This is a sort of coals to Newcastle story.

It seems perverse that someone left Dubai, on the edge of one of the world’s hottest deserts, and flew nearly halfway around the world to Death Valley to run in an ultramarathon.

You want sand and blinding heat? In the UAE, step outside and you are in it.

But a professor of electrical engineering at Wollongong University in Dubai had her reasons, as explained in The National.

To back up a minute, Californians cannot overestimate the global appeal of Death Valley. For starters, it has a great name, given to the area in 1849 by prospectors who made the mistake of entering it while hurrying to California’s gold fields.

It gets better. Death Valley is the site of the highest reliably reported air temperature in world history, 134 degrees Fahrenheit (56.7 Celsius) in July 1913, and it is also the home of the lowest point below sea level in North America, the Badwater Basin, at 286 feet below sea level.

People from all over the world trek to Death Valley; go there this time of the year, and it will be busy with, especially, Europeans who are fascinated by such a hot and dry and deep desert.

Ultramarathoners being the freaks they are, someone came up with the ridiculous idea of staging the Badwater Marathon, a 135-mile run from Badwater to the trail head of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states.

The annual event attracts the best/craziest of ultramarathoners, 100 each year, and a few weeks ago a Dubai-based Australian named Catherine Todd competed in the race.

She not only completed it, as noted in the story linked (above), she had the best time among the women in the race: 29 hours, 55 minutes, 29 seconds.

Not only did she survive the scorching heat of Death Valley, during July, she also dealt with a ridiculous amount of uphill running, more than 13,000 feet in climbing, culminating in the finish line, not far from the peak of Mount Whitney.

Once we pack in all the climbing and the below-sea-level start, and the hottest place on Earth … we can see why an ultra-crazy would be attracted.

Just seems strange, at first blush, to those of us sweltering in the powerful grip of an Arabian Peninsula summer.