Columnist Susan Snyder: Exhaustion isn’t in her vocabulary

Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2000 | 8:41 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@ vegas.com or 259-4082.

Erin West is a Las Vegas soccer mom with a twist.

OK, several twists. She climbs mountains, backpacks, whitewater rafts, writes, whips up a mean latte, and she runs.

And runs and runs -- sometimes 50 miles all at once.

West, 37, has a penchant for adventure approaching what many might consider illness.

She has survived the Eco-Challenge and the Raid Gauloises -- races requiring five-member teams to trek, run, mountain-climb, swim, river-raft and sometimes sea-kayak across an unmarked course several hundred miles long.

They must navigate with only a map and a regular compass and fend for their own food, water and shelter.

Winning is secondary.

"Out of 50 or 60 teams, only about 10 will finish the race. With odds like that, your objective is really just to finish," West said.

She has scaled a 20,000-foot mountain with torn ligaments in one ankle, slipped into unconsciousness from hypothermia and courted death swimming across a raging river in these adventure races. Even a 50-mile run can bring intestinal bleeding.

"Some of it is just hideous," West admits.

So, why on earth does she keep doing it?

"My hero growing up was (English explorer) Sir Richard Burton," she said. "But when I grew up I realized there was no place left for a Richard Burton.

"We don't have anything like that in our culture. So we have to contrive these things to realize there's still something to discover inside ourselves," West said.

By the time West was 13 she was a gymnast and a runner. The adults told her girls didn't do two sports at once. They feared she might hurt herself.

West feared what might happen to her if she didn't try:

Nothing.

Her Mormon upbringing constantly called her to stay home. But her longing for adventure called louder. West still attends church, but she's aware she's not like most of the other women there.

"I haven't done anything that was expected of me. You carry around so much guilt about not being the norm," West said. "But I really feel anybody can do these kinds of things. They're just not ready."

Not ready, she says, to put aside the fear that says, "I can't." People will be amazed what they find in the one footstep that reaches beyond those words.

"The cell phone, the beeper, the work. You can't worry about the bills when you're out there because it's survival," West says. "What other experience in your day do you have where you can dig down deep inside yourself and pull out something you didn't know you had?

"It's freedom."

West's daily life is pretty normal. She runs while the kids are in school or in bed. She and her husband own a window-cleaning business, and she works part time at a coffee shop.

Running magazine just printed an article she wrote about a breast cancer survivor who completed a 135-mile run that's conducted in Death Valley each July.

West has no desire to do the event. It's not the miles or 130-degree heat. It's the terrain -- a paved road stretching to oblivion.

"Psychologically," West said, "that's just awful."