Column | Ultralopers are completely tapped, but the Run of Stephanie Case hits everything

There she is, wide -legged in her running clothes. In one hand a piece of watermelon, and in the other arm a baby on her chest. This can only be an ultra -runner. Ultralopers are crazy. I always knew that, but when I met the story of the Canadian Stephanie Case, the woman in the photo That won the Snowdonia Ultramarathon last weekend, I thought again: ticked.

The 42-year-old Ultraloopster had not run any competitions for three years. The baby turns out to be her six-month-old daughter Pepper and the Snowdonia Trail, the largest ultramarathon in Great Britain, was her comeback. 103 kilometers up and down, through the rugged mountains of Wales. During the stops, Case quickly breastfed her daughter, and after almost 17 hours she reached the finish – In the winning time with the women.

In the winning time with the women. I can imagine a lot, but this is far beyond my imagination. Where do you actually get that blow from the mill, I wondered that you do this at all. Let alone win. I went to investigate.

Stephanie Case appears to be lawyer, specialized in human rights and humanitarian crises. She spent a large part of her career in life-threatening conflict areas, she says in a TED talk that I found.

For example, she was in Afghanistan for a long time, where she founded ‘Free to Run’, an organization that gave girls and women from that country the opportunity to run. Now women really can’t do anything there anymore, but then that was still possible under strict conditions. Two women in her group wanted to be the very first Afghans who would complete the Gobi March of 250 kilometers through the Gobi Desert. Before they left, they had never walked further than a few kilometers. On the last day they only walked three kilometers per hour, it took endless, but together with Case they reached the finish – and wrote history.

That wasn’t even her most best story. That was about the Tor des Géants, an ultramarathon in the Dolomites of 350 kilometers and 27,000 altimeters – that is two and a half times the Mount Everest up and down. In the run -up she was first in Afghanistan for her work. There she walked back and forth over the compound as a training, while continuously shifts were going on. Then she lived in a tent in South Sudan, in a refugee camp. Finally, she was stationed in Gaza. She told about her training buddy Tyrone who kept her company there: an outer tire that was in the parking lot of her UN compound where she was training.

You could hardly prepare your worse preparation for the Tor des Géants. Still she went. In order not to lose time, she walked the first 175 kilometers without sleeping. Along the way she hallucinated so that during the singing, with which she was busy, she received request numbers of the animals she came across her path. She spent two hours of sleeping during the entire race, and after 98 hours, 15 minutes and 27 seconds she reached the finish, as a second woman, and as a fourteenth overall.

Winning the Snowdonia, with her baby at the chest, appears to be a detour in the light of her other adventures. Whether Case has been tapped? Totally. Dare to be crazy, I hear her say in her ted talk. We have no idea what we can do until we try. Limits, they are only in your own head.

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