When the quad runner turned too sharply coming down a massive sand dune in southeastern California near Yuma, Ariz., it and rider Sue Lanz began to tumble.
The all-terrain vehicle gashed her right thigh and mangled her left foot and ankle when it was caught underneath. She dislocated her big toe and fractured the t, shifting her foot in a different direction.
The ankle was broken and most of the tendons in the foot were torn.
“The surgeon described it like it was the military, stepping on a landmine, there was so much damage all over the place,” Lanz said.
That was five years ago. Specialists described surgeries to install metal plates. When Lanz asked about running or even hiking again, they responded: “‘Oh, no. You won’t have an athletic life because of all the arthritis.”
“That knocked the wind out of me,” Lanz said. “That’s me reg to a very different life for the rest of my life. I decided I wasn’t going to do the surgeries. I wasn’t going to do any of it, so I could get active again and do big things.”
Then, she did. Bigger than big, actually.
It took those five years to re-train her body, to build up the muscles in her leg, to stifle the mental demons, to begin the proving-everyone-wrong process.
On Saturday, Lanz — the 60-year-old principal at Christian High in El Cajon — ran the Leadville Trail Marathon.
Stop to process that: She ran a marathon, in the thin mountain air with elevation gains, five years after being told she’d never run again, as a sexagenarian.
Leadville, which winds through a historic Colorado mining district, is the self-proclaimed toughest marathon of its kind. It’s a test along uneven trails, rising 6,167 feet to its a 13,185-foot peak at Mosquito .
Lanz did not simply push limits and test herself, she tossed herself into a physical and mental meat grinder.
On purpose.
“It’s trying to be resilient through a very difficult thing,” Lanz said. “I believe bad things happen for a reason. Because the recovery was so extended and challenging, I had to change to get through it.
“It changed me, so it’s a good thing all of that happened.”
Perspective, in bucketfuls.
There were so, so many reasons to shrug shoulders and accept an uncomfortable fate. The accident initially deformed her left foot, causing two medical workers to physically move the affected area of the foot back into position.
“That part was not fun,” Lanz said.
Lanz also shared that just before driving down from that sand dune, her husband wondered if her helmet was fully strapped on. He tightened it up.
When the tumble ended, Lanz’s head violently struck a rock.
“I couldn’t see, I lost my vision,” she said. “I had a severe concussion and that was with my helmet on. I’ve thought so many times, ‘You wouldn’t be here.’ I know I wouldn’t have survived.”
None of it derailed Lanz. It motivated her.
She decided no one was going to foist limitations onto her world. No one else would build her ceilings. She would control the days and years to come.
She would train, climbing to the top of the Cuyamaca and San Miguel mountains to prepare. And she would spend seven hours running up and down a mountain after no reasonable person thought it possible.
“Leadville is kind of an iconic thing in the trail running community, so it sounded like the ultimate challenge,” Lanz said. “It was the hardest race I’ve ever done, but I knew it was going to be hard.”
Then it wasn’t.
“The last two or three miles to Mosquito is a 10 to 20 percent grade,” she said. “When I got there, I how beautiful it was, the expanse of it. Once I got to that , I knew I was going to do it. I felt great the whole way down.”
Just getting to the race was a marvel of its own. Completing it?
Well, that’s pure relentlessness.
“I work with kids,” Lanz began. “They always ask me why I do it. I tell them there’s nothing special about me. Everybody’s stronger than they think they are. It’s when you have to tap into it, you realize it.”
And that surgeon who said it all was impossible?
“I thought about (calling her),” Lanz said with a laugh. “But I don’t know if that would do any good.”
There’s better ways to spend her time. There are more mountains to climb.
“I’d like to …” said Lanz, pausing because she knows what is coming out of her mouth might sound a little insane, too. “There’s a Leadville 100 next summer.”
One hundred miles. The same thin air. The same fistfight with elevation. The same long odds.
Time to jump back into the proving-everyone-wrong business again.
