Diane Van Deren

On 15 February 2009, Diane Van Deren was one of a dozen runners taking part in the Yukon Arctic Ultra,
a 700-kilometer race across frozen tundra in the middle of winter. Not a single woman had ever completed it.
With temperatures of 30 degrees below zero and only seven hours of daylight each day,
it’s probably the toughest race in the world. But, then, there is no woman like Diane Van Deren.
Twelve years earlier, Van Deren, a former professional tennis player, had a kiwi-size piece of her brain taken out.
It was part of the treatment for the epilepsy which she suffered from. The operation was successful,
but she noticed a strange side effect: she could run without stopping for hours. At the start of the Arctic Ultra,
icy winds froze Van Deren’s water supplies, so she had nothing to drink for the first 160 kilometers.
She kept going by sucking on frozen fruit and nut bars. On the eleventh day,
the ice beneath her feet cracked open and Van Deren fell up to her shoulders into a freezing river.
She managed to climb out but struggled to continue. Her soaked boots had frozen to her feet.
Yet somehow through it all, Van Deren remained positive.
This was perhaps helped by another curious by-product of her operation.‘I have a problem with short-term memory.
I could be out running for two weeks, but if someone told me it was day one of a race,’ she jokes,
‘I’d say, “Great, let’s get started!”’ On 26 February 2009 – exactly twelve years after her surgery –
Van Deren crossed the finish line of the Arctic Ultra. She was one of eight finishers – and the first and only woman.