’ her first half marathon.

Eight years later, Shelley was inspired by a blog written by trail legend Ryan Sandes, in which he described what it was like to run across the Atacama Desert.

At the time, she was knee-deep in parenting her two kids (then aged two and four), had just started a new job, and considered herself an average runner. How on earth could she just up sticks to run across the world’s driest desert? Besides, she would need thousands of dollars just to travel to South America!

But the same can-do attitude that had prompted her to cast aside her crutches and run 21km made this hare-brained idea seem plausible.

“I thought, Hang on… why can’t I do this? she says.With that, Shelley decided: she would run the Atacama Crossing in October 2016.

Training

She began crowdfunding for the event, which was then only 20 months away. As friends and family bought into her dream, the money started pouring in.

Now there was no turning back.

Shelley got in touch with Ian Waddell, who had coached both Ryan Sandes and Daniel Rowlands to victory at the Atacama Crossing.

“Ian is phenomenal,” she says. “He has a holistic approach to training: it’s more about maintaining good spirits than achieving good times.”

In the past, Shelley and her husband Eligh had taken turns to go out and run, according to when they could fit it in around their busy schedules. But once she had built up a general level of fitness, Waddell prescribed an intensive training programme.

Shelley ran in blocks of 25km over a period of four days, committed to two weekly gym sessions, and had one rest day.