43
Mooney’s Zajac scales new extremes
Photo
Cardinal Mooney High graduate Val Zajac poses next to the 50-mile sign on the High Line Canal trail last month in Denver. Zajac ultimately ran 63 miles that day on a training run with her friends.
By Joe Scalzo
“Running an ultramarathon is a game of inches and the hardest three inches are the ones in between your ears.”
- Ken Chlouber, founder of the Leadville Trail 100.
The first time Val Zajac ran an ultramarathon was in June 2011. It was the Bighorn Trail 50, a 50-mile race through Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains that, according to its website, features “panoramic views” and “splendid seas of wildflowers.”
What Zajac remembers most is stopping at the 31st mile with massive blisters on her heels.
“I made the mistake of letting the nurse try and pop them,” said Zajac, a 2003 Cardinal Mooney High graduate. “So, the whole heel ripped off. I walked a few more miles and was so happy when they were like, ‘You’re out of time and you have to stop.’
“I probably could have pushed through the blisters but it was a good excuse to stop because I wasn’t mentally quite there yet.”
For most people, this would be trying skydiving for the first time, then discovering your primary chute won’t open. You’d be happy to survive, you’d be one story richer and you’d stop jumping out of planes.
But Zajac is a distance runner and distance runners are used to ignoring pain (not to mention jokes from people who think they’re nuts). She battled through an injured-marred cross country career at the University of Nebraska that featured six stress fractures, two calf pulls, a torn hamstring and a couple rounds of anemia.
So, after taking a few years off, she decided to start running ultras, which are perfect for people who don’t think marathons are long enough.
“Most people think you’re nuts,” Zajac said. “When you’re out there, you think you’re nuts. But after you’re done, you forget how bad it hurts and you try to do it again.”
(This, it should be noted, is the same thing people say after giving birth.)
Zajac has run two 50Ks (the Mount Werner Classic in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and the Market to Market in Lincoln, Neb.), three 50-milers (the San Juan Solstice in Lake City, Colo., the Silver Rush in Leadville, Colo., and the Run Rabbit Run in Steamboat Springs) and a trail marathon (Run Through Time in Salida, Colo.). She’s also failed to finish two 50-milers and a 100-miler.
When asked why she runs races that take 10 hours (or more), she paused for a second, then said, “Being able to say you can? It’s something not everyone can do. It’s sort of a battle with yourself kind of deal. I don’t know how to put it, really.”
Zajac was a standout runner in high school, advancing to the Division II state cross country meet four times and finishing a career-best fifth as a sophomore in 2000.
She redshirted her first season at Nebraska with a stress fracture and was never again healthy. But she excelled in the classroom, earning academic all-conference honors three times.
She then gave up running for four years, focusing on biking and swimming, before moving to Boulder, Colo., for grad school in 2008. She soon hooked up with a local road running group, met some “crazy people” (her words) who were training to do a 50-miler and jumped on their training program.
“I thought, ‘If they can do it, maybe I can too,’” she said, laughing. “The first couple runs were pretty brutal. Your feet are spasming, you’re sorer than you’ve ever been in your life and you’re beyond tired. You’re thinking, ‘How am I ever going to do this?’
“I had to really wrap my head around [the idea that] I’m going to be out there all day.”
Zajac works as a mental health professional at the county jail, so she trains either early in the morning or late at night. She’s done training runs that start with an 8 p.m. trip to McDonald’s and finish 32 miles later with the sunrise. She’s run through the snow in the Colorado mountains and up and down the Grand Canyon. She’s spent 3 1/2 hours running through cascading snow in negative-5 temperatures.
“You have to get used to running when you don’t want to,” she said. “Whether it’s raining or snowing or 100 degrees, you have to just kind of motivate yourself to do it.
“The race is easier when you learn how to suffer when you’re not in the race.”
Zajac’s running form was famously bad in high school — she often looked like she was about to pass out, even in races she won — and running thousands of miles hasn’t cured her.
“I would venture to guess it’s still pretty bad,” she said. “I’m still doing the breaststroke, with my arm swinging. I’m definitely not one of the more photogenic runners out there. I’m not going to get my picture on Runner’s World.”
Zajac only gets back to Youngstown once a year, typically to visit her family over a holiday. She still looks forward to running in Mill Creek Park and eating Handel’s cookie dough ice cream. (“They don’t have anything like Handel’s out here,” she said. “People eat dairy-free, gluten-free yogurt.”)
But eve though she’s spent more than a decade away, she still treasures the relationships she built here because of the sport.
“Cross country was one of the best parts of high school,” she said. “I got to know some awesome people. I guess that’s what made me get back into running.”