CIRCLEVILLE, Ohio — 

Mile one

“Never underestimate someone who runs extreme distances in search of pain,” are my thoughts as I stroll beside Kelly O’Dell, and she begins to tell her story. 

Kelly, a Logan Elm graduate, Circleville native, and now ultra runner, has finished at least five 100-mile races thus far in her career and more than twenty ultra marathons (distances over 26.2 miles).

Among her several top-five finishes in endurance races, she finished 2nd in the USATF 24hrs National Championships in 2019. Not in the women’s division, 2nd among all who entered.

But before Kelly was outlasting her competition in 24-hour running events, she was just a woman wondering if she could complete a 5k. She was thirty years old before she ran her first competitive strides. 

Challenged by friends and co-workers to “just run three miles,” the ecstatic O’Dell completed her first practice 5k using a combination of walking and running on a treadmill in forty-five minutes and thought, “that’s pretty good.”

Mile two

She laughs about it now as her small but quick cadence clips along at a pace that would complete the event in under thirty minutes, all while holding a conversation. 

She describes herself as a naturally competitive person. Formerly she was a gymnast, and something about running appealed to her, many somethings to be exact.

Finishing one race was not enough. Kelly loved the atmosphere. She loved the idea of doing something that made her feel better; she loved the idea of competing.

“I’ll do something, feel pretty good about it and turn around a day later and say, I am going to do that again because I can do it better than I did before. I am still very much like that.”  

Before long, she ran more, limited dairy, and looked into plant-based diets. Not to shun anyone who ate meat; she wanted a performance advantage. 

“I realized I was starting to have expectations of how I wanted my body to perform, and I needed to be fueling it with the right things.”

As running began to fill some holes in her life, it also exposed some open wounds. Something that she couldn’t find in running. But that didn’t stop her from trying.

Mile three

“If you’re looking for pain, it will find you” is the new mantra bouncing around in my head as I try to make sense of her story. Then I realize “pain” is not even a word she keeps in her vocabulary. Neither is “quit.” 

So now she replaces the word pain with “discomfort” and “quit,” no replacement is needed. It still is not in her vocabulary.

But before discomfort was her word of choice, it was pain that she was after. And pain is what she found in ultra running.

After three years of running and wanting to try something new, Kelly began looking into ultras. She talked one of her eager friends into coming along with the flawed logic of “it’s only like six miles longer than a marathon.” 

Her first ultra was the Tie Dye 32-miler. She finished in eight hours and twenty-three minutes -dead last. 

Undeterred by the results and proud of her accomplishment, Kelly had completed her first ultra-marathon. But most importantly, she found something else, her tribe. 

“I remember looking around the first couple of ultras I watched and then participated in and thinking these are my people.”

Mile four

Two months later, Kelly decided that since she could do thirty-two miles, she might as well try fifty. So she entered the Mohican 50-miler. 

She did indeed find her people. But she was still lost. 

Kelly continued to enter and complete ultras for the next several years -fueled by the continual search for pain.

She was looking for the breaking point that would never quite come, but she loved being able to get to the edge of her capabilities. She finds this blissful place in almost every event she entered.

Kelly describes this euphoric runner’s high that comes when the body is dismantled to its bare essentials, when all of the World’s problems are all but an afterthought, and it is just the runner, the trail, and the fortitude required to take the next step. It is a feeling that is hard to comprehend for those of us who have never pushed ourselves to the brink of our humanity. But this is the feeling she is in search of every time she enters an endurance race. 

These races are all but bandaids on bullet wounds for a growing problem outside of running. But, deep down, Kelly already knew it.

“I wasn’t in a good place mentally. I was using these races to beat myself up for things I was holding onto, and it wasn’t healthy.”

Guilt, shame, and failure were at the time fueling her fire.

Mile five

Thousands of miles later, Kelly decided that she could no longer keep pace.

It had been nearly seven years since Kelly began running in search of these small glimpses in which her problems melted away. But when the races were over, the issues still existed. The one thing Kelly O’Dell could not run away from was herself. And herself was the part that needed fixing. 

“I had to step back and reevaluate my life, why was I running, where was I going, and how to make it enjoyable again.”

Some other life circumstances changed. Her support system grew. She began using reflection and changed her perspective on running. 

“I realized that I wanted to run because I love to run, not to beat myself up or in search of pain.” 

The strength of her mind had endured thousands of hardships both on the trail and off. But it was time to stop abusing it and time to start taking care of it. 

Her life began to improve, as did her race results. In putting herself through a gauntlet of rigorous endurance races, she popped out the other side with a niche. She was good at 24-hour events.

The mind that she had callused time and time again, in search of punishing it, is no longer fueled by guilt, anger, and shame—instead, it’s driven by love.   

Kelly learned how to love herself, love those around her, and rekindled her passion for running. 

Mile six

Kelly’s longest mile may be yet to come; she was selected to run in the Badwater 135 in July of 2022, amongst hundreds of applicants. 

Badwater is arguably the most demanding endurance race on the planet, according to badwater.com.

“Covering 135 miles non-stop from Death Valley to Mt. Whitney, CA, the Badwater® 135 is the most demanding and extreme running race offered anywhere on the planet. The start line is at Badwater Basin, Death Valley, which marks the lowest elevation in North America at [282′] below sea level. The race finishes at Whitney Portal at [8,374’], which is the trailhead to the Mt. Whitney summit, the highest point in the contiguous United States.”

As if running through Death Valley is not enough, Kelly will be doing it in the middle of summer. 

When asked if it is a winnable race for her, she hesitates and lets in a hint of doubt, wavered her confidence for a fraction of a second until her support chimes in from the background with some words I can’t quite make out, then she quips, “The goal is to finish. I have to go into every race with the confidence that I will finish and that quitting is not an option. So it isn’t even something I allow to enter my mind.

Our journey is over; we find ourselves back in the parking lot where the interview began six miles ago. But her journey is far from over. With a newly found love for herself, there may be no limit to what Kelly O’Dell can do in the ultra world, but more importantly, what she can do outside of running for herself and her family.

Follow her story at progressbyintention.wordpress.com, or find her on Instagram @kellyrocks.

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