Her advantage is a shotgun. Her edge the shard of a beer bottle.

Before ever stepping to the starting line, a history of despair and adversity is already helping her pull away. A history her competitors rarely outrun.

How can depression turn into leverage? Suffering into superior endurance? Experience. You had to be there.

Blisters that scream with every foot fall. A gastrointestinal virus that caused 13 stop-and-squats. The remnants of food poisoning. Hallucinations.

All mere annoyances. No reason to stop.

The usual detractors aren’t enough to drain Nikki Kimball. The murderer’s row of weight fluctuations, heat stroke, exhaustion, dehydration, diarrhea, dry heaves - a lineup that routinely retires the elite - has yet to defeat the Bozeman resident who was born with crooked feet, dyslexia and an atypical talent for overcoming.

Kimball, a redheaded, freckle-faced physical therapist, can run 100 miles and finish smiling. Thirteen years ago, three miles - crying the entire way - were enough.

A condition that left her bedridden, gaunt, unemployed, a tear fountain, bankrupt of will and suicidal didn’t kill her. How could anything else?

“I can juxtapose anything that’s thrown at me during a race, to almost being dead,” Kimball, 36, who is running the Western States Endurance Run this weekend, says.

When more than 400 individuals take off before sunrise Saturday morning in Squaw Valley, Calif., for a 100-mile, 100-degree, 100-ways-to-trash-your-body race, none of her competitors will have such a reservoir of detriment to tap.

None will have an unmet “deadline,” in the truest sense of the word, to recall.

More at bozemandailychronicle.com

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