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She Stopped Eating Meat at Six. At Sixty, She Still Holds an Antarctic Marathon Record.
She lost her right kneecap at 17. Doctors said she would never walk properly again. She turned 60 last month and still holds four Guinness marathon world records.
Photos from Fiona Oakes
Fiona Oakes was six years old when she stopped eating animals.
She was seventeen when a tumor in her right knee cost her the entire kneecap.
The surgeons who operated on her told her she would never walk properly again, let alone run. She has since had 17 surgeries on that leg.
She turned 60 on August 1, 2026. She still holds four Guinness World Records for marathon running. Her personal best is 2 hours, 38 minutes.
If there is a more useful data point in the entire can a plant-based athlete perform at elite endurance conversation, we have not seen it.
The Short Version of an Impossible Career
In 2013, at age 47, Oakes decided to attempt something no woman had done. She would run a marathon on every continent on the planet, plus the North Pole. Fast.
She won both the Antarctic Ice Marathon and the North Pole Marathon that year, setting course records in both. She completed the full seven-continents-plus-the-Pole circuit in an aggregate time of 23 hours, 27 minutes, and set three Guinness records simultaneously.
Fastest woman to run a marathon on every continent. Fastest aggregate time for the whole grand slam. Fastest female Antarctic Ice Marathon on record.
The Antarctic time, on ice, in temperatures that broke another entrant on the same course, was 4 hours, 20 minutes. She beat the previous women's record by six minutes.
What The Rest of Her Weeks Look Like
This is the part that separates Oakes from the average elite. Her marathon career is a side project.
Her main job is running Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary in Asheldham, Essex, where she cares for more than 400 rescued animals, mostly horses, pigs, sheep, and dogs.
Alone, most of the year, with her partner helping on weekends.
She has also worked as a retained firefighter, the UK equivalent of a volunteer emergency responder, on-call and expected to respond to anything from house fires to car crashes on a moment's notice.
Her training runs happen in the middle of an 8-to-12-hour shift on the sanctuary, before dawn or after 8pm. The sanctuary food bill runs over £5,000 per month.
She fundraises for it herself.
This is not the itinerary of a professional athlete. It is the itinerary of a person whose only leverage is discipline.
The Question Everyone Asks Her
The obvious question, and the one Oakes has answered a thousand times in interviews and one full-length feature documentary, is how.
She has been eating plants for 54 of her 60 years on Earth.
Her documentary, Running for Good, was directed by Keegan Kuhn, the filmmaker behind Cowspiracy and What the Health, and released in 2018. In the film she runs the Marathon des Sables, a 250-kilometer ultramarathon through the Sahara in temperatures that reach 51°C.
She finishes it. On plants. On one kneecap.
Her explanation, in interviews, is boring in the specific way that professional-athlete explanations tend to be.
- She trains early or late so the animals get their day.
- She does speed work, which she credits as the single largest lever she found to move from good to fast.
- She eats whole food, mostly, because she does not have time for anything else.
- She has been vegan long enough that the question stopped being interesting to her decades ago.
That last one is the point.
Most of the how does a vegan athlete do this framing assumes plant-based eating is a limitation to work around.
Oakes' career reads more like a proof that after 50 years on the diet, the question was never the one worth asking.
The Wider Story Around Her
Oakes belongs to a category the mainstream running press has not caught up to yet. Long-term, lifelong-vegan endurance athletes competing into their sixties and seventies.
The category is not new.
Mike Fremont holds half-marathon world records in the 90 and 91 age groups, on plants. Harvey Lewis, the American ultrarunner, keeps setting course records into his 40s and 50s. Naomi Mitchell has been competing at British national level for years.
Torre Washington will step on the Mr. Olympia stage this month at 52, on plants.
What Oakes offers, beyond the records, is the longitudinal proof.
Anyone can argue about a 12-week trial. It is harder to argue with 54 years of dietary consistency held next to four Guinness plaques.
One Thing About the Sanctuary
The reason to write about Oakes is the record. The reason she runs is the sanctuary.
Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary is home to over 400 animals, most of them horses and farm animals that would have been slaughtered or euthanized if she had not intervened.
She has been running it, largely alone, since long before her marathon career took off.
Every appearance she makes, every interview she gives, every documentary that films her, is in the service of raising money to feed those animals for another month.
That is the actual reason she keeps running, at 60, on one kneecap.
For more on the lineage of vegan endurance athletes quietly rewriting expectations, our recent piece on the English powerlifter who deadlifted 3.5x her bodyweight while vegan since 17 sits alongside this one.
And if any of this makes plant-based endurance feel less mysterious than the noise around it suggests, our free 7-day vegan meal plan is a low-friction place to try what she has been eating for 54 years.
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