Golden Trail Series Final: Eli Anne Dvergsdal’s journey from professional football to mountain running in Nepal, fuelled by a ‘hunger to push myself’
- The Norwegian runner took the tough decision to leave her former career behind when she felt a hunger to push her limits
Eli Anne Dvergsdal was forced to choose between her two passions – football and running – when competing in both at a high level became too much. She was a professional footballer in Norway and her team had just won promotion back into the top league when she decided to concentrate on running.
“I started football when I was five. I have a brother who is two years older. I went to practice with him and they let me in the team. So I was actually playing with the boys,” Dvergsdal said. “But I had always been running for myself.”
When she didn’t have a match, she would go to running races. She said there is little else but mountains where she lives, and the running scene tends to be very steep races that finish at the top of a climb. They didn’t involve any downhill running.
“I had this feeling that I wanted to see if I could do better, I wanted to push my limits,” she said. “At one moment, I was doing intervals, then I was going to football practice and it was too much. I had this conflict. But I think I decided because I had this hunger for getting tired and pushing myself. It’s hard to tell when it happened, but it was a hard decision.”
It is a decision that paid off. She won the Norwegian Cup, a mountain running series, four years in a row. Hunting for a new challenge, she entered the Golden Trail Series (GTS) this year. The GTS has six races in Europe and one in America. The top 10 men and women are invited to run in the final in Nepal, which is taking place on Friday, over 42km near Annapurna.
Sacrificing football was not easy.