Covid 19 coronavirus: Adelaide nurse walks ultra marathon in hotel room quarantine

Some binge on Netflix, others Facetime their friends and families, but one South Australian nurse has come up with an innovative way to pass the time in hotel quarantine: walking marathons in her room.

Sarah Crocker, 24, told NCA NewsWire she started with a half marathon which she found "pretty easy" before upgrading to a full marathon.

And on Thursday she set herself a new challenge – a 55km ultra marathon.

Her 30-metre walking route begins at the door, before she strides to the lounge, loops around the couch, along the edge of the bed and down the hall to the bathroom.

"My hips are really sore from walking around all the tight corners so I have to have an ice bath at the end," she said.

"I've had lots of people comment about how crazy it is. But it keeps me connected to the outside world because people are commenting on my Instagram stories."

The nurse is completing 14 days in quarantine at the Playford Hotel in Adelaide after she was deployed to Melbourne's most infectious hot spots with 30 other South Australian colleagues to help with a testing blitz.

For 10 days she went door-to-door and to clinics to test symptomatic Melburnians.

It isn't the first time Crocker has been in quarantine. In March she caught coronavirus while flying home from London, forcing her to isolate at home for 14 days.

"There were two days where I couldn't even get out of bed and shower," she said.

After fighting through post-viral fatigue, the 24-year-old is back to feeling her best. She said she wanted to make the most of her second stint in quarantine given she missed out on running a half marathon in London.

"I was working in schools there and lost my job so I had to come home," she said.

Crocker spent a few months working at Flinders Hospital in Adelaide before deciding to help her colleagues across the border.

"I felt like Melbourne needed our help more than Adelaide at the time," she said.

"Initially that wasn't what I signed up for, I was supposed to go home to my dog and my backyard."

Before leaving Britain, Crocker was planning to run the London Landmarks Half Marathon but the pandemic hit and organisers were forced to abandon the event.

"Given I'm still perfectly healthy in this [quarantine] stint, I thought I might as well walk some marathons. I run most days so I decided to do a half mara and I thought that was easy, so I did a full marathon and now I'm here," she told NCA NewsWire mid-walk.

The 55km took Crocker more than eight hours to complete. Thankfully she had "nothing else to do" as well as the support of the workers at an office building across the road from the hotel.

"They started waving to me when I was walking passed like they had clocked on that I was probably some crazy girl in hotel quarantine," she said.

South Australia recorded one new case of Covid-19 on Thursday, a man returning to the state from Victoria.