Brian Roders had spent two backbreaking months building 17 miles of trails in the Never Summer Mountains. A month-long bike ride to Wisconsin with a pal seemed like a good way to cap his summer of labor.
Almost two weeks after pedaling out of Steamboat Springs in October, Roders and a friend rolled into Byers. They stopped at a grocery for bratwurst and milk before pedaling off in search of a camp.
After an open-fire feed in a stand of trees filled with junked and dumped furniture above the plains hamlet, Roders, 20, zipped himself into his sleeping bag and bright orange bivy sack and fell asleep.
He woke up three weeks later in Craig Hospital. His back was broken in five places, the skin scraped off his face and his brain seriously injured. His life was forever altered. According to reports from local police, it appears someone was four-wheeling and ran over Roders. His bivy sack snagged under the truck. He was dragged 320 feet. The driver never stopped.
“Some drunk guy probably, off rooting and tooting and four-wheeling, saying ‘Hey, I’m going to run over that tent.’ And he runs me over,” Roders said. “(Bad) cards get dealt, and I got dealt a lot of ’em.”
Last week, Roders left Craig Hospital, heading home to Florida with his mother, Pam. His new baggage is hefty: an assemblage of steel bars in his back, a torso-twisting limp, a left hand and pair of legs that aren’t listening well to his commands and a brain that hasn’t fully rebounded from its severe rattling under that truck.
The day before he ended his four-month stay at the hospital, he got a visit from his friend Diane Van Deren. It was an inspirational meeting for both Craig veterans, a moment that left both more determined to reach goals that sometimes seem beyond reach.
For Brian: recover, rebuild and return to Colorado, where he would like to go to college and study forestry or something environmental.
For Diane: run 350 miles in less than a week this month on a self-supported race across Alaska’s frozen hinterlands; a race most struggle to finish riding a sled pulled by a team of dogs.
“When I’m on the trail and I’m running those 350 miles,” Van Deren said, choking through tears and grasping Brian’s hand, “I’m going to think about you. I’m going to think about where I was and where I am today and I’m going to think about our blessings. When it’s dark and it’s 50 below zero, you’ll be pushing me, Brian.”
“Can’t” doesn’t compute
Doctors 11 years ago told Van Deren she would have to give up her quest for athletic excellence. The professional tennis player and mother of three was undergoing surgery to remove an epilepsy- inducing blob of seizure-scarred brain tissue. Her lifelong and very successful push to be the best at all sports was likely going to end with the removal of a kiwi-sized chunk of her brain.
You can’t excel after a temporal lobectomy, the doctors said. But what the doctors didn’t take into account was Van Deren’s unflinching disdain of the word “can’t.”
With her debilitating seizures vanquished, she started with a couple of marathons. She breezed through those easily. She moved on to endurance races, the ones that stretch 100 miles and last a full day. She was good – excellent, actually – at keeping the pain at bay and the legs moving. Despite – or maybe aided by – lingering impairments from the surgery, the Sedalia runner has become one of the world’s strongest endurance racers. She can literally run for days. And she will do just that beginning Saturday – three days after she turns 47 – as she races in what is considered one of the world’s most grueling endurance contests.
“That is crazy. That much in a week? Wow,” Roders said. “That is inspirational. It really is.”
Finding inspiration
Two years ago Van Deren ran the Iditarod Trail Invitational – billed as the world’s longest human-powered winter race – but she made it “only” 260 miles. She ran 180 of those miles with a stress fracture in her right foot and a groin pull delivered by a moose-made hole she plumbed while running through the frozen darkness. Eventually the agony beat the motivation and Van Deren bowed out of a race for the first time.
When she endured that pain, dragging her right leg for 180 miles, she remembers thinking about a man she met during her four-month rehab from brain surgery at Craig, an internationally heralded rehab center for adults with spinal cord and brain injuries. She spent her months at Craig relearning things such as walking, eating, cooking. He worked just as hard toward his goal of moving his hand.
“When I’m out there and I’m injured and I’m hurting, I think about these moments I’ve shared with people here. They are the visions I take with me on the trail,” she said. “I think, ‘What is my pain compared to a man who fights to move his finger?’ I use their energy and make it my own.”
Physical, mental test
Since the first snow of the season, Van Deren rises hours before dawn to start running. She drags a weighted sled from her home, venturing deep into the Rampart Range. She celebrates when Denver weather forecasters somberly warn of record lows, scheduling her five-hour training runs during the most frigid temperature drops, even if that means rousting at 3 a.m. to run. She’s running in Alaska with Cami Semick, a fellow athlete on The North Face clothing company’s endurance team, marking her first race with a teammate. They plan to sleep at most three hours a night. They will drag 42-pound sleds laden with food, water and gear over frozen terrain. They will run through record snowfall on frozen rivers and wind-scoured dirt as they traverse the fabled Iditarod Trail from Knik to McGrath, Alaska.
“The thing I love about this race is that it is so extreme and it puts us in these elements where we truly test ourselves both physically and mentally,” Van Deren said.
But more than her love for pushing limits and expanding the boundaries of the possible, Van Deren runs to pay it all back.
“For me, success is being able to give back some of the blessings I have,” she said, promising her “best cheerleader” Roders a guided hike when he returns to Colorado. “Never stop exploring, Brian. After I had my surgery, I never stopped finding new ways to get better. You are going to have good days and you are going to have bad days. I want you to remember to never stop reaching and never stop exploring.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
