Daughters of Distance by Vanessa Runs

Author:Vanessa Runs [Runs, Vanessa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Endurance: The Balance to Life

When Christine Bilange was asked to pace her friend Stephen at the Angeles Crest 100-Mile Endurance Run, she brought her 15-year-old daughter Lea along to help crew. It wasn’t exactly the stereotypical 15-year-old girl’s paradise: no clothes shopping, not many boys, no giggling girlfriends. This was the backcountry with rugged trails and unforgiving terrain. They arrived Friday and didn’t go home until Sunday afternoon, dirty and tired and exhausted.

A few months later at another race, Christine would overhear Lea instructing a runner at the end of a 50-mile race on endurance nutrition, hydration and cramping prevention. Three years later Lea told her mother out of nowhere, “Mom, that was the best week of my life!”

The crewing experience for Lea had been extreme, yet it provided an important balance to a life otherwise filled with teenaged convenience and conformity. Without such extremes, our own lives could easily turn into overdoses of comfort, far from the call of the wild. We would know nothing of blisters or electrolytes or how to handle ourselves in the backcountry.

Instead of trying to minimize our training time for the sake of balance, maybe we need to acknowledge that extreme endurance is the balance to a modern life overflowing with sedentary shortcuts.

In a world where normal involves sitting for more than ten hours a day and consuming copious amounts of highly processed foods, perhaps endurance sport is not the “unhealthy” habit we need to worry about. Save the alarm bells for when people are being hurt or neglected, not when an athlete is aspiring beyond society’s “normal.”

Endurance athlete Lisa Tamati credits running as the activity that balances her mind, body and soul, yet her weekly training in no way resembles balance to the non-athlete looking in. Lisa is an acclaimed elite, having run the equivalent of three times around the world through the hottest, harshest and highest terrain on the planet. She says that having a single endurance goal is purifying because there is so much going on in her non-running life. “The phone’s constantly ringing, emails are coming in, there are a hundred things that need doing—and I have to find a way to balance it all…When I go to a race, I leave all that behind and just focus on the trail.”

Jennifer Pharr Davis is another endurance athlete and thru-hiker who has given up the illusion of a daily balance. She has hiked more than 11,000 miles of long distance trails, trekked on six continents and holds endurance records on the Appalachian Trail, Long Trail and Bibbulmun Track. Jennifer is also the first woman to be the overall record holder on the Appalachian Trail, a feat accomplished by hiking the 2,181-mile trail in 46 days, 11 hours and 20 minutes—an average of 46.9 miles per day. How does she make it all work?

It’s simple: she plans her life on a yearly basis. “Everything has a season,” she explains. “My day-to-day life is not usually balanced, but if you give me 365

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