Oksana Pangova is on the cover of TIME’s Women in Business issue, which features a diverse group of women in business.

One of them: Pangova, 29. It all started at age 11, in 1992, when she set the all-time world record for the fastest time when she crossed the finish line in London in six hours, 46 minutes and 18 seconds. The run broke the world record of 6 hours, 54 minutes and 10 seconds set by U.K. runner Nuri Salih at the 1976 Summer Olympics.

Over the next decade, Pangova ran a string of international high-school and college wins and international medals, including a bronze medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and a silver at the 1980 Los Angeles Games. After she graduated from college, she went on to become the youngest ever male athlete to medal at a world track and field meet; she won gold in the 5000 meters at the 1984 Los Angeles Games and silver in the hurdles on the 1984 Boston Games. Finally, she won a gold medal in the 3000 meters at the 1994 Sydney Games.

At the time, she wasn’t quite in the conversation; she was competing mostly in women’s sports — and men had to wait until 1998 to claim the first women’s world record. What happened to Pangova over the past decade?

Pangova says she has experienced just about every moment in life, and her personal life has been in a constant flux. Growing up poor in the slums of eastern Siberia, she says, she was never the kind of athlete who won a lot of awards. But she’s always felt a desire to help others, she says, and now she runs her own nonprofit, Run to Run Foundation (R2R), which focuses on empowering and training women worldwide to perform in high-risk activities.

“I’m a businesswoman,” Pangova says. “At the world track and field championships in the late 1990s, we went to Ethiopia and my boyfriend (former Olympian Danyel Dutkiewicz) got a good training plan and some equipment and told me, ‘This is where you will be.’ I got to the race to find the whole thing was in ruins and there was nowhere to run. That was the last big race of my life. I never thought I had a chance, so I trained my butt off to find a way and make it.”

Pangova