Name: Sabrina Moran, DIV’12
Favorite Place to Run: Across the Rocky Mountains (for six days)
Favorite Book: Anything Hegel or Nietzsche
Last Race: Rocky Raccoon, a “100-miler” in Texas on February 4th… which she won.
We all have those days: you burst into your room after a long day of classes, practically crying from exhaustion, and collapse in utter defeat on your unmade twin-sized bed. Maybe it was that know-it-all who shut you down in section (what kind of person actually does the 500-page reading on a Wednesday night?), or maybe that humiliating moment when your Justin Bieber ring tone went off in lecture. And now you have to begin a five-pager due in six hours. Baby, baby, baby, life has just delivered a hard punch square in your face. Looking around, it seems that Yale has got most students trapped and twisted in a ruthless stronghold.
For Ms. Sabrina Moran, it is most certainly the other way around. She’s got a firm grip on Yale’s slippery reins.
I first read about her in the YDN in early September and wanted to learn more. Maybe she could provide all of us bumbling undergraduates with some much-needed guidance.
Simply from our e-mail exchange, I had the feeling that Sabrina would be the overwhelmingly modest type, that high-flying wunderkind who dismisses scores of awards and years of accomplishments with a bashful wave of the hand. I was right.
From our hour-long chat in the Hall of Graduate Studies, I never would have known that, at the age of 25, she is known as the 6th fastest female ultra runner in North American history. She can cover 138 miles in a 24 hour race. She has organized and dominated countless charity runs, including a 100-mile run for the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition, a 24-hour run fundraiser in Peru, and a 24-hour fundraising drive for a Nicaraguan orphanage in Managua. She is sponsored by Team Inov, Drymax, Gore-Tex, and more. She ran her first marathon distance at the tender age of eight years old.
It’s no wonder that she’s been proposed to at her races more than once; Sabrina has been followed as far as Colorado by a particularly devoted suitor.
This renowned long-distanced runner’s average day is in and of itself a kind of ultra-marathon. She wakes at 4 a.m., reads a pithy philosophical text before sunrise (right now she’s digging Nietzsche), and then embarks on a very, very long run to East Rock.
On the average day, Sabrina logs in 10-30 miles, and often completes 175 miles a week. Afterward, she hits the books at the Divinity School, competes in club sports, and snags another run before heading home and hitting the sack. In between, she fuels up on sunflower seeds, dairy, protein shakes, “lots of chicken,” and Swedish Fish when she is in the mood for indulging. “Running like this doesn’t fit neatly into my imagination, so I like that. I thrive off of the monotony. I like the sense of completion.”
It’s an exhausting schedule just reading it; imagine living it. That jerk in section doesn’t seem so terrible after all, does he?
How, I wondered, can she possibly sustain such a brutal schedule? Her mother, who was suffering from cancer, prompted her to run her first ultra-marathon. She ran the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition ultra-marathon as a “grand gesture.”
A glance at her hilarious, yet thoughtful personal blog provides an even deeper look into the distance-loving athlete: “By the time I crossed 100 miles, I had been inside of my head for a long time. I’ve become a master of sublimation and am the most industrious when life is hard…sometimes you hit 103 miles and feel kind of lazy. But that’s ultra-marathoning, and mediocrity is contextual…If we think something is harder, we’re going to be biased in the way we see it. We have the power to alter our vision.”
If you ever need a running partner to East Rock at 6 a.m., now you know who to ask. Sabrina would be more than happy to oblige.