A 50-year-old Spanish extreme athlete emerged on Friday from a 500-day challenge living 70 meters (230 feet) deep in a cave outside Granada with minimal contact outside. Wearing dark glasses and smiling as she adjusted to the light of spring in southern Spain, elite mountaineer Beatriz Flamini told reporters that time had flown by and she did not want to come out. “When they came in to get me, I was asleep. I thought something had happened. I said: ‘Already? Surely not.’ I hadn’t finished my book,” she said. Flamini’s support team said she broke a world record for the longest time spent in a cave in an experiment monitored by scientists studying the human mind and circadian rhythms. She was 48 when she went into the cave, celebrating two birthdays alone underground. Flamini began her challenge on Saturday, Nov 20, 2021 – before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the end of Spain’s Covid mask requirement and the death of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. She did come out for eight days, her team disclosed, but stayed isolated in a tent waiting for repairs to a router used to send audios and videos to tell her team how she was doing.