SINGAPORE – When mother-of-three Martini Abdul Talib says she is running errands, she means it literally.

“My friends always tease me. If I say I want to buy shoes from Queensway, they’ll ask: ‘Are you going to run there?’” says the 43-year-old, who thinks nothing of clocking the 16km distance from her home in Pioneer on foot. She does not own a car.

In 2013, Malay newspaper Berita Harian reported how she and her husband, civil servant Idi Bakhtiar Md D’Zokere, 45, jogged from their then home in Clementi to Geylang Serai during Ramadan once a week to buy food to break their fast, a distance of about 17km. It took them almost three hours, and they would take the bus or MRT home.

Such distances are easy for Ms Martini, an ultramarathoner who has competed in numerous races of more than 50km, including three over 100km, since 2014 in South-east Asia. Ultramarathons are races longer than the marathon distance of 42.195 km.

She aced three recent competitions, coming in first in the women’s masters category (42km) in the Salomon Forest Force 2023 race in Singapore; third in the women’s open category (84km) in the Route 68 Ultra 2024 race in Selangor; and second in the women’s veteran category of the Highland Ultra Challenge 2025 in Genting Highlands, which is a 12-hour endurance race.

Nothing seems to faze her – not even a fractured ankle after a hiking trip to Nepal in February 2019. Doctors inserted a metal plate and six screws in her foot and told her to rest for six months. By October that year, she had recovered enough to run a 55km ultra race.

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, she wore out her Vibram barefoot shoes jogging around Singapore. They were costly to replace. So, for three years, she trained and raced in made-in-Taiwan thong-style cushioned flip-flops in Singapore until she rejoined overseas competitions that required proper footwear.

She now has eight pairs of shoes, each with a different function, such as for trails, roads, interval training and recovery.

What makes her story extraordinary is that the petite, 1.54m-tall mother of three teenagers aged 14 to 17 was not a sporty child.

She started running only in 2012 to lose 10kg after the birth of her third child at age 31. It was the cheapest and most convenient way to exercise as she lived near a stadium.

“One round around the stadium track was very tough. I couldn’t even finish two rounds (around 800m),” she recalls.

As ...