Urban Ultra - It's Origins In The UAE
OutdoorUAE|January 2018
Urban-Ultra was founded by a passionate team of women that have made the trail running scene in the UAE a more family friendly, outdoors mad, ultra-distance hungry community of people. How did it all happen?
 
Pascale De Jong
Urban Ultra - It's Origins In The UAE
In 1996 we established a graphic design and Photography company here in the UAE. Always keen on our desire to be active, outdoors and part of the sporting scene, we evolved from playing GCC, to mountain biking and running.

Triathlons where a natural progression in the direction of doing multiple sports which re-kindled our love for road cycling.

We wanted to have a Triathlon with world class athletes like Faris al Sultan and “Macca” Chris Mc Cormack in the city center with amateur athletes competing alongside them. So that was the first Urban-Ultra.

Our ambitions then started to shift. We wanted to do longer and more challenging events, and eventually our own DIY Dubai Ironman, just because we could…This idea came about when we sat around the campfire and wanted to do an Ironman, but there where non in the UAE and so together with two of our friends we created the first Ironman event in Dubai... (Very VVIP) LOL!

Shortly after the DIY ironman, we joined a Gulf for Good Cycle challenge, cycling from Bangkok to Cambodia, raising funds for children in need, and had to create a way to raise funds in the UAE first, so we set up the first ever Coast to Coast Cycle Challenge, a 200km route, now from Sharjah coast to Fujairah al Aqah. Cyclists had families donate money for every km they finished, and this was added to the donation pool for the children in Thailand.

This story is from the January 2018 edition of OutdoorUAE.

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This story is from the January 2018 edition of OutdoorUAE.

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