Meet The Author: Vicki Ash Hunter

Nothing has ever deterred runner and author Vicki Ash Hunter from strapping on her shoes and claiming a moment of bliss. And even though she always runs, she always returns to the real world, too.

Her first book is titled just that -- Running and Returning.

When she started writing it, she thought the book would be about injuries and how she rebounded from pain. But a deeper story emerged in the process, and it became more about the trauma she’s faced and her recovery from it, including the pattern of addiction that runs in her family: her own running, her mother’s dependence on food, and her daughter’s drug problem.

“The chapter on my daughter’s addiction was very hard to write,” Ash Hunter said. “When Jade was going through it, that just tore me up. She was 18 and we couldn’t fix her.’’

Ash Hunter takes an introspective look in the book at the three generations of women in her family that have struggled, and she paints a complicated picture of her own running career.  

“At first, my running was to separate myself from the rest of the world,’’ Ash Hunter said. “It was something to do by myself where I could escape my family. It was the first place I could truly find joy.’’

But during grad school, those moments of escape took a different, more intense path for Ash Hunter.

She met a group of elite runners when she was at the University of Colorado, and they took the relatively inexperienced runner under their wings and showed her a new world. Though Ash Hunter never thought of herself as that kind of runner, she embarked on a journey that she’s still on.

She soon began long-distance training, and she went from running a few 10K races to running marathons. She battled injuries almost from the outset, though, so Ash Hunter began researching running and all its variables.

She read a few books, but there was not much on the subject back in the 1980s.

“It’s not like today when you can find just about anything on the internet,’’ Ash Hunter said.

Thinking more training was the answer, Ash Hunter threw herself into running even more. Her goal: the Olympic Trials. She would need to slice almost an hour off her marathon personal record to make the 2-hour, 50-minute cutoff.

It took a year, but she did it, running 2:49 in 1987.

“That was a huge miraculous thing,’’ she said. “I was in such a flow that day. That race changed my sense of self as a runner. … Once you start doing well in running, you’re always looking to run more and more.’’

That’s when more injuries popped up, a string of them that bordered on the life-threatening, including those from a harrowing car accident in 1997, when she was 14 weeks pregnant. In the book, she tells the story of falling asleep at the wheel and sliding off the road.

“I broke just about every bone on my right side except for my arms and legs,’’ Ash Hunter said. “Coming back from that accident was what the book was going to be about, how I survived and returned to running and living.’’

But there was so much more than just how she and her unborn daughter Jade survived the accident.

In 2016, she started writing the whole story.

By then, her mom Joan, who failed to see the benefit to her daughter from running, had passed away; Jade suffered from cocaine addiction; and Ash Hunter had fallen during another long run and broken her arm.

“Somebody was trying to tell me there was more to this book than just the car accident,’’ Ash Hunter said. “I saw there was so much more to include…. I was never going to give up on the book. It was a record of the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

Ash Hunter’s daughters were suffering through trauma -- Jade with her addiction, and Jessi, who is three years younger, was witnessing her sister’s struggle and feared she would die from it.

Jade nearly overdosed one night at home.

The next morning, Ash Hunter went for a run to clear her head. Then, she returned to help her daughters through it all.

Ash Hunter, who spends the summers in Boulder, Colorado, and the winters on Kona, Hawaii, still runs and teaches today. In 2021, she ran the Boston Marathon, posting a time of 3:30.02.

But in life, she feels like she has not reached the finish line yet -- it’s not time to hang up her running shoes.

Maybe it never will be.

Running and Returning is coming from CG Sports Publishing in June.