IF OBSTACLE RACING has a breakout star, it’s . The 30-year-old Portland, Oregon, native has won, or scored a podium spot in, each of the 14 races she’s entered, and she’s done it while working 80-hour weeks as a corporate bankruptcy attorney for one of the world’s largest law firms. At last year’s , a 24-hour championship race in Englishtown, New Jersey, Boone traversed 90 miles and more than 300 obstacles to take first place among women. She also finished second overall and a full ten miles ahead of the guy in third. As an encore, this summer at the eight-mile , she got lost and was forced to run an extra mile鈥攁nd still won the women’s division.
THE ASCENSION: In 2011, Boone, who was a high school soccer star but gave it up in college, registered for her first obstacle race, a Tough Mudder event in Wisconsin, along with three colleagues. “Within five minutes,” she says, “I ditched my coworkers and floored it up the mountain.”
PROUD WARRIOR: Boone’s office is littered with racing paraphernalia鈥攖he orange Tough Mudder headband, liability waivers, a faux skull from one of the three Spartan Death Races she finished. “My bosses are a little scared,” she says, “but they’re always very interested in what I’m doing.”
FEAR OF FRYING: “I’m petrified of electricity now,” she says. “I crawled through the Electric Eel nine times at World’s Toughest Mudder last year. One time I got blasted so hard I nearly blacked out. I fell and hit my head and started crawling in the wrong direction.”
CALL IT A HOBBY: For the moment, there’s no such thing as a professional obstacle racer. That could change soon, though, as the fledgling sport gains sponsors and a TV audience; September’s Spartan World Championships, with a $250,000 prize purse, was filmed for the NBC Sports Network. It’s easy to see how Boone could make a career of it鈥攊f she had any desire to. “I’m not sure I’d want to do it full-time,” she says. “I like using my brain too much.”
UP NEXT: Boone defends her World’s Toughest Mudder title on November 16, then heads to England in January to tackle her first Tough Guy, a nine-mile, 40-plus-obstacle event held in the dead of winter. “I have a feeling it will be an entirely different level of suffering,” she says. “I hate the cold.”