Ten Years Later (20 page)

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 the
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 2010 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.

“Obviously,” Diane jokes, “you don’t have to have big boobs to have big lungs.”

Diane’s muscles were determined to be superstars as well, as efficient as those of
a woman nearly thirty years younger.

The next step was to leave the lab and gear up for feisty Mount Aconcagua. In January
2010, Diane and nine other climbers were hooked up with electrodes. Real-time medical
data would be gathered, stored on laptops, and then wirelessly transmitted back to
computers at Mayo. The mission had two parts. The first was to generate data as Diane,
the other climbers, and medical staff slowly trekked to the top of the mountain along
a treacherous but well-traveled trail. The second goal was to monitor Diane and a
fellow elite climber a day or two later as they re-summited as quickly as possible
along the same route, or as similar as possible based on weather conditions.
Diane’s neurologist, Dr. Spitz, offered his blessing when Diane initially inquired
about the medical risks of the ultra-high-altitude expedition.

“I’m a big believer in ‘live your life,’ ” Spitz says. “When I look at life, there’s
a certain amount of risk in everything we do, so I weigh the potential benefits, of
course being careful, and is it worth it? I know Diane as a person well. I know how
important these things are for her. It’s her identity, and so I carefully think about
what she’s going to be doing, but I tend to let her go for it.”

Diane and the team went for it in mid-January. Doctors placed a small harness around
the middle of Diane’s chest to measure her respiratory and heart rates as well as
her oxygen saturation. She was also monitored by a neuropsychologist for cognitive
issues related to altitude sickness. The expedition would take weeks, due to the acclimation
process and erratic weather conditions. A massive volcanic mountain, Aconcagua is
frequently blasted by a hurricane-force jet stream that Argentineans call the
viento blanco
, or white wind.

In a Mayo Clinic blog post from January 30, Diane describes preparing for the summit
and for her speed record attempt:

It really was so great to feel awesome climbing to 18,000 feet! Stunning to be on
top of the mountain on a crystal clear blue sky day and you could see forever! I told
Bruce and Luke [a Mayo doctor and his son] that I think this is a glance of what heaven
is going to be like. It was great to climb and feel in my element. No headache, no
tightness of lungs etc. Tomorrow we will take gear to camp one and we will not have
contact for maybe 6 7 8 days as it depends on weather conditions on the mountain.
No summiting today because of the winds. Well, love to everyone and keep prayers for
everyone . . . start the summit tomorrow. xo Di