Radiolab - In the Running

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Diane Van Deren is one of the best ultra-runners in the world, and it all started with a seizure. In this short, Diane tells us how her disability gave rise to an extraordinary ability. For Diane Van Deren, a charming mother of three, daily life is a struggle. But as soon as she steps outdoors, she's capable of amazing feats. She can run for days on end with no sleep, covering hundreds of miles in extreme conditions. Reporter Mark Phillips heads to Colorado to get to know Diane, and to try to figure out what makes her so unstoppable. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.     

Oh wait, you're listening. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening.

Good listening. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening.

Good listening. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening. Good listening.oo-Loo-Milber. Hey! Hello! How's it going? I'm good, I just started running. It is so crazy hot.

Lot of! Is this our first run together? This is our first run together although it's you know a part together. Separated by like 2000 miles. Oh my god I'm already out of breath. I have an engine running. It's really like five minutes. Okay here I go. Hi I'm Lathapnacer. I'm Luttef Master. I'm Luttef Master. This is radio lab on the run.

We are on the run. We're out for a little jog. It is, it's fall season. It's getting to be the nice running weather in some places. Hell is here. Not here, but I'm doing it anyway. And so we thought we would just play this old piece, this lovely little piece that is about running.

Re-run, that's your real rerun. Re-run, run. Yeah, but he's also like, well, hey, I love Radio Lab doing a sports story. I just do, but it's also about, it kinda offers some keys on how to, a surprising key on how to unlock endurance for anyone. Yeah, it's a very beautiful story.

As I run and still do not comprehend why people would willingly voluntarily do this story helps me understand that, at least a little bit. Perfect. All right, well, it comes to us from producer Mark Phillips and we'll just let Chad and Robert take it from here. Enjoy. Hello. Hey Mark. Hello. I'm Chad Abel-Mrod. I'm Robert Krollowicz. And this is Radio Lab. The podcast.

The podcast. And today on the podcast, we have a story from a reporter Mark Phillips who's here with us. Yes. Okay, so Mark, what are we hearing? Well, I went to visit this incredible woman named Diane Van Daren. Hey. You found us come on in and nice to meet you. Yeah. What was her last name? Van Daren. Van Daren. Hey! You found us! Come on in, man! Nice to meet you! Yeah.

What was it? What was her last name? Van Daren Van Daren. Yeah. She lives just south of Denver in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Oh, it's a cool view of a mixed Denver-look tiny. Doesn't it? So who is she? Why is she a person of note?

Well, she's one of the best ultra-runners in the world. We have a very active life center. It's an ultra runner. The definition is just anything longer than a marathon. The majority of them that she runs are 100 miles. 100? This is continuous miles?

Continuous. There's no sleeping. No sleep, 28 hours straight. Wow. I can tell you what pain is. I can tell you what pain is. And I was fortunate. I got runner up to Lance Armstrong

for out to her person of the year, years ago. And I kind of think Lance and I have stories that are very parallel. How so? 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. Well, my first seizure, gosh, I do remember it. It was 1988, Diane was 28 years old. I had two children married. I was three weeks into my third pregnancy. And one day. I was with my mom, we were in the car. And as we were driving around,

I remember reaching for like the glove compartment box my mom had asked for me to get some gum out. And I remember as I was reaching for that that's I had this funny sensation. It was quick and it was brief. And then boom. That's the last thing I remember. And next thing she knows she's waking up in the hospital. I was confused. I didn't know where I was, what I was doing, what happened. And eventually I ended up getting with a doctor, Dr. Spitz. And after some tests. They sent me off for a NMRI.

He told her. What you have is epilepsy. That was the first time I heard that word. The seizure was just out of the blue. Well, what the doctor's eventually figured out is that when she was a baby, she had a fever. And they ended up throwing a grandma seizure, which lasted almost an hour. That's the big one, yeah. And they ended up throwing a grandma seizure, which lasted almost an hour.

That's the big one. Yeah. And they kind of put together that she probably damaged a part of her brain from that seizure. And 24 years later, basically, boom, seizures re-accured. And you said earlier that this somehow led to her running? Yeah. Okay. 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. People with my great type of, yeah. I would get really tingly all over my body,

but feel kind of floaty. The premonition that something's about to happen. She was in the shower, she would have to get out. Okay, would I need to be, would I need to do, and then... Pfft! It would happen. I tried every medication that was available. Diet, nutrition, I mean, I tried it all.

Basically, nothing was work. Nothing worked. Until. 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. She'd be eating dinner, she'd feel a premonition, just drop her fork and knife. Throw those running shoes on, and I just showed you these mountains here by my house. I'd run to the Pikes National Forest.

Yeah, let's just run in silence for a second. Okay. So we can get some sound of that. Yeah. Her house is literally, you know, on the foothills of these mountains. So I'm not gonna see her to elk out here. I've seen them out, lying out here. A lot of deer. 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,

Dines can be all running in the middle of nowhere. Have a seizure and we're not gonna know where she is, how to find her, what we're going to do. But I found that it worked. She wasn't having seizures. So when she would have a premonition, but no actual seizure at the end. Yeah. 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. She did this for years. She'd feel this aura and then she'd just run. Literally outrunning the seizures. At first it'd just be an hour or so, but then she was going for longer and longer, two hours, five hours, six hours, and it sort of worked for a while. But eventually. The seizures basically just started overcoming. They caught up with her.

I was having three to five seizures a week. I wasn't getting those premonitions like I did in the beginning. It got to the point where she didn't have enough time to get her running shoes on. 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 in time, I really was at more of a risk of dying from a seizure.

You could die 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 taken 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 three small children, I was running out of options. And you know, she talked with her doctors and they said, well, there's a chance you could have a surgery that would fix this. If the seizures are coming from just one discreet part of the brain, they can cut that part of the brain out. But first, they have to figure out if it's that type of seizure and where it's coming from.

To see if it was operable. Which meant she had to go to the hospital and actually have a seizure in front of them. I had to have 64 electrodes, basically glued onto my scalp. And then I had this cord out of each one of these electrodes that was in my head, it was tethered into a TV set. She was hooked up to an EEG machine and... I had a camera on me 24-7.

Oh, here. And... There's footage of this. She showed it to me. Remember laying there in the bed saying, I can't run. I need to let it happen. What you see on the screen is she starts to jerk. She's clenched. She's shaking.

You hear the bed sort of rattling, and she bites her tongue. So hard that you know there's just this pool of blood below her face. She's choking on her blood. It's horrifying. And then as I came out of it, honest to God I felt like I'd been run over by a truck. I was gurgling still on some blood that was in my throat and I had a massive headache. But the doctors are standing right next to her, cheering. All right, all right, we got it, we got it. Because they actually found that the seizures were coming from one spot in the brain.

Then when they said, well, what do you think we found the spot? You could be a surgery candidate. I mean, it's a big risk. It's not just taking a pill. I mean, you're cutting out a chunk of your brain. Was it a tough decision? Or was it just sort of a no brainer, no pun intended? Let's see here.

Well, I know a lot of steam. It was hands down. I was like, let's go. Drew Downey from Daphne, Alabama. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation and Hansen Public Understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the side of my right head open. I just literally just sawed it open. And so there was my brain exposed, was on the table.

So the doctors had it around and they look in and they can actually see this gray, discolored spot from all the seizure activity. It's on the back right side. It's a part of the brain called the temporal lobe, which is the part of the brain that seems to be involved in memory, spatial reasoning, and temporal reasoning, time. And they had to decide, okay, well, how much of her brain are we going to take out? And they go back and forth. I mean, obviously, the more brain they take out, the more consequence, the more side effects. Well, they ended up cutting out prior the size of a kiwi

out of my right temporal lobe. That's big. Yeah, it's not insignificant. Kiwis are like the size of golf balls, right? Bigger. Wow. When I came home, I just had horrific headaches. In this extreme pain, I just remember just holding my head, just trying to hold my

head together. It just hurt so bad that... And seizure wise, they didn't know. So everybody was kind of on pins and needles. Did it work? Did it not work? And as the days went on, they waited. And waited.

And waited. And I wasn't having seizures. None at all. No, she's not had a seizure since the night before the surgery. So you didn't really get into the competitive ultra running until after the surgery. How did that come about? I mean, how did I get into this? It was interesting. I did a 50-mile race.

I won that. Wait. What? Here's where things kind of get interesting. After a year or so of no seizures, Diane decided to enter this race, a 50 mileer on the win. I just read about it in a magazine.

I loved to run and I thought, oh man, I have this new outlook on life. I'm not a lot of seizures. Okay, I'm gonna run a 50. I won that and then I signed up for my first 100 mile race. Of course, everybody was like, oh my gosh, a race in the big horn mountains of all places did well. I ended up placing.

At the same time, back home. When did you start to notice, you know, that things were working differently in your brain? I didn't. My family started noticing things. Mom's forgetting, you know, what time my appointments were, relate to school. Mom's not here to pick me up. So she was having short-term memory loss? Yeah, a lot.

Meeting somebody in the morning, later on that afternoon, maybe I see them again and I have no idea who they were or they'll have to say, hey, remember I saw you, those kind of things, but, let's see what I saying. Meanwhile, first overall on the Alfred Packer 50 mileer, second overall on the Bayer 100 mileer. First overall on the Tahoe Rim 100 mileer,

I could keep going. Yeah, go. First overall on the 24 hours Rim 100 Miler, I could keep going. Yeah, go. First overall in the 24 hours in Frisco Trial Run, first for women's in the dances with the dirt 50 Miler in Hell Michigan. Dances with the dirt in Hell Michigan. First in women's in the Canadian Death Race, 78 Miler in Edmonton, Canada, the Canadian Death Race.

The Yukon Arctic Ultra 300 Miler was minus 48 degrees 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. I did 430 miles and the Yukon pulling us sled. During which time, she'd sleep only about an hour and night. For 10 days.

Wow. Really? The crazy thing is that through all of this, she can't read a map. What? What do you mean? 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. It's like just a bunch of information on a piece of paper. All those lines, all those squigglys.

Just noise. So then how does she navigate through a race? Well, I take a pink ribbon with me. So when I'm out in the middle of nowhere and I have three ways to hit a trail, and I'm not quite sure which way to go. All right, is it left, is it right? I'll pick away.

I'll drop a ribbon. And after a couple of 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. On the Yukon, there was a time where, um, 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. Did you win that year that you were lost for two hours? Yeah. 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 wonder, like, do you think

did having part of your brain removed make you an alter runner? Did you understand the question? I do. And she says no. I think having a brain injury puts me at a disadvantage. I see what I was saying. But I think for me the 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. Time. I can really get lost in time. When the doctors removed that part of her brain, they took out a basic awareness of time passing. 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. Some other racers are saying, oh, I've been on here

six days, I'm exhausted. For me, I can't look back. I can't think, you know, some of the racers are saying, oh, I've been out here six days, I'm exhausted. For me, I can't look back. I can't think, you know, how long I've been running because I don't know. I stay in the moment. Because of that, she doesn't, she doesn't know how tired she should feel. Huh, 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're just hearing your footsteps and that's it. 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 eight minute pace would be, how my feet would sound. So count how else the beat for me. Two, three, four, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, six, five, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, six, five, six, five, six, six, five, five, six, five, six And even with my breath, in to out. See it's all breathing and feet. We all go together. Make your smooth. Get your smooth in your gate. Smooth in your run.

So how does the breath from the feet interact? I just know, two breasts in, two breasts out. That's my feet. Is it the room? Yeah. If that's all I have to hear, 28 hours, that's what I want, that's all I have to hear, 28 hours.

That's what I want, that's music. That's my music. So nothing else in my mind. Put my feet in my breathing. That's the music to an athlete's here. That's the flow. Thanks Mark. Yeah, no problem. The border mark, Phillips. For more information on Diane Van Derren, you can go to our website radiolab.org. We've got some links there. And I guess that's it. I'm Chad Abel-Marratt.

And I'm Robert Kroel, which thanks for listening. Hi, this is Rosie, and I'm a radio lab listener from Seattle, Washington. Radio lab is supported in part by the AlperP Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org. In-hansing Public Understanding of Science Technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.Sloan.org. Thanks guys. Bye.