Inside the Mind of a Serial Runner

For Pam Reed, a marathon is nothing — a morning warm-up before starting her day. Running through a desert for 28 hours in temperatures so hot the asphalt melts your Nikes? Now that's a race.

As she tells it in her new autobiography The Extra Mile (Rodale), Reed helped put ultrarunning on the extreme-sports map. In 2002 she became the first woman ever to win the Badwater Ultramarathon, a brutal 135-mile race across Death Valley in July. In 2003, she beat out all 80 competitors again and remains the only woman with the first-place title.

Last year, Reed became the first person to run 300 miles nonstop with no sleep. She holds the U.S. women's record for running the most miles in 24 hours (138.96), and she once completed the London Marathon and the Boston Marathon (she has run the latter twice) in 48 hours.

Is she crazy? "Maybe a little," says Reed, laughing. However, the 100-pound mom prefers the word "driven." "When a race is over, I'm definitely happy," she explains, "but within a couple of days or even an hour, I want to do it again. I want to see if I can do better."

In her book and in conversation, Reed comes off as complex, intense, even contradictory. She describes herself as an easily bored type A, yet she'll gladly run laps around the same quarter-mile track for two days straight. She claims to compete only with herself but has taken flack for supposedly dueling with 2004 Badwater champ Dean Karnazes.

Reed credits ultrarunning with healing her relationship with food. For 15 years, she battled anorexia. "I look at food now as fuel," says the former triathlete, who ingests Ensure, Red Bull, noodles and oatmeal during a race (often while running). "If I don't eat, then I can't do what I want to do. I see food now as a positive thing."

She shoots down the suggestion that her anorexia actually prepped her for the deprivations of her sport. "A lot of people think that," she says, "but it didn't." Instead she points to a surprising secret weapon: her age. "A huge aspect of ultrarunning is patience," explains Reed, who is 45. "And patience comes with age. I am not a really fast runner. I broke three hours in a marathon once. But in ultrarunning, it's not about speed — it's about heart.

"It's about how strong you are mentally," she adds. "And that's where I draw from my experience. I know that the pain is going to pass. I know what's on the other end."

Gender, too, plays a role, she believes, in her ability to run with a throbbing hip or feet studded with blisters. "When you look at who finishes these races, there's a ton of women at the top," she says. "Mentally, women are really strong, because physically, we go through so much. We can endure a lot."

Still, Reed insists that she isn't "inhuman." Or amazing. She believes that with practice and dedication and a crew of race assistants, you, too, could be running, Gump-like, up 8,000-foot inclines in 130-degree heat.

"I want to bring ultrarunning to the average person," says Reed. "It's not so outrageous to say, 'I'm going to run 50 miles.' You just have to put your mind to it." Just make sure your doctor says you're healthy enough for this kind of exercise.

She compares each race to "living a lifetime," with ups and downs as dramatic as the terrain. The past year has been especially tough: Reed, who recently moved to Jackson, Wyoming, had to drop out of Badwater 2006 and reports that she is running with more pain. Yet don't count this gritty groundbreaker out of the race. She's talking about attempting a run of 500 miles straight.

By: Alicia Potter
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