“Running and Returning – Seeking Balance in an Imperfect World,” a memoir from endurance runner Vicki Ash Hunter, Ph.D., is now available from CG Sports Publishing.
The book tells Hunter’s family’s story through the lens of trauma and addiction, focusing on her own, her mother’s, and her daughter’s struggles.
The book opens with a harrowing chapter detailing a life-threatening and life-altering car accident Hunter experienced when she was pregnant with her first daughter, Jade. Hunter recovered but in many ways was forever changed, and she questions the role the accident played in Jade’s future: Could the traumatic pregnancy have contributed to Jade’s eventual turn to drugs?
Hunter also takes a hard look at her mother’s depression and dependence on both food and drugs and how growing up around such influences may have contributed to Vicki’s own obsession with exercise, which began once she started running longer and longer distances.
Hunter is an Olympic Trials qualifier in the marathon (1988), and her running resume is stacked with some of the most elite and iconic races in the country, including the Boston and Pike’s Peak marathons. Now in her 60s, Hunter continues to compete, often outrunning much younger competition splitting her time between Kona and Colorado.