JENNA BROOK

Jenna Brook is the Simpson Desert Ultra’s self-appointed Fun Creator (aka Race Director) and hails from the small town of Birdsville in Australia’s remote Outback. With a passion for showing others just how beautiful the vast and inhospitable desert can be, Jenna strives to ensure that each and every person who participates in the SDU will feel like they are the only person that matters. 

In 2012 Jenna embarked on her first adventure to walk across the Simpson Desert and covered 1000 sand dunes in the process. So if you’re planning to complain to her about the 20-30 dunes in a particular section of the SDU course, it’s probably best to think twice as you are unlikely to garner any sympathy from her. 

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In 2015 she became involved in the phenomenal event known as the Big Red Run which later became in the inspiration behind the SDU. Participating as a walker in 2015 and 2016, Jenna then went behind the scenes as a volunteer and became the self-appointed Campsite Cheer Coordinator in 2017 & 2018. It was here that she felt she was able to really make a difference to the experience had by each and every participant.

As someone who had regularly used the phrase “I’m not really a runner”, Jenna ate her words in 2018 when she completed a run from the bottom of Tasmania to the tip of Cape York, and could thus no longer argue that she wasn’t indeed a runner. In her defence she did walk a lot of the 4500km but is still probably fairly entrenched in the runner column for the time being. 

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Jenna has a loud voice that almost negates the need for a microphone and can usually be heard correcting people when they complain that they are dying on course, advising them they are not in fact dying and to stop being so dramatic. She spends most of her time near the back of the pack and has no issue whatsoever calling out the front runners for taking the easy way out and finishing so quickly. 

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She loves nothing more than an awkwardly long finish line hug, so if you’re not a huggy person she strongly urges you to start adding it to your training program because if there is one thing you can be sure of at SDU, it is that you will get hugged by Jenna.