Sedalia – Diane Van Deren stares unshaken at the video on her television. About halfway through the moving local news profile of her, a snippet of video shows her in a hospital bed, locked in the throes of a seizure.
“Kinda scary, isn’t it? That’s what my kids used to see. I didn’t know what I looked like until I saw that,” said the mother of three.
The video was from 10 years ago. Today, Van Deren is a world-class ultrarunner who collects medals and accolades for running 100-mile races that last more than a day.
The 45-year-old’s voyage from epilepsy to world-class endurance runner is the stuff of legends.
Van Deren’s brain was scarred after suffering a 50-minute seizure at 16 months; she didn’t have another for 24 years. She grew up in Littleton, establishing herself as one of the best athletes in the state and later became a professional tennis player. When she was in her mid-20s, she started getting what she called “little tingling sensations” but ignored them. Those sensations were small seizures, part of a gathering neural storm in her brain.
In 1996, seven months pregnant with her third child, the scar on her brain ruptured and she had a full-blown grand mal seizure. The debilitating episodes became more frequent. She ran because she didn’t have seizures when she was on the trail. But 10 years of dangerous epileptic seizures was destroying her life.
“My kids had to take care of me,” she said. “My role as a mother was reversed. None of the medications worked.”
A scan revealed the seizures were coming from one section of Van Deren’s brain, making her a candidate for a radical surgery. The night before doctors removed her brain’s right temporal lobe, she had a seizure. It was the last one she has suffered in almost 10 years.
In June 2003, Van Deren ran her first ultramarathon, a 100-mile suffer-fest, finishing with ease. At the finish line, a representative from Craig Hospital asked her to speak with children suffering from the disease she overcame. One of the girls at the hospital, a teen about the age of her daughter, asked her to run a race for her. She did. Today, with dozens of ultraraces under her small belt, Van Deren is one of the world’s best trail runners, racing in the hardest races on the planet.
Her tanned and tone body belies a hidden disability. Her memory is impaired, making small daily tasks difficult. She labors through logistics, as evidenced by her note-plastered refrigerator. She’s not so good with times, appointments or holding new images in her head. She easily loses her way on the trail.
“I run out 50 miles to the turnaround of a race, and it will be like a whole new trail for the next 50 miles,” she said with a chuckle. “I’m probably the only ultradistance runner that races more than 100 miles because I do get lost.”
Van Deren says her disability enables her.
“Running 100-mile races, while physically demanding, is so relaxing mentally for me,” she said, looking spry after an early-morning 20-mile “training run” in the wooded hills of the Rampart Range outside her Sedalia ranchette. “All I have to think about is, ‘Eat, drink and don’t fall.’
“Plus, having gone through brain surgery, it kind of puts the pain on a trail in perspective.”
Dr. Don Gerber, a clinical psychologist at Craig Hospital who has worked with Van Deren for years, said she is deflecting well-deserved credit.
“She has found a way to work with her disability and minimize any disruptive effect so she can hit her peak performance and get into the zone,” Gerber said. “It is not without tremendous effort, though. Most people could not do what she does with that kind of injury. She is a great inspiring athlete. She is an inspiring person.”
Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
