In 2008, Sandes won the Sahara Race and the Gobi March. In 2009 he placed second in RacingThePlanet
Namibia, and won the
Jungle Ultra Marathon in
Floresta Nacional do Tapajós in Pará, Brazil, setting a new course record. In 2010 he set a record time for the
4Peaks Mountain Challenge. Also in 2010, Sandes became the first competitor to have won all four of the
4 Deserts races, each a 6/7-day, self-supported footrace: through the
Atacama Desert in
Chile, the
Gobi Desert in
China, the
Sahara Desert in
Egypt, and lastly through
Antarctica. This achievement prompted Mary Gadams, founder and CEO of
RacingThePlanet and organiser of the event, to state
“Ryan Sandes is clearly one of the top endurance athletes in the world - to have won all 4 Deserts is a remarkable accomplishment.” At the time, only 81 individuals had completed all four trails, and 11 competitors had done them in the same calendar year. In 2010,
Time magazine included the 4 Deserts Challenge on a list of the ten most demanding endurance races in the world. Sandes won the 2011
Leadville Trail 100 in a time of 16:46:54, more than half an hour ahead of runner-up
Dylan Bowman. He won the 2012
North Face 100 in Australia in a time of 9:22:45. In August 2012, he bettered Russell Pasche's record for the 90K Fish River Canyon hiking trail from 10:54 to 6:57. In 2014, he won the second race in the Ultra-Trail World Series Tour, the
Transgrancanaria. In 2017, he won the
Western States Endurance Run, in 16 hours 19 minutes 37 seconds.
Pair running In 2014, Sandes and Ryno Griesel set a
fastest known time (FKT) on the Drakensberg Grand Traverse (DGT), an unmarked and self-navigated route across the main Drakensberg escarpment between South Africa and Lesotho, covering 200km of distance and 9000m of elevation gain. In 2018, they set a new FKT for the
Great Himalaya Trail (GHT), running 1,504 km in 24 days 4 hours and 24 minutes. ==See also==