She hoped to beat the world record held by an American (262 km), ultimately Stéphanie Gicquel will have to settle for the French record. But the performance remains exceptional. Among the world’s best athletes during the Desert Solstice Invitational Track, in Arizona, the Parisienne improved her performance and covered, on the track and covered 249.3km in 24 hours.
This is the equivalent of six times the marathon distance at an average pace of 10.4 km/h. This corresponds to 623 laps of a 400 m track.
To achieve this performance, the licensee of the Entente PUC-Stade Français spent the summer and fall at CREPS in Font-Romeu where she performed sprints in hypoxia at + 5000m altitude. It then reached the United States and Arizona in the heart of the Sonoran Desert.
Beyond the distance to be covered, he had to overcome the challenges of managing sleep, eating during the race, and mentally due to the monotony of the circuit and the lack of variation in muscular demands. Without forgetting the strong heat during the day and the thermal amplitude between day and night. She had worked on these aspects with researchers from INSEP.
This performance was also made possible thanks to his practice of ultra-endurance for many years in different forms. Ten years ago, this lawyer carried out a long polar expedition across Antarctica. Stéphanie Gicquel had traveled 2,045 km via the geographic South Pole in 74 days with temperatures dropping to -50°C. It is the longest expedition carried out by a woman on this continent without motorized means or traction sail, appearing as such on the Guinness World Records.
Member of the French athletics team since 2018, Stéphanie Gicquel was vice-world champion in 100 km in 2022 with the French team, and vice-European ultra-distance champion when she improved the French record with 253.6 km run in 24 hours non-stop, in 2022, one year after a serious accident which required several months of rehabilitation and reathletization. In 2019, Stéphanie Gicquel finished third in the World Marathon Challengea competition of seven marathons over seven days and on seven continents.
Before the event, Stéphanie Gicquel had warned: “I am going to try to improve the world record. This will be my first attempt, there will be others in 2025 if necessary.”