Jacqui Bell

About Jacqui

Jacqui Bell holds records that few athletes anywhere in the world can match. She is the youngest person in the world to run an ultra-marathon on all seven continents, and the youngest woman to complete Racing the Planet's 4 Deserts Grand Slam — four self-supported 250-kilometre races across Namibia, the Gobi, the Atacama and Antarctica. She has raced more than 2,000 kilometres in competitive ultra-distance events, across terrain that ranges from Antarctic ice to equatorial desert. Along the way, she has raised more than $35,000 for The White Cloud Foundation, where she is an ambassador, connecting her physical achievements to a purpose that extends well beyond personal record-breaking.

Bell did not become an ultra-runner because running was easy for her. She became one because she discovered what running through extraordinary discomfort could teach her about her own mind — and specifically about the mental health challenges she was navigating in her own life. That is the thread that runs through everything she does: the idea that the physical and the psychological are not separate, and that the lessons learned at kilometre 80 of a desert race have direct application to the way people cope, recover and endure in everyday life.

For corporate conferences, leadership programs, mental health awareness events and women's forums, Jacqui Bell offers a perspective that is at once extreme and entirely relatable. She does not ask audiences to run 100 kilometres. She asks them to examine their own relationship with discomfort — and to consider what might open up if they leaned into it rather than away from it. She leaves audiences not just with admiration for what she has done, but with a practical framework for what they can do.