Angela Ivory stands relaxed, Broad Street, Cookeville, TN, August 11, 2006
Angela Ivory runs the railroad tracks at Cookeville, TN, August 11, 2006
Note: As the title's present tense suggests, his story about Angela Ivory was written when she was running and feeling well, back in 2006 after she'd fought breast cancer to a standstill and after she'd run a marathon in each of the fifty states plus D.C. She would repeat that running feat and set a new and harder goal. It seemed a happy time for her. She had been free of cancer for two years. We know now, of course, cancer eventually came back. This story was written as a feature for the Herald-Citizen newspaper. It was reprinted in three running magazines and has since been adapted as a chapter in my recent book Going Down Slow. On the sad occasion of her death Thursday, May 31, I dug the story out. As we mourn her death maybe it can serve as a vivid reminder of the full, vibrant life Angela managed to live during her forty-four years.
What had happened to Angela Ivory came as a rude
surprise to me. I didn’t know her very well at first. We’d talked a few times
at local races. Then I didn’t see her for a few months. After I heard her news,
I invited her up to my Cookeville home so we could make pictures and talk about
a story.
By then she had run over a hundred combined
marathons and ultramarathons. That list included a marathon in each of the
fifty states plus D.C., a saga that required what seemed to me a staggering
amount of travel.
She lived alone in Nashville, but grew up in Memphis.
Prior to her marathon saga she had been west of the Mississippi River only
twice, to visit an Aunt in West Memphis Arkansas, she told me.
She spent an afternoon in Cookeville, answering my
questions and posing for pictures. Then she and Jo Ann and I went out for
dinner. An astonishing saga emerged. As impressive as her list of races was, it
barely began to tell her story.
She’d started
out by dabbling—two marathons in 2001, two in 2002, one in 2003. Then things
went crazy. In 2004 she began running either a marathon or an ultramarathon
every weekend, traveling wherever she had to, to wherever there was a race,
crisscrossing the country time and again. When I asked her about the travel,
she only said,
“Yeah,
it’s hard on you. I really believe in jet lag.”
She was
on a mission then to record a marathon in each of the fifty states. She was
doing it the hard way, by not counting some of the ultramarathons she ran along
the way. The typical ultramarathons she runs are 31.2 (50k) and 50 miles in
length, usually on a trail. Since all ultramarathons, by definition, are longer
than a marathon, she could have counted an ultra as a marathon in a given state.
There’s a reason she didn’t count the ultras, and that’s part of her story.
With the
Orange County Marathon, in Newport Beach, California, on January 8, 2006, she
completed the mission, her fifty-first state (counting D.C.). It was her
thirty-eighth birthday.
“I went
out there scared,” she said.
To
understand her apprehension, you’d have to know what happened in the December
preceding that January race. As she closed on her target, two bogies reared up:
her hardest marathon, and her first DNF.
The
Kiawah Island Marathon, in South Carolina, was her hardest, despite its flat
course. It turned into a seven-hour trudge. She had tendonitis of the IT band
and had to walk most of the way. That race was her forty-seventh marathon of
the year.
Forty-seven?
“Yeah, I
missed a couple of weekends, but there were four weekends I ran doubles.”
Doubles?
“That’s
where I ran a marathon on Saturday and then ran another one on Sunday.”
But her
body was wearing down. The crunch came the next weekend at a 50k ultra in
Indiana. It was a cold 19 degrees and the trail was under a foot of snow. Her
body screamed its warning. She faltered after the first 10-mile loop. It was
her first failure. She went to the car and cried.
“It hurt.
You get through most of these races with your mind, and I guess my mind wasn’t
in it. I guess everything has a breaking point.”
So her
hardest marathon—the forty-seventh that year—was followed a week later by a
failure. And that set the stage for her thirty-eighth birthday, and for that
capstone race in Orange County that ended a saga.
That saga is just part of her
story. To understand how that part came about one needs to go back to the year
2003. That year changed Angela Ivory’s life—and who knows in how many ways.
They cut
off her left breast.
They had
to. The big C. It was June. They took out 22 lymph nodes, too.
The doctors laid out a menu of
long-term outrage. Chemotherapy started three months before the surgery, and
continued for three months after it. For that, they planted a “port” in her
right shoulder, a sort of plastic valve under the skin that connects to a blood
vessel via a tube, a handy place to stick the chemo needle. After the chemo
ended, five weeks of radiation followed.
Chemo is supposed to be tough,
right? Tougher than the Tour de France, Lance said. But Angela didn’t whine
about it. Only the port drew her scorn—for the reason that it hurt when she
reached for the bicycle bars—yeah, she was biking, too. The doctors installed
the port in February 2003; they decided she was clean and took it out early in
2004.
Then everything changed for
Angela Ivory.
Oddly, I remember talking with
her about that time. It was January 24, 2004, at Natchez Trace State Park, just
after the 5-mile “Race on the Trace.” We sat on the steps of the lodge talking
about running, as racers will.
I didn’t know her secret, and she
didn’t mention it. I couldn’t have guessed the perfect storm of marathons to
follow; I doubt she could. That day she seemed a bit wistful and dreamed about
running an ultramarathon, something she’d read that I’d done.
Later that year, in June, she
indeed ran an ultra, the Star Mountain 50k, in Etowah, Tennessee. Maybe by then
she’d learned what she wanted to do, although she doesn’t recall a particular
moment when she formed her 51-states plan; it happened gradually.
You can imagine that a black girl
growing up in Memphis during the 70s and 80s faced all the usual pitfalls of
big city life. But Angela’s parents taught her well. She studied hard and
earned an academic scholarship to Vanderbilt University. Once there, she knew
she wanted to major in mechanical engineering—this despite the scarce number of
women in that program, not to mention black women.
Despite earning the degree in
mechanical engineering, she took a job doing a vital kind of civil engineering
work—another irony—as an environmental protection specialist with the Tennessee
Department of Environment and Conservation. She was working and living in
Nashville…between races.
Races, always the races. Somewhere
every weekend. And those races had become ultramarathons.
The ultras started another saga,
another story, because Angela Ivory raised the ante: She planned to run an ultramarathon in each of the fifty
states. Already she’d checked off 16 by the time of our Cookeville talk. And that
number was wrong by the time I had written it, for the reason that it was
growing week by week.
But why? Why that goal? I wanted
to know.
The self-effacing woman was much
too modest to give a pretentious answer. In fact, she seemed embarrassed by the
attention and preferred to not mention the quest, or her accomplishments. She
just laughed at the question and answered with humor.
“Well, I’m not sure. The more I
run the less brain cells I have.
Her dad died in 1993. What does
your mother think about all that running?
“I don’t think she completely
understands it, but she’s supportive.”
By its nature, Angela’s quest didn’t
permit great speed. Her best marathon finish came in 2005—the year she ran
47—in, remarkably, the Country Music Marathon, in her hometown, a time of
4:26:49.
Angela is a shy person who
dislikes talking about herself, a trait that evinces what you might call
character. As a consequence, she completed a marathon in each of the 51
states—47 in one year—quietly, without fanfare, almost secretly. And she
started the ultra quest the same way.
I wrote a feature story about
Angela’s running and her battle with cancer for the Sunday edition of the local
paper. It was reprinted in three running magazines. The story surprised many of
her running friends. Until then, they had not known about her cancer, and had barely
known the extent of her running. She’d done the running quietly and endured
cancer the same way.
So modest was Angela, she’d initially
declined the article. She didn’t care about being the center of attention. I
didn’t want to pressure her; I wanted her to make the decision, yes or no. But
I did point out that such a story might inspire someone else, help someone
else. That idea—the thought of helping someone else—was what changed her mind.
The story blew her cover. It was
time. This brave woman deserved recognition. The inspiration her courage brings
to running and to life deserved broadcasting to the most remote corners of
human endeavor.
“I’m just a chicken, and a slow chicken at
that,” she said.
Chicken? Ha!
There, in admirable humility, she
belittled her remarkable courage. In Angela Ivory, humility and courage are
complement qualities. Her humility veils the heart of a lion.