Kim Pursley simply couldn't wait any longer to follow her dreams. Even if that meant literally following them to the ends of the Earth.
A lifelong athlete who once played field hockey and lacrosse at McDonogh, Pursley put her athletic aspirations on hold for nearly a decade while building her party planning business. The tragic loss of her older brother, mother and aunt, however, helped her find the motivation to put her running career back on track.
"I learned that we don't have to wait for something wrong to happen to do something that we want to do," Pursley said. "If we want to do it, we shouldn't wait. We should just go for it."
So Pursley is about to go for it -- and then some.
Beginning Sunday, the 44-year-old Forest Hill resident will take part in the inaugural Triple 7 Quest, an event in which runners will compete in seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. Forget about personal records. This is about survival.
The trek begins with a 26.2-mile run through a park in downtown Melbourne, Australia, where temperatures are expected to be in the mid-90s, and ends on King George Island in Antarctica, where recently the mercury has hovered around zero. In between are stops in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Paris; Tunis, Tunisia; Long Island, N.Y.; and Punta Arenas, Chile.
That's 183.4 miles of racing, all told, neatly tucked around 40,647 miles of air travel — enough to wear out even the most hearty of globe-trotters. Pursley is one of 37 entrants — including 17 women — who have ponied up $13,995 for the privilege of taking this journey.
That is, if their bodies can hold out.
"We don't really know how their bodies are going to react to this," said Will Dillard, the Colorado-based coach of Pursley and one of her fellow competitors. "If you're going to do multiple marathons back to back, you have to consider recovery time in between. The biggest challenge in doing an event like this is the cumulative fatigue."
That kind of fatigue, Dillard said, can overwhelm a person's system, making it almost impossible for them to get necessary rest. Refueling with proper nutrients, as well, will be a must.
Mainly, though, this will be about sheer willpower.
"I don't think there's really any true preparation you can do for something like this, other than just doing it once," said Steve Hibbs, whose company, Marathon Adventures, organized the event.
Hibbs said the vast majority of participants are nonelite runners, who typically finish marathons in four to six hours. For them, it's about the adventure more than the competition.
"From an athletic standpoint, these are people who want to go out and do things that most people won't do," Hibbs said. "The typical people who sign up are natural adventurers. They want to see the world, and see it in a unique and different way. They are also high achievers. We have people who have swum the English Channel or climbed Mount Everest."
Pursley has done neither. Her motivation is more personal.
At age 16, she learned that older brother Michael Pursley had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. He died before his 21st birthday.
"I watched him during the final months," she recalled. "He had gotten into triathlons himself, and he always had this amazingly positive attitude about life and about what was happening to him. He really inspired me to realize that no matter what happens in life, you pick up and you keep going."
She later lost two of her biggest supporters when her mother, Pat, died suddenly in 2000 and her aunt, Sue Wright, later succumbed after a six-year battle with breast cancer.
With them in mind, she has launched a GoFundMe crowd-funding campaign, called "Where In The World Is She Now," and plans to donate a portion of the money raised to charities and philanthropic endeavors focused on girls and young women. Another chunk will go to The Scott Rigsby Foundation, a nonprofit promoting health and fitness for people who have lost limbs.
Her goal is to raise $26,200.
Of course, her other goal is simply to finish all seven races — something she hardly could have imagined years ago.
After starting her company, Pursley's Party Productions, while still a student at Towson University, Pursley took a hiatus from competitive running until the age of 39, when she entered a half-marathon in Virginia Beach, Va..
Upon returning home, she found a friend had left her an article about how few women had competed in marathons on every continent.
The idea sparked a fire inside Pursley, who decided to attempt the feat on her own, picking marathons on each continent as part of a personal journey on the verge of her 40th birthday. So on April 10, 2011, she took to the road with 40,000 runners in the Paris Marathon, and the quest was on.
Along the way, she enlisted the help of 2013 Baltimore Marathon winner Dave Berdan, who she blindly emailed for assistance with her training. Last year, under Berdan's tutelage, she joined about 60 runners who completed two marathons in three days in Chile and Antarctica.
It was during that event she first learned about the Triple 7, and her sense of adventure took over.
"I thought, 'You know, I think I'm really going to do this,'" she said. "Sometimes we get so busy with our own lives and what we're doing that we sort of give up on some of our dreams and our goals. I think one day I just reached a point and said to myself, 'Wait a second, this is something that I want to do, so why can't I do it?'"
Training partner Laura Barnard, a former Baltimore resident now living in Atlanta, doesn't doubt Pursley will get the job done. Since meeting at a race in Baltimore nearly two years ago, the two have become inseparable on the circuit, recently completing both the Philadelphia Half Marathon and a 50k in Clearwater, Fla.
"We're both endurance junkies and we're both competitive," Barnard said. "I'm not at all worried. We both are sub-4-hour runners … and for most of these races we have seven to eight hours to finish."
With so many miles to cover in such a short time, the Triple 7 Quest isn't about speed. It's about endurance.
To prepare his athletes, Dillard based his training not on mileage, but on time spent on the road.
"I'd say, 'I want you to go out Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and run five hours each day,'" Dillard said. "'I don't care how slow you run, I don't care how fast you run. I just want you to have five hours on your legs each day, because that's what your body has to adapt to.'"
Pursley, of course, won't know whether she's actually prepared for such an enormous challenge until the races begin in earnest Sunday. If she's worried, however, she doesn't let on.
"I can't tell you that I'm not nervous or don't have butterflies," she said. "But this is about redefining my impossible. For my age, this is an opportunity of a lifetime."
Follow Kim Pursley's journey through her blog, whereintheworldisshenow.com.