Rosie Swale Pope MBE

The hardest ever journey was her 21,000 mile solo self supported run around the world from Tenby to Tenby circling the globe to raise cancer awareness after her husband Clive died of prostate cancer.

Rosie has been an athlete and an adventurer for years. Before her husband Clive’s death in 2002 from prostate cancer, she had run marathons in different countries like Albania, Romania, Iceland and war-torn Kosovo and wrote about some of them for publications like Runner’s World and Woman’s Weekly. From those experiences, she learned how to travel with a backpack and tent and survive on a small budget.

When she first met Clive she was preparing for her solo transatlantic sailing expedition in a 17 foot boat.
But it was her husband’s death at their home in Tenby, Wales that spurred her on for her run around the world. Heartbroken over her loss, in 2003 she decided to run a circle around the world in his memory to raise awareness about the importance of health checks and to raise money for cancer research.

Although her adventures on this trip are too many to list, she did share the time in Siberia where a timber wolf decided to pop his head into her tent to say hello. She wondered if he had never seen a human before.
“He never hurt me and he and his pack followed me for awhile. It was like they were running with me,” she said.
She also shared how one early morning in the forests of Russia, at 1 a.m., she woke up to find a man coming at her with an axe. At first she thought he was yelling at her in anger, only to realize that he was yelling with joy. He hugged her and invited her to a party with his fellow woodsman and said she was the woman for him. She politely declined, but later in the morning she found that he left her a parcel of food and a small bottle of vodka.
“There really is kindness in everyone,” she said.