About Fast Women

From 2000 to 2005, I operated a website called fast-women(dot)com, which focused on women’s competitive middle-distance and distance running and was hosted by New York Road Runners. I continued to cover women’s running independently for four more years, but it eventually came into conflict with the college cross country and track & field coaching I was doing, so I let it go.

I always missed it, but I loved coaching, too. And all along, I fully expected that someone else would take up the mantle and operate a similar website. I though I might feel a little sad that I wasn’t involved, but I’d be thankful for the coverage.

But 10 years later, while there were more people than ever providing amazing coverage of the sport, I was surprised that no had ever created an online resource that focused solely on women’s competitive running in the United States.

So at the start of 2019, Fast Women was reborn. In returning to covering women’s competitive running, I decided that I might be able to help fans more by focusing on consolidation of the existing content. I wanted people who are enthusiastic fans (or potential enthusiastic fans) to be able to follow the sport in depth without spending so much time hunting for information.

And that’s how the Fast Women newsletter came to be (with many nudges from my editor, Sarah Lorge Butler, in the preceding year). The original domain is no longer available, so fast-women.org it is, but the most up-to-date content will live in the weekly newsletter, which moved to Substack in 2023.

As a lifelong fan of women’s distance running, I’ve always wished that I could geek out with more people over the latest news in the sport. And this newsletter and the resulting community has enabled me to do that. When the runners in the pack learn about the runners up front, they absorb lessons they can apply to their own running, they get a big dose of inspiration, and they often find out they have more in common with the pros than they imagined.

For more content between newsletters, follow Fast Women on Twitter, Instagram, and/or join our private Facebook group for subscribers.