Stephanie Case – Rescue in the Alps and Pushing our Limitations
Stephanie Case Interview
Stephanie Case has in incredible resume of ultramarathon and trail races:
- Tor des Geants
- Lavaredo
- UTMB
- Gobi Desert
- Grand to Grand
- Vermont
- Matterhorn
- Madeira Island
- UROC
If it’s long and tough and pushes the limits, Stephanie has likely run it. Does she “listen to her body” when it tells her to stop? Nope. How does it respond when she’s surviving on 2 hours of sleep after 98 hours of running?
While training for the above events, Stephanie’s lived and trained in some of the most adverse conditions in the world including a tent in South Sudan, a rooftop in Gaza with soldiers at the door, and on a UN compound in Afghanistan in the middle of a war. She’s adapted by running up stairs, pulling tires, and doing laps around a 1k parking lot. Do we talk about working with the conditions you’re given? You bet.
This strength and focus certainly came into play five weeks ago when she found herself with a collapsed lung, bleeding liver, broken ribs, and a dying cell phone halfway down a cliff while on a solo snowshoe trek on the UTMB/TDG course in the Italian Alps. Whoa.
In this interview, we talk at length about the scariest part of the incident, how she was rescued, the technology that saved her life, and what she learned from it all. And wait, she’s running and still planning to do Western, UTMB, TDG, and Eiger this year??? This is an amazing tale that will make you think differently about your next run in the mountains.
She tells some hilarious stories about meeting Sarah in a tent in Utah and how good she smelled, about when she dropped a mic down her underwear during her TED Talk, and the message she’s been preaching of we don’t know what we are capable of until we try. We hear more about Stephanie’s foundation Free to Run and how she’s working to use running as a means to lift girls and women out of dangerous areas in the world.
This was a fantastic interview that I’ll be listening to multiple times.
Stephanie Case Episode Notes
Here’s the TED Talk with Stephanie Case. (Make sure you watch it after you hear her story on the podcast.)
Here’s Sarah’s article about Stephanie.
Here’s my Patreon page. If you like what I’m doing, please consider supporting my work via Patreon. Thanks!
Note: Yeah, I bleeped a few naughty words. I’m trying to stay clean for iTunes and this is a talk I’d like kids to listen to and want to make sure parents are comfortable with the words.
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