CREDIT: ALL CAPS 50 explore march/april 2009 CREDIT: ALL CAPS see jen run Canadian endurance phenom Jen Segger is going the distance with the best adventure athletes in the world. And who knows just how far she can go By Masa Takei march/april 2009 explore 51 The sun has yet to crest the horizon on this crisp December morning, and Jen Segger is already halfway through her first workout of the day. She’s running up a path on the backside of the Stawamus Chief—the 1,800-foot rock face that rises above Squamish, B.C., about an hour north of Vancouver. The path is seriously steep, but Segger’s baby blue trail runners blur in a steady stream of foot strikes as she climbs relentlessly through the pine and spruce forest. Segger is clearly in her element. She seems totally relaxed, her breathing steady. ope ning photo: robin o’neil ; this pa ge: courtes y jen se gger ; opp osite : bob cox 52 explore march/april 2009 Jen Segger seems to run her life at the same pace as her races. In addition to being a pro athlete, she’s a coach and personal trainer, a motivational speaker and an adventure-race course designer. She also has what she calls her “dream job”—as the athletics coordinator and team-trainer at Squamish’s new Quest University Canada. I take a seat in the corner of her office at the university to see what I can learn about her. For starters, I learn that, though she might kick boy ass out on the trail, she does indeed dress like a girl. Today it’s fashionable jeans and a white blouse. I also learn that she wears a nose stud and a hoop high up on the left ear. And finally, I learn that she is busy. So busy that I ask her how she ever has time for the kind of training that must be required to perform at the level she does. She passes me her training logs. I’m expecting to find complex periodization schedules, VO2 max tables and heart-rate monitor graphs. Instead, I find a simple two-column table. In one column is the with the pyramidal peak of Mount Garibaldi and the Coast Range behind, and the fjord of Howe Sound below—it’s easy to believe that Segger is poised on the brink of greatness. In a sport where top competitors continue to improve even into their 40s, Segger has already achieved fantastic results at 28, and experienced racers who run alongside her on the international circuit rave about her mental and physical toughness. There seems little question that Segger is looking at a big future. The question on a lot of people’s minds is, “What’s next?” winning smile: Segger on her way to a firstplace finish with team DART nuun in the Baja Travesia in 2006. Segger’s pace up this rocky and rooty trail may be impressive, but to see her at her best, one would need to go back a few weeks, to the rainforest, mangroves and desert dunes of Brazil during the Adventure Racing World Championships in November 2008. There, slogging 580 kilometres through 40°C heat, stabbed by flora and bitten by fauna, Segger was truly in her zone. She and her team finished the sevenday expedition race in just four days. Of the 60 teams competing—an assembly of the fittest adventure racers from around the globe—Segger and her squad came in sixth, making her and her team captain the top-finishing Canadians. Six seasons into serious racing, Jen Segger is now a leading contender in just about any endurance event she enters, and her race record is an ever-growing collection of top-five finishes, dominated by firsts and seconds in adventure races, mountainbike classics, snowshoe races and ultras across North America, and in expedition races worldwide. By that kind of standard, this morning’s run up the Chief barely qualifies as a warm-up for one of Canada’s—if not the world’s—top female adventure racers and multi-sport athletes. As she nears the summit after about 45 minutes, Segger— dressed in sleek black, her determined face framed by dark brown hair under a black toque—explains that had she been taking the trail at “race pace,” she’d have already topped out and returned to the bottom of the Chief. And at the first ladder before the summit slabs, she mentions that if she were really training, she’d turn around here. “The ladders and chains don’t do much for keeping the heart rate up,” she explains. As she spends a few moments taking in the panorama from the top of the Chief— Segger gave no indication that she had any talent for endurance sports as she was growing up on vancouver island. “I always knew that i wanted to be the top of some sport,” she says, “i just didn’t know what.” march/april 2009 explore 53 adventure racing was born a hemisphere away in New Zealand with the first Raid Gauloises, the crucial seeds of success for the sport—disciplined perpetual motion— had already been sown in her. But Segger gave no indication that she had any talent for endurance sports as she was growing up. “I always knew that I wanted to be the top of some sport,” Segger says, “I just didn’t know what.” She ran the gamut of the usual activities for young girls. “I did ballet,” recalls Segger, “but I always used to look at my sister growing up. She’s taller, thinner and here I am built like my dad, stocky, thick-boned.” It would be years before Segger would figure out just what games that body type would be perfect for, and in the meantime, she fell in love with field hockey and pura toothbrush and run [55 kilometres] up the road to Whistler, stay with a friend who’d make me dinner, then in the morning run back down again.” That’s the on-season, but according to her logs, she has yet to take a full day off since her races ended in the fall. As seems to be the case with any of the top players in her field, Segger’s success appears to be an alchemy of obsessive devotion, self-discipline, near inhuman pain tolerance and some degree of preternatural disposition to her game. “Even when Jen was a baby, from day one, her arms and legs would be moving,” says Segger’s mother, Bonnie, from the family home in Duncan, B.C. “I couldn’t keep a blanket on her.” And Segger’s capacity to discipline that energy is just as deeply rooted, according to her mother: “She always had a Daytimer. She made very, very wise use of her time and knew how much time she had for each task. It was her Grade 5 teacher who taught her that.” Which is to say that by the age of nine, around the time that modern date; in the other, a brief description of the type and the duration of the activities that she engaged in. Her entry for June 6, 2008, is typical: “Run: 1 hr (11 km–road), Hike: 1 hr (Chief top), Strength: 30 min, Elliptical: 1 hr, Bike: Road (1 hr–27 km) TOTAL: 4 hrs 30 min.” That represents a 5 a.m. workout before heading to the office at 9 a.m., a workout at lunch, and then another in the evening. In her on-season, Segger manages to fit in between 18 and 30 hours of training during the week, on top of her full-time job. Then there’s the extra training for specific races, like the Badwater Ultramarathon, which she ran for the first time last July. Badwater, the 217-kilometre race through California’s Death Valley, claims the title of toughest foot-race in the world. Segger was not only the youngest woman to ever complete the race (the average age of the 80 competitors last year was 47), but was also the top Canadian finisher, man or woman, placing ninth overall. To train for the race, she came up with a new workout: “I’d pack hot stuff: segger was the top canadian last summer at the infamous badwater ultramarathon in death valley. tony austi n 54 explore march/april 2009 Adventure Race (MOMAR) series, explains: “Expedition racing is so expensive—to race for a week and take two weeks away from work. There’s only a handful of people who can do that, so usually there’s a mix and match of people.” In her early days of racing, Segger would often meet her team for the first time at the airport, and sometimes she’d walk away at the finish line and never talk to her teammates again. “Horrible, horrible experiences,” she remembers. At the same time, Segger also discovered that there was a huge demand for women who were willing to put up with the suffering involved. By 2003, teams were approaching Segger to race with them, some offering to pay her travel expenses. Still, Segger had to work three or four jobs at a time for several years, doing everything from snowboarding instruction and snowmobile guiding to working retail and food services. On top of this she continued to train. She hired a coach to help structure her regimen, and pushed relentlessly. People in her gym got used to seeing Segger inside the sauna, jogging on the spot in a down jacket, and Ty remembers that she once passed out after putting in hours with a hypoxicator mask that she used to accustom her body to the thin air she’d encounter at high-altitude competitions. While racing in the World Adventure Racing Championships in Newfoundland in 2004, Segger was running in front of a team she was unhappy with when she struck up a conversation with Team Dart-nuun, one of the longest-running teams in North America, who happened to be towing their woman along. They connected again at the after-party and Segger has been a member of the team ever since. The big finishes continued to pile up— first or second in just about every mid-sized race in 2005, and solid results in the big shows: fifth in the Ecomotion/Pro Expedition in Brazil, and 10th in the solo Marathon des Sables, the six-day, 243-kilometre stage race across the deserts of Morocco. By 2006, she had cobbled together enough sponsorships that she was actually breaking even with her racing. Segger had arrived. “I wanted to be an adventure racer and I wanted to become the best.” By this time, Segger had moved to Whistler. During her first day there, Segger met Ty, her partner of the next seven years. Ty remembers seeing Segger’s promise from the start, when he introduced her to his sport, mountain-biking: “She wasn’t the most gifted, but she was going to work hard. She’s mentally the strongest person I’ve ever met. I’ve never seen anyone go through the pain that she goes through.” Once, he loaned her some flat downhill pedals for a sued that with the same soul she’d eventually bring to adventure racing, trying out for the national team and considering scholarship offers from U.S. universities. But Segger made the difficult decision at the end of high school to leave the sport; a gut instinct told her that it was the right thing to do. In 1998, Segger enrolled in a recreation management program at the local Malaspina College and took summer jobs in the U.S., teaching outdoor skills. Weekends were spent kayaking, surfing and hiking. Then, wanting to travel, Segger chose to finish her degree at a school in Australia. After 16 months away, she came back home to settle, only to leave again eight days later for a job in Virginia. Which is where she experienced her first adventure race. “I entered with some staff I was working with at the time. We were all outdoor guides and it seemed like a natural thing for us to go do. And I remember the feeling at the end. The race was maybe three hours long but we felt like we’d just conquered the world.” What clinched it for her was coming back to Canada and finishing her first adventure race solo. She was hooked from the moment she crossed the finish line: “I looked at all the mistakes that I made out there, but yet, the feeling at the end was awesome. I was on such a high.” Her new purpose was crystal clear. Continued on page 61 team effort: segger and the dartnuun squad after winning the mind over mountain adventure race in cumberland, b.c., in 2008. race, since she’d never used clip-in pedals before. “She came back with blood all over her legs; it looked like someone had taken a machete to her. But she had a smile on her face and that’s when I knew that this was something she was serious about.” By 2003, Segger was racing in earnest. In her early sprint adventure races, she consistently placed in the top five. That year, she travelled to New Zealand to compete in the six-day Southern Traverse. Although one of her team members dropped out with a severe gastro-intestinal condition, Segger and the rest of the team went on to cross the finish line unofficially in second place. There was pleasure in the pain of racing, but the first couple of years also showed Segger a more trying side of the adventure circuit. Bryan Tasaka, the race director of Western Canada’s Mind Over Mountain “what really differentiates people,” says one teammate, “is their mental tenacity and their ability to push beyond what’s perceived as realistic. jen has this uncanny ability to do that. and at her age, it’s quite remarkable.” see jen run Continued from page 54 in and glides out, graphite paddle dipping into a reflection of trees, mountains and sky. At this moment, she’s training (“Paddleboard: 30 min”), spending time with a friend, and getting paid to do what she would be doing anyway. Life, it seems, could hardly get better for Segger. But how much better can her racing get? “Adventure racing is a sport that requires physical ability,” says Cyril Jay-Rayon, Dartnuun team captain and co-founder. “And Jen has that. But when you’re racing at the world championship level, everyone has that. What really differentiates people is their mental tenacity and their ability to push beyond what’s perceived as realistic. Jen has this uncanny ability to do that. And at her age, it’s quite remarkable.” What Segger will achieve next would seem to depend on what she chooses to focus her iron sights on. “My thing for ’09,” she says, “is that I want to put in some races that scare me. I don’t mean scare me because of the environment or something, but races that I think I might suck at.” Already on deck for late March is the Rock and Ice Ultra in the Northwest Territories. It’s a six-day, 235-kilometre run through -40° and a whole lot of flat country—“ scary” for her because, she says, “running flats for me is just atrocious.” Then perhaps the Spartathalon in Greece (246 kilometres of historic road from Athens to Sparta) or the Himalayan, a 160-kilometres stage race through the Himalayas. Or the Trinidad Coast 2 Coast , a multi-sport race across the island’s western peninsula. Definitely, a 24-hour mountain bike race. There’s also early talk of running along the length of the Colorado River, nearly 2,400 kilometres, in support of the non-profit organization Impossible2Possible. And then, of course, there’s the Portugal XPD World Championships, on her calendar for late 2009. Certainly, winning a world championship would be a career pinnacle for Segger, but expedition racing is a team effort with so many uncontrollable factors. “I consider myself more of an adventure athlete,” says Segger, “that’s why I do these big races. It’s all about exploration and pushing boundaries.” Which is why the question on her mind is the same as the question on everyone else’s: “What’s next?” e Masa Takei is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. Lunchtime rolls around at the university and Segger gets one of her student assistants to cover for her as we head out for her midday workout. She drives her blue Subaru Forrester away from the university down toward town. As we pass a large pickup with an orange trials bike in the bed, a hand flicks out of the driver’s side window. Jen returns the universal smalltown salute. We enter a new development in Brackendale, a nearby neighbourhood of contemporary homes with fresh landscaping, and pull into the driveway of a three-story house. Segger shares the house with a climber, a backcountry guide and a rafting and kayak guide. We walk into the garage, where equipment sprawls: bikes, kayaks, surfboards, skis. Segger is adept at all kinds of sports, and she’s always trying new ones—currently she’s getting into randonnée racing (competitive ski touring). But today she wants to do some stand-up paddleboarding, a sport she just picked up last summer. She throws open a wardrobe that’s a good foot taller than she is to reveal shelves full of nothing but sporting footwear. On shelving along the walls, a large bin contains only sunglasses; another is full of just sunscreen. She shows off one of her favourite items, a featherweight headlamp system that allows her to train at any time of the day or night. Out in the driveway again, I study the back of Segger’s car, analyzing the different sponsor logos. From the mix of those willing to support her in what she does, it’s apparent that there’s little separation between her personal and professional being. “It’s all,” she says with a smile, “about play.” There, among the logos for Salomon and nuun (a sports drink), is the red, white and green of her favourite coffee shop (she’s technically a sponsored coffee drinker). There’s also the stylized tree logo of Vancouver Island’s Sitka surf shop, which apparently just liked her vibe and sent her a nine-foot board. We drive to nearby Alice Lake, where Segger pulls her paddleboard off the car and carries it toward the water. A colleague of hers, Norm Hann—a sometime kayak and fishing guide and coach of the Quest women’s basketball team—is already out on the glassy green lake making bow waves on his own stand-up board. Segger, now dressed in board shorts and a hoodie, puts
