Harvard physics professor attempts record-breaking run
Her knee buckled like a folding chair, and then it was over. Ticking off an average of 61 grueling miles per day, Harvard physicist Jenny Hoffman, the Clowes Professor of Science, covered 2,560 miles in six weeks, through high winds and impassable roads, a plague of grasshoppers, and bone-deep fatigue. Just seven more days, 460 miles, and she would have smashed the women’s record for a trans-America run by nearly six days. Hoffman wanted to keep going, but doctors warned that if she did she risked irreparable damage. An ultramarathoner and mother of three, the 41-year-old doesn’t let goals escape without a fight, but this time she had to let one go. She did achieve another: coming to terms with the loss of her father. “To be able to run through the country,” Hoffman said, “I can think about it partly as running for him and having an experience that he wasn’t able to...