Long Road Back

Lisa Smith-Batchen didn't even know why she was behind the wheel that afternoon in early 2005, until she saw the long plunge to the rocky canyon floor beneath Teton Pass and it suddenly made sense. She hates heights, but for once the view didn't frighten her. It felt restful. It felt—responsible.

"Everyone will be better off without me," she told herself. All the misery her husband, Jay, had gone through because of her. All the terror her 5-year-old son, Joshua, had endured because of the mistake she'd made. All the chaos that 20-month-old Annabella had been through. All because of her.

She hadn't planned to drive off the bridge when she set out this afternoon. Or had she? Was it a coincidence that after months of barely being able to drag herself around the house, she had this overpowering urge to get behind the wheel and go? Maybe she just refused to admit, even to herself, the real reason she was backing the van away from her home in Driggs, Idaho, and heading east toward Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

"There's no other way you'll escape this pain," she told herself, which would have surprised anyone who knew her, because pain was her fame; she'd made such a specialty out of mastering pain that she looked forward to it in a race, the way a power lifter looks forward to the feel of steel. But a lot about Lisa had changed; her friends wouldn't have recognized her as the same freckled blond beauty with the chiseled midriff who'd dazzled on the cover of Winning magazine a few years before, or who—just six months earlier—had glowed at the completion of the first, and only, "Badwater Grand Slam."

To accomplish that, she'd run four major 100-mile races and the Badwater Ultramarathon, which stretches 135 miles across Death Valley in the blistering heat of summer: 535 miles and 80,000-plus feet of elevation, the equivalent of 20 trail marathons in just 10 weeks. At one point during her adventure she had to red-eye directly from a finish line in Vermont to a starting line in California. But when she had crossed the fifth and final finish line, Lisa looked as fresh and beautiful as the day she'd started, beaming that apple-cheeked grin that attracts every eye in every room she enters.

It was the capper on one of the most impressive résumés in ultrarunning, and a fantastic comeback for a woman who at 43 was already a two-time female champ at Badwater and the only American woman to win the fabled Marathon des Sables, a brutal, six-day race across the Sahara.

Her battle with depression and its debilitating effects was finally over, she thought—never imagining that it was about to get much, much worse, and lead her to that treacherously thin road on the edge of the Grand Tetons.

More about this topic from MSN Health & Fitness:

• Exercise Eases Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety
• Depression is a Family Matter
• Depression Dos and Don'ts
• Talk About It: Depression on the Message Boards