Stephanie Case on the Alps rescue, and running where running isn't allowed

Stephanie Case’s race list reads like a dare: Tor des Géants, UTMB, Lavaredo, the Gobi, Grand to Grand, Vermont, the Matterhorn ultra, Madeira, UROC. Multi-day racing, mostly. The question of whether she listens to her body when it asks her to stop gets a short answer in this episode, and it is no.

The accident

Five weeks before the recording, she was alone on a winter snowshoe outing on part of the UTMB and Tor des Géants course in the Italian Alps when she fell partway down a cliff. She came to rest with a collapsed lung, a bleeding liver, broken ribs and a phone that was running out of battery.

Most of the episode’s first half is the rescue: what the worst part actually was — which is not the injuries — how the call was made and received, what technology made the difference, and how long the whole thing took. It is a specific, unglamorous account of mountain rescue from the inside, and it is far more useful than the version these stories usually get.

She was already running again by February, with Western States, UTMB, Tor des Géants and Eiger on the calendar for that year.

Training in places that don’t have trails

The other half is stranger. Case’s work as a human rights lawyer has put her in postings where ordinary training is impossible. She has trained out of a tent in South Sudan. She has trained on a Gaza rooftop with soldiers at the door. She has trained on a UN compound in wartime Afghanistan, doing laps of a parking area a kilometre round. Her solutions were stairs, dragging tyres, and repetition — for months at a time.

That produces a particular kind of runner. Someone who has done a hundred-mile-equivalent block on a compound loop is not going to be undone by a boring section of the Western States trail.

Free to Run

The episode also covers Free to Run, the organisation she founded, which uses running and outdoor sport to expand what is available to women and girls in conflict-affected regions. It is the through-line that makes the rest of the resume make sense: the racing and the work are the same argument about what people are permitted to attempt.

And the rest

There are also stories about meeting a fellow runner in a tent in Utah, and about a technical mishap during a TED talk that she is entirely willing to describe. It is a long episode and it earns the length.