Worldwide phenomenon
An ex-smoker's peak performance lands her two Guinness records
CHARLTON - Nearly two decades ago, suffering a persistent cough and chronic hoarseness, Jeanne Stawiecki traded her two-pack-a-day smoking habit for a pair of running shoes. The only problem was, she couldn't run.
"I coughed up a lung," she says. "I mean, I was dying. I couldn't breathe. So I had to walk, which was not exactly what I thought was going to be great."
From those humble huffing-and-puffing beginnings, the 57-year-old nurse anesthetist has gone far and reached great heights. Last year she logged the fastest time of the 58 women who have run marathons on all seven continents when she crossed the finish line of the Antarctica Marathon. Just over two months later, she climbed Mount Everest, capping her quest to become the oldest woman to scale the highest peak on each of the seven continents, a feat accomplished by fewer than 50 women. Now, the two Guinness World Record certificates she received last month hang in the foyer of her Charlton home.
"When you step out of your comfort zone the first time, it's difficult," says Stawiecki, a petite blonde with a girlish laugh and arms cut like Venus Williams's. "But it's addictive."
She should know. Stawiecki - called "Sticky" because of her needle-centric profession and her tendency to finish what she starts - has refused to stay comfortable since throwing out her cigarettes 20 years ago.
Having grown up in Massachusetts and wondered, always, what it would be like to run the Boston Marathon, she bought a treadmill and started walking, working her way up to running 4 miles every other day and longer on weekends. She tucked in training around her 60-hour workweek and finished her first-ever footrace, the 1994 New York City Marathon, in 3 hours 36 minutes - just over 8 minutes per mile, fast enough to qualify for Boston's 99th running.
Despite Heartbreak Hill, she finished the 26.2 miles 10 minutes faster than she had in New York. But six Bostons later, she'd grown bored with running, and a colleague suggested she take up rock climbing.
"I thought being in the mountains would be a good challenge for her," says Mark Nawrocki, the anesthesiologist who worked with Stawiecki at University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, and introduced her to climbing in the White Mountains.
"I thought, oh God, I'm afraid of heights," Stawiecki says, gold bangles clinking as she gestures. "But if I'm afraid of something, that's the very thing I'll do."
It was the thrill of conquering those fears, coupled with a backpacking trip to the Himalayas - at age 50, her first time sleeping in a tent, and her first journey farther afield than California - that fueled her interest in travel and mountaineering. In 2001 she took a course with Alpine Ascents International, a Seattle-based guiding outfit known for helping clients reach the world's biggest peaks, and then set off in 2002 for Russia's 18,510-foot Mount Elbrus, the highest point in Europe.
A bout with dysentery didn't slow her down. "She gritted it out and overcame some pretty tough intestinal conditions to get to the summit," says Vernon Tejas, who guided Stawiecki on five of the seven peaks. "I was impressed."
Elbrus is a learning peak, Tejas says, where clients can bone up on skills like negotiating a crevasse field, traveling in a rope team and using an ice-ax to keep from sliding downhill. But Alaska's Denali, legendary for its remoteness and bad weather, requires technical proficiency and strength to schlep more than a hundred pounds of gear. Stawiecki, who weighs 112 pounds, refused to let her size, age, and gender get in the way of carrying her fair share.
"She had to do extra training, and fortunately she understood that," Tejas says.
There was one thing she couldn't train for, however: the overpowering stink of a mountaineer's body and clothing after two weeks without a shower. "For a woman, it's hell," she says. Channeling MacGyver on a rest day, Tejas built a solar shower for her at 14,000 feet.
A woman doesn't have to give up her femininity to be strong, says Stawiecki, sitting in her living room surrounded by souvenirs from her two trips around the globe. And she certainly doesn't have to fade into the woodwork after menopause.
"Every single woman is going to get to be this age," she says, looking decades younger than she is. "Why should we become invisible?"
In 2004, she topped Mount Vinson in Antarctica and Aconcagua in South America. She hung a photograph of Everest on the wall of her bedroom for motivation. For years, she'd been working two jobs and saving up to climb the world's highest peak. She'd refinanced her house, and she'd trained her body - sprinting uphill with a tire tied to her waist - and her mind, running on a treadmill for three hours at a time without radio or television for distraction.
Even so, she had to turn back during the climb up Everest - two times. A vocal cord dysfunction had left her unable to talk or breathe normally, and she couldn't keep going.
But she's Sticky - a "sparkplug," says Tejas, a "make-it-happen person." She went to speech therapy and learned how to breathe using different muscles, which tamed her vocal cord problem. And in 2006 she summited Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro without incident.
With the blessing of her supervisors at work, she set off to run a string of marathons around the world - starting with Australia, where, three days after finishing the race in Melbourne, she climbed the continent's highest peak.
Stawiecki, who is divorced, ran the seventh marathon last March during a return trip to Antarctica, where contestants battled mud flats, streams, a glacier, and freezing temperatures. There, she cemented her first world record, a combination of the total number of hours she spent running and the number of days - 141 - it took her to complete all seven races ("Good travel plans," she says, shrugging).
Just two months after watching penguins from a Russian trawler off the coast of that southern continent, she was back on Everest, lining up in the middle of the night with her teammates for a final push to the summit. All she could see was darkness, and the tiny pinpricks of climbers' headlamps in the distance.
"It was the first time I had the feeling of looking down on stars," she says, tearing up at the memory. She reached the top, saw the curve of the earth, and started down - stopping only once, when she caught the tip of her crampon, tripped, and found herself dangling over 7,000 feet of thin air. A Sherpa pulled her to safety.
The photograph of Everest still hangs on Stawiecki's bedroom wall, a reminder now of her transformation. Used to be, she'd wake up tired. "I was just living," she says. "I didn't have any dreams." Now, she arises with gratitude, and excitement about the day ahead.
She's writing a book about her experiences, which she hopes to parlay into a career giving motivational speeches. Meanwhile, she's already dreaming up the next challenge.
"I've been thinking about going kite-skiing," she says, a glint in her eye, "to the North Pole."
