First Run of New Jersey For Charity 212 miles in 55 hours and 49 minutes. Raised $20,000.
Chapter Eight
You Can’t Run Through…
I was told a girl will never beat a guy in
running, especially a girl like me with no talent. Thusly, I won three races outright over the
men and women later in life, in my early forties. A Fifty Miler in Detroit, on
a mix of cross-country terrain in a wicked storm that produced tornados in the
Midwest in November of 2002.
I won outright over men and women in a six hour trot till you drop trail terrain run in
May of 2003. I then won as a first time
Mom. I won outright over men and women in a Twelve
Hour Trot Till You Drop run in 2004.
I set the Twenty-four Hour Women’s
Treadmill Record in 2005 at age forty-two, six months, two weeks and ten days
old, for North America. At the time I was ranked second in the world until 2017
for that distance and timed type of a run, now as this book goes to press, I’m
third in the world and still holding the North American record for that
distance and time for women on a treadmill.
I’ve raced and ran across deserts, trails,
all sorts of surfaces. I’ve ran up the side of mountains when I was nearly
falling backward due to the incredible grade; such as Mount Whitney in
California, and Smuggler’s Notch in Stowe, VT.
A Coma…
In 1985, Un-coached and told my body was
unable to handle the miles men would run; I decided to try to train like a
man. My mental thought is when someone
says, “No”. I respond with physically
bringing myself to the point of proving my dream a possibility for myself. The
first attempt at such high mileage, I was out of action for over eight months
and told running was not for me and wouldn’t be.
My second attempt, I was injured yet
somehow rebounded, albeit in pain. Then
again my third attempt finally achieving ten weeks of one hundred miles plus
per week of running. In 1986, I was
sidelined after the third marathon and couldn’t run for two months. I had so many things strapped and taped on me
going into that marathon; I look back now and wonder, ‘How did I do that?’
I didn’t produce the time I desired but a
2:57 marathon back then, wasn’t so bad for anyone much less a woman in 1986. It was a PR (Personal Record by over six
minutes). However, it was quite physically painful at
the time. Hamstring issues, sciatic
nerve issues ensued occurring more in the left leg than the right, coupled with
the pulled hamstring in the left leg; both feet felt trashed. The left foot arch pained me as constant calf
pains coming and going and the shin-splints reared its ugly head as well for
the 1986 Waterfront Marathon in New Jersey.
Luckily, I recovered from January’s case of
sesamoiditis in both feet, which caused me to take two weeks off running, and instead
swam miles per day in the local YMCA.
The orthopedic surgeon warned me, that he’d have to do foot surgery if I didn’t
stop running, and then a week after I was back running, early February’s battle
with acute Achilles tendonitis that kept me up for three nights elevating my
feet, putting my legs up on ice, while in screaming pain and trying to fall
asleep.
Many injuries plagued me, mostly my left
foot, left hamstring; my shins, ankles,
bukoo sciatic nerve issues and my sacro-iliac joints were affected. Injuries plagued me even worse, after I
suffered a physical assault by a man, in the middle of a light training run,
one sunny weekday morning in 1991.
After that, I’d lost two inches in diameter
on my right thigh as a result of the attack, and underwent over seven hours of
spine surgery. They did bone and bone
marrow graphing from part of my right hip, to repair my lower back combined with
metal plating and screws.
Prior to the surgery, I was misdiagnosed
six times by four different doctors; they didn’t know I had fractures in my
back. They took the x-rays wrong. That took me ten years post operatively to
get rid of the limp I had, when I’d run a certain speed past two miles.
I ran through most everything. I had much physical therapy from mid-1993 to
the end of 1999. I continued to do my own rehab through 2004, after one day in
June of 2003 I realized I had my right leg almost all the way back. I then knew ultra-running was the way to go.
I’d been doing multiple hill repeats, quite a few sessions on a hill behind and
up from where I lived.
I would run out my front door and up
Evergreen to Spruce which became Highwood Avenue to Glen Avenue that traverses
through another town to a highway, and somehow skips the highway and becomes a
road into another town. The hill is
approximately one and a half miles long.
I broke the hill down. I’d sectioned off
the first portion; that just briefly enters the nearby town of Ridgewood, just
past a little delicatessen. That first
portion to Monroe Street would be about a half mile. Then on my braver days of hill repeats; I’d
sectioned out the bottom mile from Monroe to just past Maple Avenue in
Ridgewood. And on my I got to make me tougher days; I ran the
entire one and a half miles multiple times after a one mile warm up from my
house to Glen Avenue.
There were mornings, before and after we
became parents that I really wanted to stay close to home, even though I knew I
had to get in a fifty mile training run.
I’d boil potato perogies, wrap then in triple plastic and run with them
at four in the morning and hide them in a branch in a tree in front of Mr.
McCourt’s home on Glen Avenue.
After so many miles, I’d look around, so no
one, not even a squirrel would see what I was doing. Then climb the tree a bit and grab the packet
and unwrap it to eat a couple of potato perogies and off I was sipping the
water in my hand held water bottles, till the Park Wood Deli would open, and I
could get more fluid.
One Saturday morning at about five thirty
as I climbed the tree, two women out walking their dogs saw me do this. I said, “Perogies in a tree. Please don’t eat them.”
They smiled and wondered what I was doing. I said, “I have a long run of hill repeats I
have to do for training and I cooked the perogies last night, and triple
wrapped them so the squirrels don’t eat them.
I need food every bunch of miles.”
Smiling
they said, “We will never tell.” We laughed
as I climbed down from the tree with my perogies in hand.
Funny, no one ever stole my food, or the
water bottles I hid along Glen Avenue either.
However, the Father of Long
Distance Running and the Grandfather
of Ultrarunning, Ted Corbitt, way back, when he was in his forties and
running in the city as he lived. He told
me someone stole his sandwiches he’d put into his mailbox at the beginning of
his long runs. He would loop around
feeling hungry after twenty miles, in one of his ultra-training runs, stop, and
take a bite or so to eat, and then continue on.
Ted said, “One day I stopped for some of my
sandwich and it was gone.” Ted
giggled. He was that kind of guy who
could laugh at himself. Ted set the Overall
Men’s American Twenty-Four Hour Run, on the track at age fifty-four.
As I ran I would think of men like Ted
Corbitt. They influenced my drive,
especially in ultra-running. Albeit Ted
had a lot more to contend with than that, Ted told me, the police would stop
him and ask him, what he was doing. I
asked, “What’d you do?”
Ted had a long fuse and a great sense of
humor. He said, “Once they got to know
me. It was like a joke. But they also kind of thought it was
interesting what I was doing. We would
cajole each other.”
Afterword:
Last time I saw Ted, he and I talked about
the three hundred mile weeks he did, he worked full-time, was married, was a
father and dedicated to his career as a physical therapist. He was innovative in being a therapist and a
runner. He was the first
African-American to win a National Championship Marathon. He also was an Olympian and the first
African-American to represent the U.S. in the marathon distance in the
Olympics, it was 1952. Ted told me none
of this. Which this was just part of him
being a humble man. That was Ted.
Ted Corbitt passed December 12th
2007, a month before his eighty-eighth birthday. Many long distance runners do not know that
Ted was the first president of the New York Road Runners Club.
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