by Hoda Kotb
“I got the phone call that Hunter had died,” Diane says softly, “and that’s the morning I was driving up to the Teva Mountain Games in Vail, trying to hold it together.”
The night before the plane was to pick him up, Hunter suffered a seizure and suffocated in his sleep. Devastated, Diane began to feel a plan unfolding in her mind. Here she was, surrounded by the top athletes in the world, at a well-known annual event covered by the mainstream media, sponsored by a global company. Now was the time. This was the way to honor the kids at camp years earlier who’d asked Diane to tell the world they were just like everybody else. The plan came together when Diane’s name was announced as Female Runner of the Year.
“I was standing up there onstage holding this trophy,” Diane describes, “and that’s when I shared. I just pictured Hunter and it was just time. A little boy had just lost his life to a seizure and that’s when I stood onstage and said, ‘I want to dedicate this trophy to little Hunter Nelson.’ I said, ‘Ten years ago today I couldn’t even take a bath alone, because if I had a seizure I could drown. I’m here now today, running all the hardest races in the world, because of surgery. I’m here and Hunter isn’t.’ ”
Now the world knew. This elite athlete was the incredible woman she was despite the challenges she’d been dealt. Her close friend Richard, whom she told of her seizures that very first ultra race, defines her not as an ultra runner, but rather as an ultra lifer. He says adversity fuels Diane’s passion for excellence.
“Many of us look at things and we might have an inner conversation about why we want to achieve that thing, but then we also have a whole committee of voices in there about why we can’t achieve it. All the excuses kick in: Oh, I haven’t trained, I don’t have the right equipment, I don’t have the time, or Poor me, I have a foot injury,” says Richard. “But with Diane, she has plenty of reasons. She could make excuses, but she never uses them. Instead, she says, ‘Okay, this is what happened to me, I’m gonna succeed here, even though I’ve been given an extra challenge.’ She leverages what other people may call a handicap in a way that gives her strength. There’s a flame inside her that won’t go out.”
In addition to five other ultramarathons in 2005, Diane decided to compete in her longest race yet: the Iditarod Trail Invitational. You’ve probably heard of the Iditarod or have watched teams of sled dogs pull their mushers across the endless, barren miles of Alaska. The race Diane signed up for didn’t allow dog power. For the Iditarod Trail Invitational, Diane had to pull her own sled, packed with forty pounds of supplies and survival gear. The course spanned 350 miles through frozen tundra. Temperatures reached 60 degrees below zero, and the winter daylight was brief. When Diane told Scott she was going, he was angry. They had not discussed her decision as a couple. He felt a maddening mix of being disrespected and being afraid for his wife.
“That was a tough day. It was winter and we live four point eight miles from Sedalia,” says Scott. “I remember putting on full Gore-Tex and gloves and a hat and I walked to and from Sedalia in the middle of the night. I think I came home at three thirty in the morning. I just couldn’t process it.”
Scott was conflicted. He loved that Diane followed her heart, but he wanted her to take her common sense with her. He’d joined her often enough during races to know that she had fantastic instincts and an innate ability to make solid decisions under pressure. It was the things Scott couldn’t control, like Mother Nature, that scared him. Once he accepted the fact that Diane was going, he began to research the Iditarod Trail Invitational. He found the controllable risks to be generally minimal. There would be a large support team and there would always be other competitors along the route with Diane. Scott was on board.
2005 Iditarod Trail Invitational. (Credit: Whit Richardson Photography)
Diane, serving as musher and dog, began the long haul of pulling a sled across 350 miles of unforgiving tundra. She covered fifty miles each day, trying to complete the race in seven days while battling hurricane-force winds and hostile wildlife.
“The moose are huge in Alaska, and that’s the first time I’ve ever had to sign a waiver that if a moose kicked me, the race people were not liable.” Diane chuckles. “And I thought, A moose? C’mon. But if you run across a moose, they’ll stomp you, they’ll attack you, they’ll kill you. They’re very aggressive animals.”
Sure enough, it was a moose that took Diane out of the race. Not the animal itself, but the deep hole left behind by a moose as it walked through the snow. While navigating a steep embankment in the dark, wearing a headlamp, Diane accidentally stepped into a moose hole. The weight of her sled yanked her body backward, causing a groin pull. The next aid station was eighty miles away, so Diane was forced to painstakingly drag her strained leg with one hand and her sled with the other. When she finally hobbled into the aid station, which consisted of a tarp, she tried to rest her leg. Her ankle, which she would learn later was stress fractured, was so swollen she couldn’t cram it back into her boot. Diane was forced to pull out of the race at 260 miles.
“That’s when I said, ‘Screw it. If I’m gonna do this again, I’m gonna do something harder, colder, and farther.’ ”
That would be the Yukon Arctic Ultra 300, billed as the world’s coldest and toughest ultra. Scott was apprehensive but once again took a deep breath.
“If you can see her eyes light up when she talks about the Yukon and the welcoming people and the crisp bitter cold and the sun,” he says with a lilt in his voice, “and the way the stars reflect on the snow . . . I understand the appeal of all that. It just brings her alive. I just . . . worry about her.”
Diane’s mother has also struggled with the adventurous spirit of her daughter. Scott says he came up with an analogy for her mom that also comforts him. He pictures an aviator who blazed her trail in the sky.
“I can just see the scarf blowing back in the wind and her looking out of the plane. Amelia Earhart was born to fly. She probably didn’t stay home and sew socks or make beef stew a lot, and we wouldn’t expect her to. Clearly, Diane has carved out this niche that she was intended to be in: inspiring other people; using her ability; being connected to the North Face, which gives her this chance to represent a company in a positive way and influence young girls about things that they can do; and she relates to people about overcoming obstacles. So, I struggle sometimes and get frustrated when I don’t get enough Diane time, and yet I’m part of something that’s even bigger.” He adds, jokingly, “But sometimes, I would like to come home and have beef stew for dinner.”
TEN YEARS LATER
In 2007, a decade after her brain surgery, Diane was thriving. The operation had given her the freedom from worry and harm she’d so desperately wanted for herself and her family. That year, Diane spoke to three different groups about hope for beating epilepsy and how to manage the inevitable challenges of life. On the ultramarathon circuit, Diane’s feet did the talking. She ran seven grueling races, besting her former finish time in the Hardrock 100 by three hours.
The following year, Diane headed north for the “harder, colder, and farther” race she sought. In February 2008, Diane traveled to the Canadian Yukon, just below the Arctic Circle, to compete in the Yukon Arctic Ultra 300. She once again pulled a sled, this time laden with fifty pounds of supplies, in merciless fifty-degrees-below-zero temperatures. Diane applied all she’d learned during the Iditarod Trail Invitational to avoid frostbite and hypothermia. At one point in the race, her water bottles froze solid, leaving her with no hydration for twenty miles. She faced seventy-mile-per-hour winds that drove her to her knees when she reached the Yukon River. In the bluster, she lost track of the trail, but eventually rediscovered it after a four-hour detour. One of her navigational tools was to leave behind pieces of colored ribbon that she carried in her first aid kit.
“Let’s just say I got lost, and I’d go along on a trail and not see another mile marker. I could come back and tear off a piece of that pink ribbon and put it on top of th
e snow with a stick or big piece of ice on top, then I’d know when I came back that I’d already been that way; go this way instead.”
Nearly eight days later, she was the first racer to cross the finish line. Diane had beaten the Arctic and every one of her thirteen competitors from all over the world.
“I love pressure,” says Diane. “I do really well under pressure because pressure feeds me and challenges me.”
The following winter, just when Diane thought she had seen the last of the Arctic, race organizers added an additional 130 miles to the event she had won. Diane couldn’t resist the new challenge. She signed up for the 2009 Yukon Arctic Ultra 430. Scott, again, processed the mental gymnastics of supporting the pro athlete but missing his wife.
“How can I not limit you,” he explains, “but how can we do things together when we’re not doing things together?”
He again researched the most effective ways to keep track of Diane. He would follow her progress through a satellite tracker and use the Internet to keep abreast of weather conditions. He knew she would be armed with the experience gained from completing the Yukon 300.
The course started in Whitehorse, Yukon; traversed the Yukon and Takhini Rivers; and ended in Dawson City, Yukon. Facing subzero winds and just seven hours of daylight, competitors had thirteen days to travel 430 miles. Once again, Diane towed a sled packed with forty-five pounds of supplies. Her small stove was crucial for melting snow into drinking water and for cooking meals that provided Diane the ten thousand calories a day she burned. Nuts, cheese, chocolate, peanut butter—foods with a high fat content were essentials. Diane relied heavily on sliced-up mini loaves of nutrient-packed bread a German baker made for her in his Yukon bakery. He also baked her dense, wholesome fruitcake that didn’t freeze (Diane doesn’t know why). Like a chipmunk, she jammed food into her ski mask and ate it in intervals; the strategy was to avoid having to take her gloves off frequently to grab calories. Racing the clock, Diane napped, at most, three hours each day. She traveled a portion of the route with an Englishman named Jerym (Jair-um) Brunton, whom she knew from the racing circuit. Sixty miles from the finish line, the two enjoyed the first sunny day in a week. They stopped to peel off a few layers of clothing and to enjoy the clear, blue sky. Diane shed her down jacket, a fleece pullover, and a Gore-Tex shirt. Off went her down feather pants, too. She still wore several layers, and she threw the stripped items onto her sled.
And then, the bottom dropped out for Diane.
“I can shut my eyes right now and still remember that sound. The kkkkkkkkkk. The ice cracking.”
The frozen river Diane and Jerym were trekking on gave way.
“I’m out ahead of him, and all of the sudden I hear this splash!” Diane says. “I fell through the ice.”
Diane was connected to her sled by a hip belt. Because she had lost about eight pounds during the race, the loose belt floated up around her neck instead of yanking the sled along with her into the hole. Diane’s trekking poles and arms remained out of the water and she braced herself on the edge of the ice. Thankfully, Jerym was able to pull Diane up and out of the frigid water by reaching out to her with his trekking pole. Her shoes and clothes instantly froze.
“And then I had to think, because I didn’t want to get frostbite or become hypothermic. I had just stripped off those other layers, thank God,” Diane explains. “So, I started stripping as fast as I could, and Jerym had an extra T-shirt, so I grabbed that. I didn’t carry any other extra clothing because you don’t want to pull more weight. The only thing I had was an extra pair of socks. I had baggies on my sled, so I thought, I’ll put a baggie on each of my feet, over the sock, and then I’ll put my shoes on so I have a barrier. That way when my shoes started to melt from the warmth of my body moving, that kept my socks from freezing. That put a huge adrenaline surge into both of us. We just laughed and moved forward.”
Diane’s level head and quick thinking had propelled her out of a life-threatening situation and back into the game.
“That’s the challenge. It’s all about the respect. When you’re on a ledge with sixty-mile-per-hour winds, and in one fall you’re down three miles, there’s no, ‘We’ll come get ya.’ It’s ‘We’ll find you in a couple days.’ What am I gonna endure? How am I gonna get through it? Keep your head; don’t panic. And that’s really how I got through my seizures.”
Diane, Jerym, and every other racer were equipped with tracking devices so family and friends could map their progress along the punishing route. Before competing in the 430, Diane created the Miles for a Mission fund, an exciting way to align the Arctic challenge with fund-raising for patients and families at Craig Hospital, where she received such impactful counseling. Now serving as the hospital’s donor relations coordinator, Diane’s friend Barb says funds raised are used to help Craig Hospital patients and families affected by spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries.
“Whether it’s equipment, whether it’s a family member that needs to stay at Craig,” Barb explains, “whether it’s to help someone build a ramp at their house, whether it’s a piece of adaptive sporting equipment, it all helps.”
Barb, along with hundreds of coworkers, closely followed Diane’s progress in the Yukon each day.
“We could track essentially where she was,” says Barb, “and by gosh, we had a fourth of Craig Hospital tracking her and e-mailing each other: ‘Where is she? Is she okay?’ People just love her.”
Only eight competitors went the distance. After eleven days, Diane and Jerym crossed the finish line together, fourth overall. Diane was the first and only woman to complete the harrowing race.
This e-mail from Scott was posted on a Denver sports blog:
An exuberant Diane called home this morning to express her appreciation for all the support and good wishes she received during this grueling event. The angels on her shoulders had big wings! Diane walked into Dawson this morning at 4:45 A.M. The GPS tracking unit started reporting sometime early this morning and tracked teammate Jerym across the finish line. With satisfaction and relief, Diane took a long hot shower and will try to get some sleep. SWEET WIN DIANE! Way to Go Di!!
While the Yukon Arctic Ultra 430 would serve as the race of a lifetime for most athletes, Diane would run four additional ultramarathons that year, in Canada, Colorado, Wyoming, and China.
Much has been written about Diane’s miraculous ability to run so far and remain so seemingly unfazed by the rigors of ultra competition. Some clinicians speculate in articles that removing part of Diane’s brain also removed her ability to process pain.
“That’s hard for me,” Diane says. “The surgery didn’t change me or who I am, my stubbornness, my passion. If anything, it’s complicated my life. The way I prepare for a race is way different than anybody else. They all think, ‘Oh, great, you don’t feel pain.’ Well, shit—I don’t feel pain? I feel pain. I just push through it.”
Interestingly, Diane had the opportunity in 2009 to see that her tremendous self-determination has always had a running partner: her unique physiology.
At a dinner near Lake Tahoe that year, Diane was chatting with North Face executives gathered for the company’s global meetings. She learned that plans were in the works for about ten South American managers to climb Mount Aconcagua in Argentina near the Chilean border. At 22,841 feet, the mountain is the Western Hemisphere’s highest point and the second-highest outside of central and southern Asia. Diane had never climbed higher than fifteen thousand feet.
“I was with the South American group and I had a couple of glasses of wine,” Diane says with a grin, “and I love my South American group. We’re sitting around laughing and embracing life, and Aconcagua came up. And I said, ‘I could do a speed attempt up that thing! Let’s climb it first and then I’ll go for a speed record!’ ”
Done. Plans began to take shape for a January 2010 expedition in the Andes. Little did everyone know, the guest list was about to expand. At the close of 2009, the December 2009/January 20
10 edition of National Geographic Adventure named Diane as one of their Adventurers of the Year. Doctors from the Mayo Clinic took note and became interested in her Aconcagua expedition. Mayo had just created the Extreme Medicine and Physiology Program to research why some elite athletes can not only endure but excel under extraordinary stress. The goal was to collect data and apply it to help heart-failure patients. That December, Mayo doctors invited Diane and Scott to their lab in Rochester, Minnesota.
“I said to them, ‘If we’re gonna do this, why don’t you come to Aconcagua, too?’ ” Diane explains. “So they said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna test you here in the hospital and then we’ll test you on the mountain.’ And that’s what they were comparing: How am I gonna do in the lab, and then how am I gonna do at twenty-two thousand feet?”
The Mayo team put Diane through three days of baseline tests to compare against the upcoming Aconcagua ascent. Ironically, she had never before run on a treadmill, only outside on trails. Doctors placed electrodes on her body and asked her to run as hard as she could for an hour at a 15 percent grade.
“They had me on a treadmill with twenty pounds on my back and a mask on my face, and they were testing how much oxygen I take in, how far I can go, what my limits are.”
For the first time, Diane would get raw data on whether there was something, in addition to her mental toughness, that made her such an athletic badass.
“I knew in my racing I could recover fast, but that was something I learned in the testing,” Diane says. “They could push me until I was ready to pass out, but all I had to do was step off the machine, and after they gave me ten seconds, I was ready to go again. So, that’s what they found. My recovery rate is just really fast.”
Doctors also determined that Diane had a literally breathtaking ability to take in oxygen. Data showed her maximal oxygen intake was about double the average for a woman her age. Diane’s lung surface area is about one and a half times the average size.
