Diane van Deren spent many years literally running from the epileptic seizures that plagued her since her pregnancy with her third child.
An accomplished athlete her entire life, van Deren found that the only way to prevent the onset of a seizure was to run – and keep running.
“When I had the sense that a seizure was coming, I found that running was the one thing that would prevent the seizure,” she said Tuesday by phone from her home in Sedalia, Colo. “So running became my comfort and led me to the sport of running.”
After 10 years of seizures, more drastic measures became necessary. In 1997, van Deren had brain surgery that removed part of her right temporal lobe.
The operation was a success and she has been seizure free since. Freed from her epilepsy, van Deren pursued her new passion of ultra running, which means longer than a marathon but in her case usually involves 100 or more miles.