Stories are usually told starting at the beginning and then proceeding to the end. When you are very good at telling them you can start from the end and go backwards or you can also tell them by jumping from one moment in a person’s life to another. For most of us, life has a linear development: one thing leads to another thing, which leads to yet another thing. So we evolve, approximately.
Diane Van Deren’s story can be told from different points in her life, because Diane lived several lives. Or rather: she has lived and continues to live one life-hers-only for her, a fundamental dimension of every human being’s life has changed: time. When your perception of time is altered you may experience a different dimension of your life within your own life. Sometimes you can also happen to become one of the strongest ultra runners in the world. But let’s start from the beginning.
The crisis
It is 1988 and Diane is 28 years old. She is expecting her third child and is in the car with her mother. He feels something he has never felt by taking an object from the dashboard. He loses his senses. She wakes up in a hospital bed and a doctor tells her that she had a seizure. He has never even heard that word; he doesn’t know what it means. Up to that point in her life she was a good athlete: she played tennis and kept fit. Perhaps this predisposition for athletic activity makes her think that moving can do something to control her disease because she has noticed that the only thing that can keep her from having seizures is running, and especially because no treatment, no diet, no nothing seem to counteract what seems more and more like a final sentence. However, he has learned to predict seizures because they are always preceded by the so-called aura, a phase in which the senses are altered. When it happens she puts on her running shoes and goes out for a run until everything comes back under control. Running is his weapon against epilepsy, at least for a time. He runs and runs, literally escaping his seizures, at first for an hour, then two, then up to 4-5 hours straight.
While it lasts, because after a few years the crises begin to rub her the wrong way: now they come without announcing themselves, without even giving her time to slip on her shoes and start running.
From an epileptic seizure you may not get out, meaning you may even die. You’re taking a bath and you get one: you drown. You drive and you get one: you can die in an accident. Diane instructs her children to check often to see if she is well. He teaches them from an early age how to drive because, you know, maybe she has a seizure while taking them to school and then they know what to do, they know how to take her to the hospital.
Now running is no longer enough and running is no longer a weapon against the disease, because that weapon Diane does not even have time to wield.
Lobotomy
It is a scary word: “lobotomy.” Yet it is the only solution that, according to doctors, might give Diane some chance of getting her seizures under control. But to practice it, they must locate the part of the brain affected by seizures. In order to accomplish this, they hospitalize her while waiting for her to get one so they can figure out where it is generated in her brain. They fill her head with electrodes and wait. Until the crisis comes, violent and powerful. Diane squirms and swallows her tongue, but doctors are able to locate the portion of the brain where she has been triggered: it is the right temporal lobe, in its portion involved in memory and time perception.
Diane is operated on and, apart from tremendous headaches at first, it seems the problem is solved: after a year, she has no more seizures. A whole year without a crisis was something she had never experienced. He resumed running and even tried racing: almost as a joke and challenge, he entered a 50-mile race. And he wins it. At the same time, however, he notices that something is wrong, especially in daily life. She doesn’t even notice it herself to tell the truth; it is her children and her mother and friends who realize that something is not right. Diane forgets appointments, forgets to pick up her children from school, can’t remember meeting someone a few hours earlier. In fact, one of the functions that reside in that part of her brain that has been removed is short-term memory, as well as object recognition, such as maps. How then can an ultra runner who runs hundreds of miles get her bearings without a map? Diane invents a ruse: she carries pink ribbons with her and, when she is at a fork and unsure of the direction, leaves one on the ground. If after a while he has a feeling that he is not on the right track he goes back to the tape and changes his route. She succeeds her Yukon Arctic Ultra 300 in 2009: she goes off the road and accumulates a two-hour delay. And he still wins it.
The perception of time
Diane, it is now clear, has memory problems, especially in the short term. If you hear her talk she remembers details from years before, and the book of her life for her is perfectly readable. The problem is what happens to her in the immediate term: she cannot tell you precisely what she did a few hours before or even a short while ago. Memory needs time to situate itself: time gives it coordinates, situates it in a before and after. What happens if you no longer perceive time as most people do? You live in a suspended dimension in which there is no before and after, past and future.
Diane develops an endurance for ultradistances that has something mythical about it, and she explains why: “If I have an advantage over other athletes, it is time-I get lost in time. At the Yukon I ran for 10 days straight but I know this because they told me, I didn’t feel it at all. I didn’t know how exhausted I was because I simply didn’t remember.”
Diane runs only by feeling her pace because having no immediate memories she cannot place herself in time. This allows her to overcome one of the biggest obstacles that every runner knows: precisely, that of time. She does not race against time: she ignores it and, in doing so, manages to overcome it.
Remember how, after the first crises, the only way to cope with them was to escape them by running? Now Diane no longer flees: she could run against the clock but she unintentionally discovered that her proudest adversary was not the before and after, it was not the start and finish: it was how she perceived them and how she positioned herself against them.
Not perceiving it means, in practical terms, not considering it: part of physical fatigue comes from the conditioning of the mind that knows-or convinces itself-that after running a certain amount of time, the body must be tired. What if it is only a perception and not reality? What if fatigue was a function of time and not physical exertion? Diane leaves us with these questions, which she does not even ask. She has always had an answer: running.
(From the Radiolab podcast “In the running” – Photo from Diane Van Deren’stwitter account )