After Preparing to Run 7 Marathons in 7 Days, Woman Gets an Email the Night Before Leaving that Changes Everything (Exclusive)

Michelle Khare in Antarctica. Credit: @MichelleKhare NEED TO KNOW Michelle Khare spoke to PEOPLE about the intense preparation behind the Great World Race, including seven months of training for extreme, unpredictable conditions The 33-year-old YouTuber explains how a last-minute schedule change forced her to run the Antarctica leg of the challenge just 14 hours after completing a full marathon in South Africa For Khare, the experience ultimately underscored that adaptability mattered more than all the scenarios she had planned for For most people, running a single marathon is the result of months of focused training, careful planning and a full day of sustained effort — but imagine doing that seven times over, on seven consecutive days, across seven continents, each one presenting its own extreme and unpredictable conditions. That’s exactly what Michelle Khare set out to do in November 2025 at The Great World Race .

But just as she prepared to begin with the most daunting leg in Wolf’s Fang, Antarctica, everything changed overnight. “Even though we had seven months to prepare and think really critically about everything that could and would and will go wrong, you can't predict everything,” Khare tells PEOPLE exclusively . “And that attitude is really what's so important.

” Michelle Khare. Credit: Jason Roman When Khare, 33, made the decision to enter the race, she didn’t do it lightly. With more than 5 million YouTube subscribers and a reputation for immersive, high-stakes challenges, she spent months preparing for what fewer than 300 people in history have ever completed.

Starting in April 2025 at the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center, Khare trained closely with David Kilgore, a seasoned ultrarunner who was also gearing up to take on The Great World Race for the third time. Unlike Kilgore and many of the other racers who had already previously experienced the grueling demands of the race, Khare had only ever run two marathons in her life: the 2017 Los Angeles Marathon and a 2022 ultramarathon in Death Valley. And although she knew training for this challenge would be difficult, she had no idea just how much physical and mental preparation it would require.