Ferrell wins intraspecies race, edging eagle, leopard

For the first time in over five millennia of competition, a human has won the World Interspecies Survival Marathon (WISM).

Senior Cack Ferrell edged out an eagle and a leopard to take home the gold, finishing the 8,000-mile course around the Earth's equator in a time of 86 days, 17 hours, 13 minutes and five seconds.

"I never expected to do this well," said Ferrell, standing atop Mount Chachabamba just past the finish line. "I was hoping to get in the top 10, and a top-five finish would've been a dream, but things just seemed to work out somehow."

Ferrell stayed with the lead pack throughout the nearly three-month long race, but she only pulled ahead in the final days.

"The ostrich and I were shoulder to wing the entire race," Ferrell continued. "If the leopard hadn't eaten her on the next to last day and the cheetah hadn't been disqualified for doing catnip, I don't know how I would've done. With the ostrich off my back, I was able to make some good time and gain on the eagle."

"It was so amazing to watch," women's cross country head coach Peter Farrell said. "All these other species were rushing around congratulating her, and all she could say was, 'I beat a freaking eagle!' over and over again.'"

The WISM traces its beginnings to more than thirty million years ago and is based on the story of Noah and the Ark. As legend has it, when Noah called all the animals before the floods came, there was a huge race to the ark. Since then, the WISM has taken place to honor that beginning.

Though the difficulty and duration of the race is daunting, the hardest part of the journey came when Ferrell was off the course.

"It's just so hard meeting and training with all these other species," Ferrell said a few days before the race began. "All the other competition I've gone against in the past has been humans, so it takes some getting used to."

Two months prior to the race, Ferrell received a packet of information which included an outline of WISM's nondiscrimination policy. In addition to training for the marathon, competitors were expected to attend daily one-hour workshops on species sensitivity.

"It kind of sucked," Ferrell recalled. "We had to spend an hour every morning going over what species sensitivity was. We had to do it at two in the morning, too, because of the nocturnal species. One of the toughest things I had to do was when we worked on species-neutral language. We couldn't call anybody an "animal." It was always species this or species that. We couldn't even say 'runners' because not all the animals were bipedal. Many of the competitors were flying or swimming or crawling or rolling."

Running in the exercise room with a giraffe, sharing a room with an orangutan and fighting for shower time with a cheetah were just a few of the trials that Ferrell had to undergo before the race even began. But in the end, Ferrell felt she learned a lot about living with her fellow species.

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"I'm still catching myself licking myself and picking bugs out of my friends' hair," Ferrell giggled. "The marathon was definitely the best thing that's ever happened to me."