Ten women have earned places on a new training programme that will prepare them to run the BYD Karachi Marathon 2027, after more than 500 applied. The initiative, called She Runs, was launched by Mega Motor Company, the official partner of Chinese carmaker BYD in Pakistan, as part of its sponsorship of the Karachi Marathon for a second year running. The marathon itself is scheduled for January 3, 2027, and the ten selected runners will spend the next ten weeks getting ready for it.
The response was far bigger than the number of places on offer. More than 500 women applied, and just 50 were shortlisted and invited to a final selection event at Ramada Creek in Karachi. There, the hopefuls were put through a demanding day that tested far more than their speed. They completed a ten-kilometre endurance run, took part in warm-up and cool-down drills, and went through fitness assessments, interviews and medical evaluations before the final ten were chosen. It was a proper sporting trial, not a lucky draw, designed to find women who could benefit from ten weeks of structured coaching and go on to complete a full marathon.
Leading the selection and the training that follows are two people who know long-distance running from the inside. Shah Faisal Khan, co-founder of Platinum Fitness and a strength and conditioning coach who specialises in marathon performance and rehabilitation, is overseeing the programme alongside Uzma Abid, a marathon runner and running coach associated with UESCA and MatrixFit. Their job is to turn ten promising runners into marathon finishers: building endurance, improving technique, managing injury risk, and preparing them mentally for a race that will test them as never before. For many of the selected women, this will be their first experience of training with a proper plan, with coaches watching their progress week by week.
The women selected now face a demanding road to race day: a ten-week programme built around steady progress, professional guidance on endurance and performance, and preparation for the marathon itself. Ten weeks is a realistic window for a committed runner to build the base fitness a marathon demands, provided the training is planned carefully and the runner stays healthy.
Speaking about the initiative, Anum Abdullah, Senior General Manager for Human Resources, Administration and Corporate Social Responsibility at Mega Motor Company, said the response showed how much appetite there is among women in Pakistan for organised sport. Pakistan, she said, has no shortage of women with the ambition and determination to pursue sport, yet access to structured training and support remains a challenge. The aim, she said, is to create opportunities for women to turn that ambition into achievement, and to encourage more women to take up running. Talent is rarely the limiting factor for women athletes in Pakistan. What has so often been missing is the structure around them: coaching, safe places to train, medical support, and someone willing to invest in them.
That is also why the programme matters beyond the ten women who were selected. Women’s participation in organised sport in Pakistan has long been held back by practical barriers rather than a lack of interest. Training facilities can be hard to reach, coaching is often informal, and families are understandably cautious about the safety and cost of taking up a sport seriously. A programme that offers professional coaching, fitness assessment and medical checks under a recognised brand removes several of those barriers at once. It also creates visible role models: when ten women line up at the start of the Karachi Marathon in January, other women watching will see a path that did not exist for them before.
The initiative sits within a much larger story about the Karachi Marathon, which has grown quickly into the country’s biggest running event. The most recent edition, held in January 2026, brought together more than 7,000 runners from Pakistan and over 120 international athletes from more than 25 countries. It was Pakistan’s first World Athletics certified long-distance marathon. The men’s title was won by Israr Khattak in two hours and 39 minutes, while Sara Lodhi won the women’s race in three hours and 33 minutes, and both champions were later sponsored by BYD-MMC to compete in the London Marathon 2026. Race director Shoaib Nizami has said the event is part of Vision 2032, a long-term plan to prepare Pakistani runners for major world marathons and the Olympics.
For the ten women of She Runs, the story is much simpler and much more personal. They have ten weeks of training ahead of them, a marathon to prepare for, and a chance to show what they can do on one of the biggest stages Pakistani sport can offer. If they make it to the finish line on January 3, they will have done far more than complete a race: they will have proved that with the right support, Pakistani women can take on one of the toughest challenges in sport, and opened the door wider for the hundreds who applied and did not get in. That is what a programme like this is for.
