Paradis Pros are excited to welcome ultra runner and Ph.D candidate Britta Clark to the team! Clark grew up in Goshen VT where her parents owned and operated Blueberry Hill Inn and Outdoor Center. She attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and was a member of the Nordic Ski Team. The summer after her college graduation, she was home in Goshen and took out a map of the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area and started running. There were hundreds of miles of trails that she had never explored in her 20 years of living there. “It really helps to have a good endurance base, which I had from ten years of cross country ski racing,” says Clark. “I ran the Moosalamoo Ultra in August 2016 [a 36-mile race] and was hooked.”
Not only did Clark run her first Ultra that summer, she finished second overall. Shortly afterwards she left for New Zealand where she was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship. There she studied environmental policy as it relates to land and water use rights of indigenous populations. She also had the opportunity to “run really long foot races through the jungles of Malaysia.”
Since then Clark has taken off as an ultra runner. Her highlights include: the Pemi Loop and Presidential Traverse FKTs (fastest known times) in the summer of 2020; multiple first place finishes at the Trapp Mountain Marathon and the Catamount Ultra 50K (where she set the course record); and 2x winner of Moosalamoo Ultra and course record. She has also won the Killington 50K, Vermont 50-miler, and the Castle Peak 100K in California where she set another course record.
She is currently a member of the Green Racing Project, a training program based in Craftsbury, VT, for biathletes, Nordic skiers, runners, and rowers. This summer, Clark led the GRP run squad with a 2nd place at the US National 50km Trail Running Championships, completing approximately 31-mile course in 5 hours 47 minutes, which was good enough for 15th overall in a field of 178 men and women. The challenging track featured 6,300 feet of elevation gain over the course of the race. This gave her the opportunity to make her European racing debut in August at the UTMB festival. There she was part of a field of more than 2,100 runners that competed on a 100K journey starting in Courmayeur, Italy, passing through Champex-Lac, Switzerland, and then to the finish line in Chamonix, France, amassing 6,100 meters (20,013 feet) of climbing along the way. Clark finished in 35th place among the women’s field and as the ninth American female finisher.
Clark approaches her academic and professional pursuits with the same drive and determination that she brings to trail running. She is now part of a seven-year Ph.D. in Philosophy program in intergenerational justice and the ethics of climate change at Harvard. Her work focuses on the ethics of climate change, and her dissertation aims to develop a framework for making climate policy decisions in deeply unjust and non-ideal circumstances. In addition to her graduate work and running, she is involved with organizing the Harvard Minorities and Philosophy chapter at Harvard. “I think it’s incredibly important that the discipline of philosophy moves beyond its long history of exclusion and racism, and I’m proud to play a tiny role in that work,” says Clark.
We are all stoked that Clark is lending her endurance prowess and passion for environmental ethics to our team!
Sources:
https://vtsports.com/reader-athlete-the-ultra-runner-ph-d-candidate/
https://www.greenracingproject.com/
https://massultra.com/2022/08/30/current-former-new-england-residents-compete-at-utmb-festival/
https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/04/23/apa-member-interview-britta-clark/
