Catra Corbett on getting sober, and running an unreasonable number of hundreds

One of the earliest episodes, with one of Northern California's most recognisable runners.

Catra Corbett has never fitted the template, which is a strange thing to say about a sport with no template. Heavily tattooed, based in the Bay Area, running hundreds at a volume that most people consider a typo, and entirely open about how she got there.

This is one of the show’s early episodes, recorded at the end of 2011.

The part she never hid

Corbett has spoken publicly for years about the years she spent addicted to methamphetamine, and about the point at which that ended and running started. She does not present it as a redemption arc with running as the cure. The version she tells is more useful and less tidy: she needed something to organise a life around, the trails were there, and the community around Ohlone and the Bay Area race scene made room for her.

Around the time of this recording she had been featured on HBO’s Real Sports, and part of the episode is her reaction to the piece — specifically to how it framed her, which is a question anyone who has been profiled will recognise.

The volume

The numbers are the other reason people know her name. Corbett has run a great many hundred-mile races — well past the point where anyone, including her, keeps a precise count — plus a long list of doubles: running an out-and-back of a hundred-mile course, effectively turning a race into a two-hundred, which she was doing before the sport had a name for it. The episode covers the training behind it, or rather the absence of anything that would qualify as a training plan.

Her message

Asked what she actually wants to say to people, she is direct about it: she is not interesting because she is fast. She is interesting because she is proof that a life can be started over at a point when it looks finished, and that the trails do not ask you where you have been.

The plan

The episode ends with a major project she was lining up for the following year, described with considerable enthusiasm and no particular regard for what a reasonable person would attempt.