Residence: Cohoes, NY
Date of birth: 24th October 1961, in Troy, NY
Height: 5`1" Weight: 99 pounds
Personal records:
10 km: 38:05 '83
marathon: 3:01:19 '83
50 miles: 6:13:44 '95
100 km: 8:11:00 '97
Daniele Cherniak has been a runner for 23 years. She began running ultras in the early 1980s, attempting a few 50 km races. Her first 50-mile was a 7:13:35 at the Heritage 50-mile race in Massachusetts in 1984. A number of serious injuries and the demands of graduate study in physics precluded ultra competition for a number of years.
Cherniak returned to ultrarunning in 1989, with a 6:55:23 50-mile at Lake Waramaug. Considerable improvement at the latter distance followed the next year, as she completed the Golden Horseshoe 50-mile in Ontario in 6:33:56 (the same race at which Andy Jones set a Canadian 50-mile record). In that year, she also ran 75 miles 1623 yards/122.184km in the Joe Kleinerman 12-hour, an effort which was recognized by the Broadway Ultra Society as its "Best Ultra Performance of the Year".
She was first selected to the U.S. National 100 km Team running in the World Challenge in 1991 (as were her 1999 teammates Janice Anderson and Sue Olsen), and also competed for the team in 1993,1996 and 1998. Her first victory in 100km came at the Edmund Fitzgerald Ultra in 1992, in which she finished just 25 seconds ahead of Sue Kainulainen in 8:29:19. Earlier that year, she had set a trans-isthmus record for women in the 50.4 mile Ultramarathon de Panama.
In 1995, she improved her personal best at the 50-mile distance to 6:13:44, for a win overall at the Nifty Fifty in Rhode Island.
She suffered a serious injury in the 1996 World Challenge, experiencing a displaced fracture of the second metatarsal which forced her to retire from the race. Surgery, in which a plate and six screws were inserted to stabilize the bone, was found necessary, but she was able to recover after some months and returned to Ultrarunning by December of that year.
Further progress in covering the 100 km distance came at the close of 1997, when she ran 8:11:00 in Monterrey, Mexico. In March 1998, she won the U.S. National 100 km Championship race in Pittsburgh, and then ran 8:12:31 in Saint-Donat, Quebec. At Shimanto in the World 100km Challenge she ran an intelligent race to finish 8th in 8:45:23 and led the US team to a bronze medal position.
In 1999 she took the silver medal in the national 50km championships, and was once again selected for the American team.
Cherniak has been concentrating on ultradistances from 50 km to 100 km, and feels she is finally learning at least a little about running the latter. She considers herself an unreconstructed road runner, and has not yet been drawn, as have many of her compatriots, by the lure of the trails for a variety of reasons (primarily her lack of coordination and tendency to trip over that which is otherwise invisible). She also competes in events of shorter distance (5km to the marathon) and races at such distances nearly every weekend when not in an ultra, using them as elements of her training program.
When she is not running, Daniele Cherniak can usually be found in the experimental geochemistry laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she is employed as a research scientist, where her efforts are focused on quantifying and understanding diffusional transport in minerals.
Daniele Cherniak's experience and thoughtful preparation for major championships makes her a very solid competitior and a bedrock of the American women's team. The possibility of another team medal at Chavagnes will depend on the leadership of Daniele Cherniak and Chrissy Duryea-Ferguson.