[on ultra-runner Diane Van Deren] …Well, it’s interesting. She was always an athlete. She actually played professional tennis for a while. She came to running later in life, and oddly enough, her running career started with a seizure…what the doctors eventually figured out is that when she was a baby, she had a fever. “And I ended up throwing a grand mal seizure, which lasted almost an hour.”…And they kind of put together that she probably damaged a part of her brain from that seizure…So after the seizure—the first seizure in the car—they started to happen more and more. But before the seizures would come on, she would have this warning sign.

“It’s called an aura. I would have an aura. I would have a sensation before it did go into a seizure. I would get really tingly all over my body. I’d feel kind of floaty—the premonition that something’s about to happen. OK. Where do I need to be? What do I need to do? And then… It would happen. I had tried every medication that was available. Diets, nutrition—I mean, I tried it all. Nothing worked.

I found the only way I could break the cycle of a seizure for me. Whenever I had that premonition a seizure was coming on, I’d have my running shoes by the front door. Throw those running shoes on. And I just showed you these mountains here by my house. I’d run to the Pike National Forest…Whenever I had a seizure coming on, I’d go run. Well, of course, my family, my mom—everybody was panicking. Because they’re thinking, oh, my gosh. Diane’s going to be off running in the middle of nowhere, have a seizure and we’re not going know where she is, how to find her, what we’re going to do. [But] I found that it worked…When I ran from the seizures and I’d run to the forest, I would just feel me just getting more relaxed. My heart wouldn’t be pounding. Calmness set in. And that is where my love for running began.

[But eventually] I was having 3–5 seizures a week. I wasn’t getting those premonitions like I did in the beginning. The seizures basically just started overcoming. I was having 3–5 seizures a week. I wasn’t getting those premonitions like I did in the beginning. I didn’t have that long of a premonition. It was like, boom, seizure. So I could tell that part of my brain was actually getting weaker. And I knew at that point time I really was at more of a risk of dying from a seizure… Happens all the time. People die of seizures all the time. For example, a friend of mine—his wife—she went up to go take a bath, had a seizure. Went up later, and he found her dead in the tub. You know, my kids—I always had to tell them, hey, Mom’s taking a bath. Come check on me. My children, at a very young age, had to learn how to drive a car. Because what if Mom had a seizure while she was driving? I, as a parent, as a wife, as a mom of 3 small children—I was running out of options.

…[on the neurosurgery to remove the epileptic brain-matter] And they had to, you know, decide, OK, well, how much of her brain are we going to take out? And they go back and forth. I mean, obviously, the more brain that they take out, the more consequence, the more side effects. Well, they ended up cutting out probably the size of a kiwi out of my right temporal lobe. When I came home, I just had horrific headaches and this extreme pain. I mean, I just remember just holding my head, just trying to hold my head together. It just hurt so bad. And seizure-wise, they didn’t know. So everybody was kind of on pins and needles. Did it work? Did it not work? And I wasn’t having seizures.

…[but there were severe side-effects] My family started noticing things. Mom’s forgetting, you know, what time my appointments were. We’re late to school. Mom’s not here to pick me up. You know, meeting somebody in the morning—later on that afternoon, maybe I see them again and I have no idea who they were. They’ll have to say, hey, remember I saw you? Those kind of things. But—let’s see. What was I saying?

How did I get into this [ultra-marathons]? It was interesting. I did a 50-mile race. I won that. Then I thought, OK… I just read about it in a magazine. You know, I love to run. And I thought, oh, man, I have this new outlook on life. I’m not having seizures. OK. I’m going to run a 50. I won that. And then I signed up for my first hundred-mile race. Of course, everybody was like, oh, my gosh—a race in the Bighorn Mountains of all places. Did well—I ended up placing.”

Mark Phillips: …Meanwhile, first overall in the Alfred Packer 50-miler, second overall in the Bear 100-miler, first overall in the Tahoe Rim 100-miler. I could keep going.
Jad Abumrad: Yeah, go.
M. Phillips: First overall in the 24 Hours of Frisco trail run, first for women’s in the Dances With Dirt 50-miler in Hell, Michigan.
Phillips: First in women’s in the Canadian Death Race 78-miler in Edmonton, Canada.
Abumrad: The Canadian Death Race?
M P: Yeah.
Diane Van Deren: The Yukon Arctic Ultra 300-miler was −48° when we began the event. The shoes literally froze on my feet. And only two of us finished. I ran the first 100 miles with no water. Did 430 miles in the Yukon pulling a sled.

P: During which time she’d sleep only about an hour a night.
D. Van Deren: For 10 days.
Robert Krulwich: Wow. Really.

P: The crazy thing is that through all of this, she can’t read a map.
A: What? What do you mean?
P: Well, one of the main functions of that kiwi-sized part of her brain that the doctors took out, as I said, was spatial reasoning. And so after the surgery, maps just look weird to her.
Van Deren: It’s, like, just a bunch of information on a piece of paper. All those lines, all those squigglies.
P: Just noise.
J A: So then how did she navigate through a race?
D V D: Well, I take a pink ribbon with me. So when I’m out in the middle of nowhere and I have 3 ways to hit a trail and I’m not quite sure which way to go…
P: Is it left? Is it right?
D: I’ll pick a way. I’ll drop a ribbon.
P: And after a couple hours, if she feels like she’s not on a trail anymore, she just goes back until she gets to the pink ribbon, and then she picks the other way.
D: On the Yukon, there was a time where—gosh—I was lost for two hours. I was out in the middle of nowhere all alone, huge heavy winds just ripping across the Yukon River.
R. Krulwich: Did you win that year that you were lost for two hours?
D: Yeah.

P: Mostly, Diane finds these sort of workarounds for what she lost in the surgery, but the fact is she only became this amazing runner after the surgery.

So while we were talking, I just couldn’t help but wonder—well, I mean, I’m—I wonder, like, do you think—did having part of your brain removed make you an ultrarunner? Do you understand the question?
D: I do.
P: And she says no.
D: I think having a brain injury puts me at a disadvantage. I—let’s see. What was I saying? But I think for me, the one advantage, if I had to say I have an advantage over the other athletes, would be time. Time—I can really get lost in time.
P: When the doctors removed that part of her brain, they took out a basic awareness of time passing.
D: Time’s hard. So when I’m on the Yukon, I’m going for 10 days. I kind of forget how many days I’ve been out there. You know, some of the racers are saying, oh, I’ve been out here 6 days. I’m exhausted. For me…
P: I can’t look back. I can’t think, you know, how long I’ve been running because I don’t know.
D: I stay in the moment.
P: Because of that, she doesn’t know how tired she should feel.
A: Huh.
P: Think about it. If you don’t know where you are in time, you don’t know how much further you have to go, how far you’ve been. You’re just running. You just hearing your footsteps, and that’s it.
D: I get a rhythm in my mind. That’s what I want to hear in my feet. I go by rhythm. I know the sound that my feet—about what an 8-minute pace would be, how my feet would sound.