The jungle doesn’t care. The jungle is not trying to bend you or break you or make you cry. Despite how it must feel, the jungle did not build a sadistic – um, jungle gym – of rocks and roots, rivers, mud bogs and dinner-plate-sized spiders just to humble or defeat you. It has no interest in making you vomit or bleed or itch. The jungle does not want to send your shattered husk back to the beach, where colorful drinks and mountains of food might help you to forget whether or not you left those emerald environs sans buckle or pride. The jungle was here for millions of years before you showed-up to scramble 100 miles over its green shoulders, and will be here for millions of years after the plane takes your battered body back to whatever mainland you call home. The jungle’s just being the jungle, baby, and this ain’t about the jungle, anyway. This is about you.

Sometime deep in the darkest hours of the morning of January 19, 2025, twenty hours or so into Oahu’s HURT 100 ultramarathon, Lisa Cabiles will feel the weight of the Hawai’ian rainforest’s indifference. She’ll pause among the tangle of giant roots, take in whatever nutrition she thinks will stay down, peer through the mist illuminated in the beam of her headlamp, probably comment on the whole affair to her father, who set her on the path to this moment, and whose memory accompanies her everywhere she goes, and then she will plunge ahead toward the breaking of day.

“Yeah, this one’s all about honoring my dad,” says Cabiles in a phone conversation earlier this month, just after her father, Kirby Skavdahl, passed after a brief battle with cancer. What better way to honor the man who introduced her to triathlons at ten, who took her on her first two mile run, who has been a sometime running partner and constant fan for more than thirty years, than to happily tackle one of the most difficult 100-mile races on the planet?

“When I was a kid,” says Cabiles, “ice skating was my sport. I would skate, like three hours a day. My dad thought I could use more endurance, so he took me on a two-mile run. Afterwards, I collapsed on the grass, said, ‘Why do people do this?’ said never again!”

And of course, soon thereafter, she was a competitive triathlete, budding road racer and star of her high school cross country team. Though she did not run on the team at Seattle Pacific University, where she earned a degree in nursing, she roomed with team members and was guided by the school’s coach, former Olympian, world cross country champion and world record-holder, Doris Brown Heritage.

“I loved running, I ran and walked all over Seattle!”

The girl who vowed “never again” was now incurably hooked, and in 2016 she ran all over Seattle to the tune of a 3:34 marathon in her hometown Seattle Marathon. The road to that starting line, however, was much more brutal than anything the race could throw at her. 2009-2012 was an ultramarathon of serious health issues: autoimmune disease exacerbated by fertility treatments, digestive issues leading to severe weight loss, sepsis and blood clots after catheterization to administer nutrition during the bout with the autoimmune disease, a roller coaster of ill health that very nearly killed her. But in 2012 Cabiles’ acupuncturist, her own training as a nurse, and perhaps a little divine intervention conspired to turn things around.

“One day, during a treatment, my acupuncturist, Sharon, noted that my pulse was different,” Cabiles says. “She asked if I was taking any new medication. I told her no. She did a few acupuncture points, but was fairly conservative and told me she wouldn’t do any more acupuncture on me until I took a pregnancy test. I looked at Sharon like she was nuts. I mean, how could I be pregnant when I had not one cycle, except prior to the birth of my son, who was then six? I did as she said, anyway. I took two pregnancy tests, and both came back positive. I was stunned!”

“Long story short,” she continues, “God blessed us with a little girl about a year and a half after I was so sick in the hospital. Because of the immunosuppressive effects of pregnancy, I was finally able to start running again. I’ve always run, but the illness gave me a hunger to run more seriously, live life to the very fullest.”

Here, the joy level in her voice shoots up about ten notches. “From 2012 to 2016, I ran tons of stroller miles, solo miles, and trail miles. In November 2016 I ran my first marathon at Seattle, with the goal of getting a Boston qualifier. Seattle is a particularly hilly course, but still, I secured my first #BQ!”