Adventure Magazine

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SIMONE MAIER
FROM TRAUMA TO CHAMPION
By Derek Cheng
It may seem a curious comparison, but multisport
adventure racer Simone Maier sees parallels
between her suffer-fest endurance races and her
long road to recovery from a traumatic childhood
that haunted her teenage years.
Sport actually saved her life, she says, but a
key caregiver also helped her to turn the page
on the abuse of her early years, and the harmful
coping mechanisms in the years that followed.
She ultimately emerged from those dark times
by rediscovering her passion for the outdoors,
eventually standing atop podiums around the world
- including the Coast to Coast in four of the last five
years.
But it's the stoic perseverance that's needed for
multiday competitions - like GODZone, which
Maier's team won in 2019, the first time it was won
by a team with two women - that share similarities
with her earlier battles.
"I feel there's a parallel there," she tells Adventure.
"I probably have a high pain threshold. Being in an
adventure race or multisport event, sometimes you
just have to be in an uncomfortable position and
push through, even when you haven't slept and your
body is under immense pressure.
"I also had to overcome my trauma where I just had
to hang in there, just keep plodding along, putting
one foot in front of the other to get out of what I was
going through. It took years."
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