SHE HAS NO COACH, NO TRAINING PLAN, AND SEEMINGLY NO LIMITS

INSIDE THE CANDY-CHOMPING, PAIN-FUELED, INFECTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC WORLD OF COURTNEY DAUWALTER

- STEVE FRIEDMAN

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, before she had 10 sponsors, running records that appear as if they will stand for decades (or until she breaks them), hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans, and an article of clothing named after her, Courtney Dauwalter was a 25-year-old, junk-food-eating eighth-grade science teacher living in Denver. She had recently taken up trail running, had completed a 50-mile race, then had heard about an event called the Run Rabbit Run 100-miler. "It sounded insane," she says. "I had to try."

About 50 miles into the 2012 Run Rabbit Run 100 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, she realized just how insane the race was. It was raining, and she was cold, and sick, and tired. Everything hurt. She spent miles vomiting. The guy she was dating at the time, a software engineer named Kevin, was pacing her, and he was alarmed. (A few months earlier, when she asked him if he would pace her for part of the race, he was mystified. "I didn't know that was something people did," he says. He meant running 100-mile races.) Kevin was primarily a rock climber, but she seemed nice, and she was funny, and he enjoyed trail running with her so, sure, why not join her for this nutty adventure?

On her way to the race's eighth aid station, Long Lake, at mile 60, trudging uphill, through rain, in between vomiting, with Kevin at her side, Dauwalter thought things over.

Who do you think you are? she thought. What do you think you're doing here? You should just stop. It hurts. It's hard. I can't do this. I'm out.

She kept going, kept climbing. Kept vomiting. She stopped and lay down on the trail. "I can't do this," she told Kevin. "There's no way, my legs hurt so bad."