Sara Hastreiter is a bit of an overachiever who is chasing her ambitious athletic goals across the globe, and setting records along the way.
On the water, the Wyomingite has raced across every ocean, including five Trans-Atlantic crossings; a true rounding of Cape Horn after 5,000 miles in the Southern Ocean; setting a world speed record in the Round Britain and Ireland yacht race; and winning Royal Ocean Racing Club’s Multihull of the Year in 2015.
By 2019, she had sailed all seven seas and had climbed the highest peaks on three of the seven continents on the planet.
Mountain climbing seems a natural pull from someone who grew up in landlocked Wyoming. The yachting is something else altogether.
“I was just a girl from Wyoming,” Hastreiter told Cowboy State Daily. “There was nothing particularly special about me, except maybe my level of curiosity and my want for adventure. Those two things really led me out into the great wide world, and I allowed myself to follow those passions and curiosities, and those took me everywhere.”
Hastreiter grew up in Casper and Laramie, and attributes her roots in the Cowboy State with her adventurous spirit and the nontraditional path she took with her life.
She has battled the elements, illness, injury and mental fatigue to achieve goals that exceeded even her own expectations.
One of her ambitions has been to always use her platform to help others and to further the causes she believes in, whether it’s talking to students about their dreams or raising awareness of causes such as childhood cancer.
Looking For Adventure
When she was at the University of Wyoming, Hastreiter got an internship in Africa with an HIV/AIDS clinic for summer 2006.
It was while she was there that she set a goal of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak on the African continent and widely considered the most technically difficult climb in the world.
After being struck down with malaria, Hastreiter knew her chances of beginning the expedition were slim, let alone completing it. A week after being released from the hospital, she attempted the climb anyway and shocked everyone by standing on the summit just five days later.
Another internship through UW took Hastreiter to the Caribbean, where she discovered sailing.
After graduation, she returned to the blue sea she had fallen in love with and became a professional sailor, racer and self-proclaimed adventurer.
“Living in the Caribbean presented some other opportunities and inspiration,” she said. “It’s really magical to sail down there because the water is turquoise, the breeze is warm and nice and steady and sailing down there is really beautiful.
“Just being from Wyoming, I was really adventurous. I thought the scariest thing I could do was cross an ocean. After doing local sailing regattas, I was really inspired to find a way to cross the Atlantic or any ocean, really.”
The first time she sailed overnight was the beginning of an 8,000-mile journey across the Atlantic. She then continued on to Greece over the Mediterranean.
“I fell in love right away,” Hastreiter said.
With less than five years of sailing experience, she qualified to join the Volvo Ocean Race in 2015. Her team successfully sailed around Cape Horn.
“We placed the highest ranking for an all-female team in the history of the race,” Hastreiter said. “We won a leg where you sail from one country to the next. They never thought that women would be competitive on the inshore racing because it's very, very physically demanding.
“We actually ended up third overall out of the 10 races that we did. We won several of those. There was a lot of really amazing highlights.”
In 2017, Hastreiter set a new goal. She had just returned from an adventure hiking trip in the Himalayas to the Nepalese base of Mount Everest when she announced to her family and friends her latest ambition.
Sara Hastreiter grew up in Wyoming and has always had an appetite for adventure. (Courtesy Sara Hastreiter) 
Navigating crevasses in Russia before climbing Mount Elbrus. (Courtesy Sara Hastreiter) 
Winning the in-port race in New Zealand. (Courtesy Sara Hastreiter) 
Sara Hastreiter's first World Record crossing the finish line in the Round Britain and Ireland Race with Team SCA. (Courtesy Sara Hastreiter)
World First Record Attempt
Hastreiter had set a goal to become the only female, and only other human ever, to complete the monumental task of sailing all seven seas and climbing the “Seven Summits.”
“The around-the-world race is often called the Everest of sailing,” she said. “I wanted an opportunity to do this race again with this group of women I had just sailed around the world with, and when that looked like it wasn't going to happen, I decided that I wanted to climb Mount Everest.”
Raising sponsorships has been one of the biggest challenges that Hastreiter has faced, realizing that she had to set a big objective to raise the money she needed.
“People told me that it wasn't enough to be the first woman in the world to sail the Volvo Ocean Race and climb Mount Everest, that it needed to be a bigger project,” she said. “I started looking at the training that I had outlined for Everest, and essentially, I was going to climb several of the Seven Summits on different continents to train for Everest.
“That was my project for four years.”
Denali Record Attempt
In 2019, Hastreiter teamed up with World Hope International for her world-record Seven Seas/Seven Summits Quest.
She described it as an exciting time as she headed for her fourth of the seven summits: Denali, at 20,310-feet the tallest peak in North America. She had already climbed Kilimanjaro, Mount Elbrus in Europe (18,510 feet) and Aconcagua in South America (22,837 feet) and was looking forward to finishing Denali.
“On summit day, I ended up turning around about 1,900 feet from the summit. I didn't know it at the time, but I had a lung infection,” she said. “I just knew something was wrong, and I didn't have enough energy to get up and bring myself back safely. Even if you climb nine-10ths of a mountain, if you don't stand on that little geographical marker of the summit, it doesn't count.”
While she acknowledged the failure of that moment, she said it was important to also remember the importance of the journey and to keep moving forward. The next opportunity was to join a sailing team heading to the Olympics.
“When someone offered me an Olympic project and all I needed to do was be an athlete for the next five years I was like, yeah, sign me up,” she said. “I knew with that I could make enough money and potentially raise my profile to get sponsorships to finish the remaining mountains.”
When COVID started and the world shut down, Hastreiter was in France training for an Olympic sailing event.
“Probably six months after that, the International Olympic Committee actually pulled that sailing event from what was supposed to be the Paris 2024 Olympics,” she said. “They couldn't regulate cheating, and they thought it was too dangerous.”
Hastrieter returned home to Wyoming and moved to Jackson, where she lives with her husband.
Sara Hastreiter grew up in Wyoming and has always had an appetite for adventure. (Courtesy Sara Hastreiter) 
Sara Hastreiter at the top of Mount Elbrus, the tallest peak in Europe. (Courtesy Sara Hastreiter) 
Climbing on cliffs over the ocean in Italy. (Courtesy Sara Hastreiter)
New Chapter
As Hastreiter continued to train and looked for sponsorships so that she could climb the next four peaks, her goals of a world record were derailed.
In her own words, “life happened.”
At the end of September 2023, she was in a car crash that left her seriously hurt.
“I had a sailing race planned 10 days later, and I didn't have enough time to do the MRIs and figure out what was going on,” she said. “I got a bunch of good meds, and I went and I did the sailing race, and it was really hard.
“And then when I came back, we did the MRIs and I was told that I couldn't sail anymore.”
Hastreiter had to have spinal surgery and is still recovering from the crash.
“I don't think I can carry a backpack up a mountain anymore,” she said. “I don’t know how much I can recover in two or three years but, at the moment, it's more like just trying to live as a normal person rather than trying to live as a superhuman athlete.
“That's OK. You know, I'm very happy here in Jackson. I'm just trying to find the next thing.”
While she looks for that new goal to aim for, Hastreiter wants to inspire others to reach for their dreams and takes every opportunity she can to speak at schools and to organizations.
“As I was sailing and living in other parts of the world, I just always wanted to share that the world is just as available to all the kids growing up in Wyoming now as it was for me,” she said. “There’s a lot to see in this world and I think sometimes living here, we feel very isolated from the rest of the world. But we're so connected.
“I think that was one of the things with sailing is to feel how connected we are to each other, around the world, to nature, to wildlife. All of those things are obtainable no matter where you grow up. You just got to find your passion and follow it.”
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
