Somewhere around mile 120, Laurie Andrews was inhabited by aliens.
On the outside, she was covered in earthlysand.
But inside, her entire body was screaming from a foreign invasion.
She tossed and turned for six hours a night, wedged between other runners in a rickety lean-to.
But Andrews willed herself to finish that day’s 26-mile run in roughly five hours.
Then she got up the next morning and ran another 11 miles to the finish line.
She was more exhausted than she’d ever been in her life.
“I felt amazed by what I’d just done, and grateful,” she says.
“I knew I was lucky to be there and to bephysically ableto do this incredible thing.
It was magical.”
One hundred and fifty miles.Through biting sand and scorching heat.
It sounds like an exquisite torture, the devising of a fitness sadist.
Last year, 25 of those women beat men to cross the finish line first.
“And more are finding that they canrun longer distancesbetter than shorter ones.”
Andrews is an accidental ultrarunner, though at times she has seemed born to it.
Although Andrews is charismaticwith a huge, engaging smile and a cadre ofclose friendsshe is also intensely private.
“Life is so full of noise,” she says.
It is like moving meditation for me."
To succeed at ultrarunningor even find it appealingembracing introspection is key.
“Laurie can be solitary without being lonely.”
In 2006, on a dare, she signed up for a 50-mile ultramarathon through the park.
Without anyspecial training, she was the second-fastest woman.
“My family and friends think what I do is crazy,” she says.
“Everyone should have something like that.”
Still, the race was virtually in her backyard, so the terrain, at least, was familiar.
Before the race, she studied the course, mapping out where aid stations would be along the way.
As she started out, Andrews could sense her bodyrevving up.
The motion loosened her muscles; she breathed more rapidly, taking in more oxygen.
The first 20 miles posed achallengeshe’d never faced in a marathon: She was bored.
“It’s a totally different way to think about running.
“I was breathing easily; the surroundings were perfect,” she says.
“I felt almost weightless, as if I were on another plane.”
Physiologically, her high may have been brought on bysurging endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.
About 60 miles in, the sun went down over the Grand Teton mountains.
“In a long race, you have to fight your inner self.”
Halfway through the night, at mile 75, “everything in my brain started to shout, Stop!
The slow gurgle that had been building in her belly turned to violent nausea.
This response could be what irritates the stomach, and it creates a conundrum.
“Runners have to digest nutrients and get them to where they’re needed,” he says.
Most people can process only a couple hundred calories per hour, even if they areburning three timesthat amount.
Runners also tend to miscalculate how muchhydrationthey need.
Too much can trigger hyponatremia, a dilution of electrolytes that can cause confusion, brain swelling and seizures.
Although she knew her body needed nourishment, Andrews couldn’t manage a bite.
She tried one nibble of an energy bar and gagged.
A few minutes later, she dashed off the Grand Teton trail to throw up.
She felt herself panicking.
“I was sure I’d never walk again,” Andrews recalls.
“I tortured myself for miles.”
But she kept going.
It’s true that physiologists have found surprisingly little evidence that endurance races seriously damage the body.
Andrews ran through her fears and stayed in the moment with a survivalist’s mantra: Eat.
And she soothed herself with a silent, gentle pep talk.
“Laurie, relax, you’re doing great,” she told herself.
“As the sun came up over the snow-kissed cliffs, an exhausted Andrews had run nearly 90 miles.
By mile 95, she got a second winda common and purely psychological phenomenon, according to Dr. Hoffman.
“You have to beawareof your body, but also a little detached.”
She couldn’t eat more than a bagel and a banana for 24 hours.
She was hooked, and not only on theendorphins.
“People treated me as if this was a pipe dream, something impossible,” Andrews says.
“It’s one thing to talk aboutclimbingEverest.
It’s another to actually get up and down.”
All winter, Andrews trained in cold and snow to prepare for the Sahara in March.
With trainer Smith-Batchen, Andrews developed a strictregimenthat would translate to the desert.
On Mondays, Andrews did hotyoga, something she’d never tried before.
The first day, it was 4 degrees below outside and at least 105 degrees in the room.
Halfway through the class, she lay down on the mat and nearly collapsed.
“Yoga is as hard as running,” she says.
“But it paid off in the race.
“The race proved that there are so many horizons out there still to discover,” she says.
For a few days after coming home from Morocco, Andrews felt invigorated.
But soon the euphoriawore off, and she was left with…nothing.
Gone was the anticipation, the single-minded focus that had her rushing out into the cold every morning.
“It was a huge letdown,” she says.
“I really missed having a big, bodacious goal.”
It was her second ultra in as many months.
But Andrews got only as far as mile 75 of the Bighorn ultra.
There, with no warning, she fainted midstep.
A runner beside her caught her before she hit the ground; Andrews was already unconscious.
“I thought I was fine, but the fatigue was way down there,” she says.
“My body was telling me, You’re too stupid to know you’ve donetoo much.”
I am doing this to be healthy, Andrews had always told herself.
When family and friends argued that running 100 miles wasn’t normal, she insisted she knew her limits.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
Why am I really doing this?
Am I trying to hurt myself?
Andrews vowed to get her priorities straight: Be healthy.Have fun.
But she wasn’t quite ready to follow that mantra.
She found it even harder than the Marathon des Sables.
It forced her to finally be honest with herself.
“Running had turned intoanother job, a stress in my life,” she says.
“For a short period, you’re able to get away with that.
But when there’s no end in sight, it becomes a problem.”
Unable to run for eight months, Andrews startedswimmingandbikingto help herself heal.
She found that, with practice, she was able to capture that euphoria she craved from training runs.
It helped sustain her until she could get back out on the trail.
In the meantime, something unexpected happened: Andrews started reconnecting with friends and making time to socialize.
No longer was she able, or willing, to immerse herself in herself for days at a time.
Andrews still dreams of running her longest ultra yet, the 350-mile Iditarod in Alaska.
But her happinessher life as she needs it to beis no longer dependent on it.
“At first, I thought my whole life was derailed when I got injured,” she says.
“I had to figure out how to live without the runner’s high.
