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It’s the story of a young woman, extremely perfectionist, who gave her body and soul to her academic and athletic success, until both, pushed to their limits, damaged by isolation and deeply hurt by mourning, abandoned her. On November 3, 2022, Inès-Marie Ducancelle was found by her father, unconscious on her couch, eyes in the air. That day, the young woman was a victim of a hypoglycemic coma, followed by four cardiac arrests over a week, forty days in intensive care, one month in nephrology department (medical specialty related to kidney function), and a long year of convalescence. From those dark days clinging to the love her family has for her and to Ucky, the golden retriever she raises like her child, Inès-Marie manages to gradually regain the will to live. By continually moving forward, the young woman wanted to go fast, and stride by stride, the steps naturally followed, so now the athlete is running her life… at a stratospheric speed. This is the story of a gem who emerged unexpectedly on the top step of the podium, during her first competition, in September 2024, and who has never finished second even once since, nineteen races later. It’s the story of a twenty-three-year-old woman whom we do not yet know well enough, but who is about to be heard of and who has already inscribed her name among the greats. Meeting.
🏀 A high-level athlete's past
“I am a jack-of-all-trades, someone who gives it their all but can also get bored very quickly”. Inès-Marie Ducancelle has practiced various sports: classical dance (only one lesson), swimming, tennis, football (she was the only girl on her team and received a lot of criticism from the boys, a difficult period for the hypersensitive person she was already at that age), then a long love affair with basketball. After ten years at a high level, the athlete was stopped at the gates of the INSEP (National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance), “they told me I was too small”. A hard blow — and that's an understatement — for someone who lived partly for her sport. Disheartened by the reason given to her, which she found hardly acceptable, and without any other way to reconcile high-level sports with her rigorous academic demands, Inès-Marie said goodbye to basketball and locked herself away in her studies. This is where her health problems begin.
👊 Her battle against illness
Inès-Marie is only twenty-three years old, yet her perspective and the sharpness of her gaze on her journey demonstrate a wisdom usually attributed to the elderly. Her long and insidious decline spans about five years.
“The cause of my health problems is multifactorial. I quickly understood that I was a hyperactive and perfectionist girl. I was very good at school, my teachers told me I was made for long studies… and I tried to make my parents proud. In sports, I was also told that I had crazy potential. I wanted to be perfect everywhere, all the time.I hadn't yet understood that it was better to be a complete individual than a perfect individual. Succeeding in all areas was a way to correct a malaise, but I lost the sense of what I really wanted due to constant success and perfectionism… I no longer felt legitimate, I had a burn-out”.
🏥 High school years marked by hospital visits, solitude, and mourning
It starts with depression, around fifteen or sixteen years old, “a loss of taste for everything.” With her dreams of INSEP shattered, Inès-Marie no longer practices sports and then loses her desire to eat. “It deteriorated in a flash. I lost more than ten kilograms in just a few months, it’s a significant stress for the body”. Hospitalized during her high school years, she often fell ill because her immune system was weak. Doctors try to understand. “They told me I was anorexic, that I was bipolar, they named all the names, ALL the names. Now, I don't care what they tell me, the labels. My only label is Inès. It destroyed me mentally, they tried to heal a body based on these labels, but they forgot my soul”, laments the young woman. Her year of the baccalaureate tests her even more, “I had to be on all fronts: Parcoursup and regaining health… it was hell”. She ended up taking her baccalaureate at the hospital, which she passed with honors. During this adolescence marked by health problems that kept her away from schools, Inès-Marie felt terribly alone. “Solitude is a vicious circle. The more you isolate yourself, the less you have the will to live, the more you lose it”.
The one who dreams of becoming a veterinarian then goes to the open days of a preparatory class, “when the teachers saw me, they told me I couldn’t enter preparatory classes in that state of health, it was very difficult, all my projects went up in smoke”. To this bad news, the death of her grandmother is added, whom she was very close to. For the young woman, it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
🫀 A hypoglycemic coma and several cardiac arrests
On November 3, 2022, Inès-Marie Ducancelle's father finds his daughter, unconscious on the couch, with her gaze in the air. “He panicked a bit, his first instinct was to call my mother, who is a doctor. They immediately called the firefighters”. Her heart started again, but the future running champion is only at the beginning of a long battle. “I had four cardiac arrests in one week. It was a real descent into hell, the more the days went by, the more my organs deteriorated. A machine took care of my heart and I was intubated due to pulmonary atrophy: I was so weak that my lungs were stuck together, I couldn't breathe on my own. I was unconscious for over two weeks”. Upon waking up, the pain was even greater, as she could then feel every part of her body, sore and bruised. “My liver and kidneys were degraded because of the medications, my skin was starting to stretch, it radiated pain. Dialyses (medical treatment that supplements kidney function, editor's note) weren’t working, and since the kidneys are used to detoxify waste in the blood, I was poisoning myself alone. So, I was swelling”. The agony of not being able to speak (due to intubation) adds to that of the body and soul… but Inès-Marie the fighter holds on. Several four-hour dialyses later, the miracle finally happens: one of them works. In total, the miraculous one will have been in intensive care for forty days and one month in nephrology department (medical specialty related to kidneys); she comes out alive, with everything to relearn. “I had no more muscles, I couldn’t sit up and let alone walk, I went home in a wheelchair. I had to insist with the doctors, it was the only way for me to regain the will to live. Being at home was a rebirth, I was once again a baby. I relearned to swallow, to chew, to regain the taste of food…”.
🔥 The rebirth of Inès-Marie
In this daily life marked by ordinary challenges that are actually extraordinary but are given little or no importance because they seem completely mundane, Inès-Marie clings… and is finally no longer alone. At the hospital, when she was able to use her hands, she draws a golden retriever (yes, she’s an artist in addition to being an athlete and having a great head on her shoulders!). After consulting her parents, the family adopts Ucky. “When you’ve lost everything, it’s not possible to move forward alone, you need a companion. We were born together, because Ucky had just been born, and I was being reborn. I taught him to grow and he taught me to heal”. Inès-Marie takes to heart her role as dog-mom, first because she dreamed of it, then because she deeply loves her four-legged companion, but perhaps also a bit because by taking care of him, she didn't need to think about herself. Because keeping him alive was a way to stay alive. “I did everything to try to understand him and to best meet his needs. Training a puppy is like taking care of a baby, you have to take him out day and night. When I think back, the burden I was imposing on myself: Even though he was running everywhere, I was trying to stand up (laughs) ! Even if my health was still alarming, I weighed about twenty-five kilograms, I couldn’t die because I had a son.
I told myself, “he only has ten years to live, give him the best life””.
Every day is a challenge that Inès-Marie faces with Ucky by her side. Little victory by little victory. It starts with being able to walk around the dining table, pick up the favorite toy of her dog, climb one step, then two, and finally the entire staircase to find her room upstairs — “I shouted, “mom, I’m in my room”!" I was so happy” — riding a bike (even falling five times in a row!), a neighborhood lap, and so on. “And then, you always want to go further: walks, mini runs, hikes (GR340, GR5, etc.). Ucky loves the mountains. Together, we rediscovered life and the beauty of life. And then, the faster you go, the further you can go, the more you are efficient daily, so I started running longer distances…”. Thus, from a convalescence in 2023, the year 2024 for the young woman was marked by rebirth.
💥 The birth of an outstanding athlete
In the summer of 2024, like every year, the Ducancelles go on vacation to the Alps. Her older brother, Louis, suggests going for a run. “We had to run about fifteen kilometers, he was exhausted! Of course, he didn’t say anything, but I understood because he’s quite athletic and he was always behind me (laughs). He asked me why I wasn’t getting a bib number, he told me I probably had something to do. That was the trigger. The idea that my battle against illness was leading me here was a satisfaction, me who was severely lacking in confidence, always telling myself “you can’t, you’re sick””.
If she admits that pinning a bib number was the “fear of her life”, the Avrillaise (resident of Avrillé, near Angers, in the Pays de la Loire region) finds an ingenious solution and “hides” behind a character. She puts on a t-shirt bearing a meaningful inscription: “comatose survivor, I run to catch up with time”. The purpose of this garment is perfectly aligned with her sporting ambitions, “if I run fast enough, I’ll pass people, and they’ll read it; it’ll give them hope… it was my superhero cape, my shield, my identity”. With anxiety in her belly, but the desire to take it on, Inès-Marie lines up at the start of her first race in September 2024, an 18-kilometer trail. She finishes first woman and takes fourth place in the scratch. A real surprise for the new runner who even thinks that luck was the only thing responsible for her performance. During her second race, she once again takes first place among women and awards herself third place in the scratch. “Everyone told me those were nonsense races”. To get a clear idea, to get a more precise understanding of her running level and to have a meaningful time reference, she registers for the Beaufort-en-Anjou half marathon (Maine-et-Loire, France), in October 2024. “I finish first woman (in 1 hour 19 minutes and 41 seconds, on forest trails, not really conducive to setting times, editor's note), twenty-five minutes ahead of the second”. Besides the competitive world and her hidden talent for running (well, her ease in ranking in the top positions during school cross events had already caught her attention, although she hated it 🙈), Inès-Marie has the happiness of discovering an entirely new perspective on herself. “Me who didn’t have many friends anymore, being surrounded, cheered on, seeing all these looks on me… so different from those I received when I was twenty-five kilograms and staggering…”.
🙈 An imposter syndrome she combats with dreams in her head and miles in her legs
When she is called a high-level athlete, Inès-Marie Ducancelle immediately calms our passions. “I’m completely new, I’m a baby in running, there’s a stage to overcome… I don’t really see myself as a high-level athlete. When I see the rankings that others have achieved over the years… Me, I just arrived, I’m coming out of a convalescence. After, I regained my confidence, even if it’s hard to say… Today, I’ve improved, I don’t care about the result, I see the quest, the process to get there. Honestly, I perform despite myself; initially, I just wanted to regain health”. And precisely, to get there, the athlete gives herself the means. She took a break from her biology studies to maximize her chances. “I tell myself that I’ll have the same brain at twenty as at thirty, but certainly not the same legs. I have the daily motivation to push my limits. With biology studies, it’s hard to project into the future, there’s a certain mental blur that sports, for me, don’t give at the moment. I will resume my studies later, I’m not afraid of it”. An urgent need to live that is easily understood when you know a bit about the young woman's journey: while running brings her concrete and instant results, studies remain in the realm of expectation. And because she dreams big — at least as much as she deserves — Inès-Marie Ducancelle also has her head on her shoulders, “with running, you don’t fill a fridge”. Formerly employed by Nike, she is looking for a new job that can allow her to train properly and feed her ambitions.
🎙️ Why do you run? What are you looking for in running?
Self-taught, the champion didn’t know how to answer those who, during her first races (not so long ago, therefore), asked her what training and weekly mileage she did to perform like that. Her watch? She never looked at it. “I just ran”. But to progress further, Inès-Marie knows she needs to surround herself, “I need to build a staff and a support system that takes me to the high level. It’s something I have to build, I hope to succeed”. Without a coach and without structure, she accompanies a few athletes during their track sessions. Her goals are equally undefined. “I’m just starting out, I don’t want to decide on my specialty right away… I want to touch everything”. Her dream? The UTMB, and to prove to women that they are just as capable, if not more, than men. “I want to push the boundaries for girls. We tend to lack confidence in ourselves. Physically, we are less strong, our genetics are less favorable than those of men… We never see women ahead at the starting line. But just because we’re thinner and less muscular doesn’t mean we can’t do great things: Courtney Dauwalter and Katie Schide defy the limits we believe are women's limits, limits that society imposes on us. I want to dare to challenge my limits, rather than limit my challenges. We’re lucky to have men to surpass ourselves, to progress. Women have stronger mental and muscular endurance”.
🙏 A personality and maturity that stand out and resonate
From her battles, Inès-Marie Ducancelle has undoubtedly learned lessons. It’s simple, we could listen to her talk for hours. Every sentence she utters is a punchline. “People often tell me that I have six years in my legs and forty years in my head. But when you fall ill, you necessarily gain perspective on life, you break free from norms, you try to rebuild yourself compared to yourself and more than others”. A wisdom she has managed to translate into her running practice, and which the majority of runners usually only acquire after many years of running. “In those moments when I push myself, when I connect with myself, I tell myself “I am alive!”. So, the result of a race, it really isn’t what matters, what you need to take away is why we are here”. Both fiery and extremely thoughtful, Inès-Marie hasn’t finished amazing us with her personality and maturity that stand out and yet resonate so strongly. “In my family, no one runs, I’m the alien of the family, and it’s even more rewarding: you can come from any background and succeed! If I tell my parents I ran ten kilometers in thirty or fifty minutes, it’s the same for them. They are proud of me, I love seeing that spark of life I give them back. Before, I felt a lot of guilt, I saw that I was making them suffer”. One thing is certain: we suffer as much as we love, and today, wounds are healing and leaving behind the painful memories that give the present a unique flavor. The future looks bright for Inès-Marie Ducancelle, and we can't wait to see what it will be like.
💡 Answers to your questions about Inès-Marie Ducancelle
🤔 Who is Inès‑Marie Ducancelle?
Inès-Marie Ducancelle is a coma survivor. She participates in her first competition in September 2024, which she wins. Since then, she has literally been on a winning streak. She has put her biology studies on hold to try to build a career as an athlete.
🎂 How old is she?
She is twenty-three years old and lives in Avrillé, near Angers, in the Pays de la Loire region.
⏱️ What are her recent times (marathon, trail, etc.) and her personal records?
➡️ Half marathon
Inès-Marie Ducancelle completes the Côte d'Amour Amarris half marathon (in La Baule-Escoublac, Loire-Atlantique, in November 2024) in 1 hour 16 minutes and 38 seconds.
➡️ Marathon
Inès-Marie Ducancelle’s only marathon was the Saumur Marathon (Maine-et-Loire), on May 11, 2025. She posted a very impressive time of 2 hours 39 minutes and 40 seconds at the finish line for her first experience in the premier event. For the fun fact, following her medical history, Inès-Marie receives regular check-ups: every six months with the endocrinologist and a blood test every four months. After her marathon, she undergoes a blood test that reveals severe anemia. That shows the full extent of her potential for progress!
➡️ 10 km
Inès-Marie Ducancelle hasn’t yet participated in an official ten kilometers… All she can tell us is that her ten-kilometer record, set during a longer-distance competition, is 34 minutes and 20 seconds! 🤯
➡️ Victory at the Ultra Marin - L’Arvor (59 km)
Personally, it was during the Arvor, a 59-kilometer race of the Ultra Marin (June 28, 2025), that I discovered Inès-Marie Ducancelle. She steals the spotlight on the live broadcast hosted by Erik Clavery, running at seventeen kilometers per hour, second in the scratch for a large part of the race, before a fall at the fortieth kilometer and a terrible knee pain that forces her to drastically reduce her pace and moves her to fourth place, both men and women included. Thanks to the public's encouragement, she finishes the event in 4 hours and 14 minutes, at the foot of the podium, and well ahead of the women's ranking. A few days earlier, during the elite presentation, no mention is made of Inès-Marie, so she perfectly embodied her role as an outsider! So don’t forget her name, you might still hear about her.
🎙️ What was your worst moment during a race and how did you overcome it?
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Trail runner and marathon runner, sport is my shared passion and inseparable from writing... because to run as to write, you need a bit of momentum and it brings us a lot of inspiration!
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