Bitten But Not Broken: This Runner Refused to Quit a 5-Day Race Despite a Leg Wound
Ioana Barbu was deep into a 143-mile, five-day ultra-marathon through Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan mountains when a wild dog latched onto her leg.
Ioana Barbu was deep into a 143-mile, five-day ultra-marathon through Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan mountains when a wild dog latched onto her leg. She didn’t see it coming. She had 3 miles left. And she kept running.
“I’m just running along. First thing I first knew of this dog, it had his teeth in me,” Barbu told CNN in March 2026.
Blood gushing from the wound, Barbu grabbed her hiking poles to shoe the dog away and yelled until it retreated. She activated her GPS tracker to get the attention of race medics. Then, fueled by adrenaline, she ran straight for the finish.
“I keep joking that the dog did me a favor because with adrenaline kicking in, I did not mess about on this uphill—it got done quick,” she said.
How Ioana Barbu pulled off the unbelievable feat
That Kyrgyzstan race was one piece of a much larger puzzle. Barbu became the first person to finish the Beyond the Ultimate (BTU) Global Race Series in a year—running 584 miles in four marathons across different terrain.
She didn’t stop at four. Barbu also completed BTU’s two additional races, making history as the first person to finish all six BTU races in a single year. The total: more than 800 miles across six races through some of the most punishing environments on Earth, all within 12 months.
Ioana Barbu trained her body for opposite extremes
The training piece of Barbu’s story is where things get especially interesting for anyone obsessed with pushing physical limits. She had to prepare her body for radically different climate extremes—sometimes back to back.
For the Arctic’s freezing temperatures, she acclimatized with ice baths. For the sweltering desert and humid jungle, she used heat chambers. These are specific physiological adaptations designed to force the body to regulate temperature under conditions it would naturally resist.
Barbu also worked with London Southbank University, which was gathering data for research on human adaptation to extreme conditions. That partnership gave her preparation a scientific edge, turning her training into something more precise than logging miles alone.
The thermoregulation challenges were no joke. “If you get too cold, you get hypothermia. If you get too hot, you get hypothermia,” Barbu explained about the Arctic conditions. “Because if you start sweating, that gets cold against your body, and doesn’t dry up again.”
Ioana Barbu has encountered many wild animals while running
The dog bite wasn’t Barbu’s only close call. She weathered a hailstorm during that same Tian Shan race, running through terrain inhabited by wolves, snow leopards and mountain goats.
Other legs of the series brought different dangers. “In the jungle, you get told about all the snakes and all the creepy crawlies and things like that. And then in the desert, there’s snakes, bushes that are dangerous, highly poisonous,” she said.
The dog bite cost her a podium finish in the Kyrgyzstan race. But the experience reinforced something deeper about what these events demand mentally.
What racing has taught Ioana Barbu
“It’s taught me I’m so much stronger than I thought I was,” Barbu reflected. “Also, it’s really rewarding to set yourself a goal and work towards it — there’s strength in that, and there’s a lot of power in that.”
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