Ultra-marathon sensation Sunmaya Budha blazes a trail for women to follow
Not only has she taken the ultra-marathon world by storm, Nepali running star Budha has opened hearts and minds
Three days before the Hong Kong 100 Ultra Marathon in January, Sunmaya Budha was racing against time to reach the city due to visa delays. She was nearly 3,000km away, in Nepal’s mountainous Jumla district. She first had to catch a flight from its tiny, weather-dependent airstrip to another city, then to the capital, Kathmandu, and finally onwards to Hong Kong.
“I was incredibly happy setting a new record after a few setbacks the previous year,” says Budha, 26, on a warm spring day in Kathmandu. She is rushing again, this time flying to Italy the following day for a training camp, before competing in the Chengdu Trail Race 60km, which she would go on to win. “It makes me realise the importance of hard work,” she says, “and that nothing is impossible if you are determined.”
In Hong Kong, where she frequently travels for races, Budha has become a force to be reckoned with. Six of her seven races in 2023 were in the city. She won the North Face 100 Ultra Trail Challenge Hong Kong 100km race and Lantau 50 (27km) in the same week in December, having won the 50k TransLantau race the previous month. She also won another half marathon and two 50k races in March and April that year.
Those wins seemed prophetic. Around 2018, Rémi Duchemin from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc Organising Committee said he saw Budha “winning the world’s greatest races in the coming 10-15 years, zero doubt”. Meanwhile, Lithuanian runner Gediminas Grinius described Budha as “calm, serene and sometimes shy, but on the trails, she is the killer – silent killer”.