Relax enough, and your body becomes so familiar with the cradle-rocking rhythm that you almost forget you’re moving. And once you break through to that soft, half-levitating flow, that’s when the moonlight and champagne show up: “You have to be in tune with your body, and know when you can push it and when to back off,” Ann would explain. You have

the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it. Scott would never again linger

the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it takes a woman to bring out the best in a man.”

because our heads were expanding, thereby providing more ballast.

Coach Vigil was a hard-data freak, but as he watched Ann plunge into the Rockies with her ballsy do-or-die game plan, he loved the fact that ultrarunning had no science, no playbook, no training manual, no conventional wisdom. That kind of freewheeling self-invention is where big breakthroughs come from, as Vigil knew (and Columbus, the Beatles,

“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and

Ann Trason.

“Humans really are obligatorily required to do aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy, and I think that has deep roots in our evolutionary history,” Dr. Lieberman said. “If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.”