Fast Women: The shifting identities of competitive runners
Katie Schide, Tove Alexandersson, and Nina Engelhard win world titles
Issue 374, sponsored by Bakline
When running no longer comes first
Over the past seven years, I’ve told a lot of stories of people who are on the rise or at the peak of their running careers. Most of them are outliers in one way or another. But especially for those who start young, a running career can stretch for many years past the point when an athlete is running their fastest times. Anyone who is fortunate enough to run for a long time is eventually going to slow down, whether it’s because they have no choice, their priorities change, or something else.
All three of the athletes I’m featuring below are still young, they’re still fast (though not necessarily their fastest), and they’re still avid runners, but their circumstances, goals, and/or priorities have changed. I wanted to tell some of these stories, because it’s normal and healthy for the role running plays in a person’s life to shift over time. This is part two in a series, and you can read part one here.
Mattie Webb, 32, started out as a swimmer, but she made quick progress when she took up running during high school. By her senior year, she accomplished one of her biggest goals when she qualified for the 2010 Foot Locker Cross Country Championships.
But after that, she began to feel more pressure attached to her running. She began restricting her food intake with the hope that it would make her faster, and in the process, she developed an eating disorder. “A lot of people have gone through this,” Webb told Fast Women. “But at the time, not a lot of people were talking about eating disorders. I felt like I was the only person on the planet dealing with this problem.”
Within a couple of weeks of starting college at NC State, she got injured, which made it tough for her to connect with her teammates. She worked hard to make a strong return but was still underfueling, so she quickly got injured again. She ultimately ended up medically retiring from the sport, which meant she could keep her scholarship, but she could no longer compete for the school, which was devastating to her at the time.
Webb spent her final year and a half at NC State getting intensive treatment and finding other ways to be active, like playing intramural basketball and taking exercise classes. “I found a healthy relationship with activity and movement, even beyond running,” She said.
By the time she arrived at the University of North Carolina for graduate school, she was in a much better place. After getting many doctors to sign off on it, she was allowed to walk on to the cross country and track and field teams and get a do-over on her college running experience. Without a scholarship, she felt less pressure. And she had spent enough time out of the limelight that she felt like no one was following her results anymore.
“I felt like I had more freedom to pursue running on my own terms,” she said. “I wanted to make up for lost time, have the chance to be a good teammate, and help others. I was at peace knowing that I might compete for two years and not PR. And I think it was remarkable that I was able to get to a point where that no longer felt like a priority.”
In loosening her grip on her performance goals, Webb was able to have a great experience. In her first semester on campus, she and her teammates won the 2014 ACC cross country title. She didn’t have a great race that day, but she was still thrilled to be a part of it and celebrate the team’s accomplishment. And in her second year on the team, she PRed in all of her events, including running 17:04 for 5,000m.
Webb kept running after she graduated from UNC in 2016, and she won her first half marathon in 1:21:35. But when she began working toward her Ph.D. in history the following year, running became less of a priority. In 2019, she began working with her current coach, Terry Howell, and he helped her become more consistent with her training and challenge herself at new distances.
“At this point, I realized my relationship with running was more about seeing what I could do regardless of the times,” she said. “It was more like, ‘How can I challenge myself in a new way?’ I wouldn’t say I have necessarily run earthshattering times, but I’ve been able to keep improving and keep it interesting.”
And if she starts to feel too much pressure to hit certain times, she’ll focus on trail races for a while, where there’s less emphasis on time and fewer opportunities for comparison. Spending time around runners who have never aspired to be elite marathoners also helps her. “They sort of bring you back to Earth by being like, ‘Why are you mad about your time? You finished the Boston Marathon, you should be happy about that.’”
Webb often chooses her races based on where she or her husband wants to travel, and she enjoys having the freedom and base fitness to hop in races at the last minute, when the opportunity arises. Next up, she’ll run the Chicago Marathon. She goes into races with tiered goals. She has run one sub-3:00 marathon, and she’d love to do it again, but she’s always ready to adjust on the fly.
“Whenever a marathon feels like it’s going south quickly, I try to slow down and enjoy it and just be happy with the fact that I can finish a marathon, which is always a cool accomplishment in itself,” she said.
While she was injured at NC State, Webb began to get more serious about her education, which has ultimately led to a career as a social and political historian of the U.S. and southern Africa. Her work and schooling have taken her all over, and running has been a great way for her to make new friends wherever she goes. Her research has led her to spend a lot of time in South Africa, and she was able to race the historic 85.9K Comrades Marathon last year.
Her advice? “Know that running will evolve with you, throughout your life, and it doesn’t have to be static,” she said. “It doesn’t always have to look the same. That in itself is really exciting. There are all these opportunities beyond the immediate future, and that’s really cool, because not all sports [are like that].”
At 35, Cate Barrett has already been through many phases in her running career. She began running at age eight, but as a homeschooler, she didn’t have a lot of guidance until her junior year, when she began working with a knowledgeable coach. “It was like four years of high school development in one year,” she said, ”Which was super fun.” That year, she ran her first 1600m race in roughly 5:35. The following year, she ran a 4:50, an incredible improvement.
She was recruited to run at Baylor University, where she continued to progress. By her senior year, she ran 16:13 for 5,000m. She tried to run a fifth year in the NCAA while attending graduate school, but she developed a stress fracture in her heel and her collegiate career was over.
After college, she spent about two and a half years training with the Rogue Athletic Club. She worked hard, but she could not match her college times. In 2016, she watched the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials from her couch and decided she wanted in. Her team disbanded later that year, and in 2017, she kicked off her marathoning years.
Focusing on a new distance helped reinvigorate Barrett’s running career, as did being part of her local Oiselle chapter, which later turned into a small sponsorship. At the 2018 California International Marathon, she qualified for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, running 2:43:40. Her online community grew, and after several years of spinning her wheels post-collegiately, it felt good to accomplish something that meant a lot to her and came with a certain status within the running community. Barrett’s Trials race did not go the way she would have liked, but she looks back on that chapter of her running career fondly.
When racing shut down due to the pandemic, she decided it was a good time to have a baby. Initially, she was able to train, and she even ran a sub-5:00 downhill mile during her first trimester. But near the end of her second trimester, she stopped running due to back pain. Her first child arrived in January 2021.
“I just thought [my speed] would come back,” she said. “I went to pelvic floor PT and I thought I was doing all the right things. I had some little injuries, and finding time to get out the door was hard. There was a lot of adjustment with our schedules, obviously, taking care of a baby… I always felt like improvement was just around the corner, and then there would be another setback.”
After a year of that cycle, Barrett decided to have a second child, who arrived in October 2022. Throughout her running career, Barrett had coaches who would ask for a little more commitment to the sport in one way or another, anything from running more to getting more sleep. Whatever her coaches recommended, she would find a way to do it. Running came first in her life for a long time. But at the same time, her responsibilities increased, first in her work life, and then when she had kids. And after having kids, she found her limit.
“There was no other way for me to problem-solve this to be a good runner anymore,” she said. “Like, in theory, I would need to run more to be better at running. But when am I going to do that? I deal with little injuries here and there, so I go and do my physical therapy just to be able to run 23 miles a week. There’s such a large gap between where I am and what I think I would have to be to do competitive training, and I don’t know how I would do it.”
Barrett did put a little more emphasis on her training for a stretch, and she got herself down to a 1:41 half marathon earlier this year. She was pleased with it, but she hasn’t felt the tradeoffs that would be required to go after bigger goals would be worth it. “Since I’ve done it before,” she said, “it doesn’t feel worth doing again, knowing that I would have to work harder than I did before to not even be as good as I was.”
Barrett says she has gotten more honest with herself in the past year about what her priorities are. “I look at my actions, and my values are not what I thought they were,” she said. “I would love to be faster, but I actually am doing what I want to be doing. I just wish it was different. I care about my career, I care about my kids, and I care about getting enough sleep and trying to feel like a healthy human over trying to feel like the fastest little running robot that I can be. These choices have gotten me to where I am.”
There are aspects of being fast that Barrett misses, like the structure, goals, and purpose that it brought to her training. She misses feeling like her results matter, but at the same time, she knows she’s engaging with the sport in a healthier way now.
For a long time, she feared slowing down, and it happened. “It was painful, but I’m okay now,” she said. “I think if I had realized that I could still enjoy running, maybe I wouldn’t have been upset about the changes I was seeing. But I’m proud of myself for the humility I’ve demonstrated in continuing to do the sport.”
Katie Newton, 34, didn’t set out to be a professional runner. Even though was a multi-time All-American for Boston University, and twice placed fifth at an NCAA championship, it wasn’t until after she completed her collegiate career that she learned she would have pro opportunities. She put her planned career as a speech therapist on the back burner and ran professionally from 2013 until the end of 2019.
She needed to start working within five years of getting her master’s degree to avoid having some of her credentials expire, so after about 4.5 years of mainly focusing on running, she began working part-time as a speech-language pathologist as well. And in the end, that made her transition out of professional running easier, because already had a clear career path.
At the end of 2019, Newton’s contract with the B.A.A. was ending. She figured she would have an opportunity to continue in the sport, but she wasn’t running as well as she would have liked and her contract was likely to be reduced. For a variety of reasons, she decided to step away from professional running. She felt like she was plateauing, she wasn’t enjoying it as much, she was dealing with some injuries, and she was ready for a break. She was also expecting her first child.
With a husband who works long hours as a soccer coach, she didn’t want to have to put her child in daycare before she felt ready, and she didn’t want to have to stress about getting enough sleep, and she didn’t want to have to worry about racing again within a certain timeframe. She was only 29 when she “retired” from professional running, so she potentially had many years of running ahead of her.
Newton’s first child arrived in August 2020 and her second a little over two years later. She has continued to work as a speech-language pathologist, and she also coaches through Running Joyfully. These days, her schedule doesn’t leave her a lot of time for running. She aims to stay fit enough to go for a 45-minute run with friends and be able to hold up her end of the conversation. She also likes to put races on the calendar here and there, which helps get her out the door to train.
In August, she ran the Falmouth Road Race in 44:20, running 6:20/mile for seven miles. It was about a minute per mile slower than she ran at her fastest, but she had a blast. Newton figures that in theory, she is young enough that she could probably get back to running fairly fast by her standards, but she doesn’t have the time, resources, or motivation to put in the same level of work that she used to.
“I don’t know if people realize how much professionals put into it,” she said. “That was my full-time job, so to run a 31- or 32-minute 10K isn’t [a matter of] me just going out for a couple more runs per week.”
Newton takes issue with the messaging that if it’s a priority, you’ll get it done, because it doesn’t acknowledge the widely varying circumstances everyone is dealing with. She knows that it does her no good to compare herself to someone who is paid to run full-time, or those who have flexible jobs or a lot of support with child care. “If you’re not getting paid as a professional athlete, are you going to pay hundreds of dollars a week for childcare to go work out? Probably not, unless you’re very well off,” she said.
Joining the masses has been an adjustment at times. She almost missed the start at Falmouth, because she didn’t realize how early the non-pros needed to get there. But she mainly just looks back on her pro running years fondly, rather than having any regrets. “I’m not running close to my [previous] times, but I don’t feel like I’m getting that much less enjoyment out of it,” she said.
Newton enjoyed seeing 35-year-old Emily Infeld, her occasional competitor in the past, win the 10,000m at the USATF Outdoor Championships earlier this summer. It’s fun to imagine that if she stuck with professional running, she might have had a breakthrough moment. But she’s realistic about how rare those moments can be.
“While I’ve been having kids, she’s just been grinding and getting stronger,” she said. “It puts it into perspective of what it took for her to get there. That was years of dealing with injuries and setbacks. But then I also see people who are closer to my level who are still running but they haven’t had a major breakthrough. I assume they really enjoy it, but I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe that would have been me.’”
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Watching the World Championships reminded us why we race at all. The performances were inspiring, but what lingers is the reminder that effort itself is worth celebrating. We may not all compete on that stage, yet each of us can be a champion of our own training, our own belief, and our own race.
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Katie Schide, Tove Alexandersson, and Nina Engelhard win world titles
The World Mountain and Trail Running Championships took place over the past four days in Canfranc, Spain. On the track, the world championships is the most important meet of the season. That’s less the case in trail and mountain running, but more of the world’s top runners are making the event a priority.
The senior women competed over four different distances: The Uphill 6K, the Classic 14K race, the “Short” Trail 45K, and the 82K Long Trail race, while the U20 women raced 7K. Katie Schide led the way for the U.S., winning the Long Trail race by 25 minutes, in 9:57:59. I loved the geographical diversity at this event, and it was great to see Nepal’s Sunmaya Budha take second in 10:23:03. Italy won the team competition and the U.S. team earned silver. (Long Trail results | Replay | More from iRunFar)
Sweden’s Tove Alexandersson, one of the world’s best orienteers, dominated the Short Trail 45K, running 5:04:20 and winning by nearly 34 minutes over Spain’s Sara Alonso. Sweden won the team competition and Jane Maus (seventh) and Ruby Lindquist (11th) led the U.S. to a fourth-place finish. (Short Trail results | Replay | More from iRunFar)
On the first day of the event, Germany’s Nina Engelhard won the Uphill 6K in 45:33, holding off Finland’s Susanna Saapunki (second, 45:59) and Anna Gibson of the U.S. (third, 46:07). Italy won the team race and the U.S. placed sixth. (Uphill results | Replay | More from iRunFar) And three days later, Engelhard also won the Classic 14K race (1:11:00) ahead of Kenya’s Ruth Gitonga Mwihaki (second, 1:12:54). Lauren Gregory (fifth, 1:13:38) led the U.S. to silver, behind Kenya. (Classic results | Replay | More from iRunFar)
Germany’s Julia Ehrle won the U20 race (38:47). Uganda won the team race, and 16-year-old Sophia Rodriguez (14th, 41:45) led the U.S. squad to a fifth-place finish. (Results)
Other News
New Balance Boston hasn’t made an official announcement about who is or isn’t on the team, but the team’s coach, Mark Coogan, posted a video of former Providence College runners Kimberley May of New Zealand and Shannon Flockhart of Great Britain running in Boston last week. As I previously mentioned, former UVA runner Margot Appleton and Great Britain’s Alex Millard, who spent a year at PC, also appear to be on the team now.
She Runs the World, the documentary about Allyson Felix, won the audience award at the Aspen Film Festival. “We promise we’re working on ways to bring it to all of you,” her brother Wes Felix, wrote in an Instagram story. “But the big streamers think that people don’t want to watch a film about an Olympian [or] Black maternal health. It’s cool though, we’ll keep carving our own path.”
In the Minnesota Distance Elite newsletter, Dakotah Popehn mentioned that she has set unofficial PRs of 15:21 for 5K and 51:46 for 10 miles in recent workouts. For someone who struggled to break 16:00 for a long time, that’s big.
You may have heard Courtney Dauwalter is running the Twin Cities Marathon this weekend. More than 350 people have already RSVPed for her pre-race shakeout run and live Q&A.
Cory McGee shared the devastating news that she lost her son. “While I feel some reluctance to share this sad news,” she wrote. “I also fear people asking about my son and how we are doing and would rather share my truth than hide. I am broken and sad and will never be the girl I was before this happened but all I can do is try my best to hope someday I’ll be ok.”
Patti Dillon will be the honorary chairperson of the 2025 Manchester Road Race.
If you’re on Facebook and you want an update on the lawsuit between Jim Estes and USATF over the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials bidding process, Becca Gillespy Peter posted one here.
When Ali Feller shared that her cancer was back, many people wanted to know what they could do to help. She now has a GoFundMe to help cover the cost of her care and more.
India’s Aman Malik, 19, has been sentenced to three years in a Kenya prison after being found guilty of distributing banned performance-enhancing substances in Iten. It’s nice to see this stopped at the source for once, and I imagine this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Ethiopia’s Shewarge Alene, a 1:07 half marathoner and 2:27 marathoner, passed away recently, at age 30. Alene reportedly felt unwell during a training session in Addis Ababa and was taken to the hospital, where she died. She won the Stockholm Marathon at the end of May.
Additional Results
Scotland’s Eilish McColgan won the Vitality London 10K in 30:35. (Results)
45-year-old Priscah Cherono of Kenya won the Boulderthon Half Marathon, held at altitude, in 1:16:48, and Molly Seidel finished second in 1:17:09. Kenya’s Everlyn Kemboi won the 5K in 15:40. (Results)
Ethiopia’s Werkuha Getachew won the Virginia 10 Miler in the rain, running 54:53, and Katie Izzo took second in 55:47. (Results)
Madison Trippett won Pittsburgh’s Great Race, a 10K, in 33:09. (Results)
Rosemary Longisa, who is in her first season of cross country at Washington State but ran track for the school last year, edged out Tennessee’s Mary Ogwoka, an NCAA newcomer, to win Missouri’s Gans Creek Classic 6K, 19:07.0 to 19:07.7. Florida won the team race (102 points) with NAU second (126 points) and CU third (166 points). Nine of the top 11 runners in the race were from Kenya. After a dramatic change last year, it seems that the Kenyan presence in the NCAA is only getting stronger. The Washington Post recently published an interesting article (gift link) on the topic. (Results)
Isca Chelangat, who is running her first season of cross country but competed outdoors for Oklahoma State, won the Cowboy Jamboree 6K, held on her home course, in 19:59.1. Riley Chamberlain took second in 20:04.4 and led BYU to a win. (Results)
Despite making a wrong turn and adding a bit of distance to the course, Rachel Entrekin won the inaugural Mammoth 200 in 46 hours, 50 minutes, and 55 seconds.
David Monti points out that after winning the Dutchess County Classic 5K 24 years in a row and 30 times overall, 62-year-old Marisa Sutera Strange’s win streak has come to an end. She finished sixth in this year’s race, running a still-incredible 20:32. (Results)
Podcast Highlights
Sage Hurta-Klecker was great on the Citius Mag podcast. She pushed back on the idea that she’s not fast enough to be world class in the 800m, and she now has a fifth-place, 1:55.89 performance at worlds to prove it.
Nikki Hiltz was also on the Citius Mag podcast, and was also great, as always. They talked about not quite achieving their goals this season. “I think the more you commit your life to this and the more you go all in, the harder it stings,” they said. “The past two years, I’ve really gone all in on this thing and I’ve committed my life to seeing how high I can place and can I be good enough for a medal. I think it’s hard because you’re like, ‘Wow, is it all not worth it?’ But…it’s such a worthwhile journey to go on to see how you can be at something.” They also said worlds was the first time that they stood on a starting line at an outdoor global championship and believed with their entire being that they could earn a medal. “Once that belief is there, I don’t think it goes away,” they said. “So now I can just build on that.”
Live show recordings don’t always make for good podcast content, but I thought Alysia Montaño was excellent on the Earthmovers podcast, recorded at the Women of Color Take the Lead Retreat.
I appreciated hearing more from Zika and Pete Rea about their decision to shut down ZAP Fitness on C Tolle Run (which is back after a hiatus). They discussed some of the highlights of the past 25 years as well as the funding challenges they’ve been facing in recent years. Zika pointed out that while it’s great when their athletes do well enough that they earn their own shoe contracts, that does little to help keep ZAP as a whole going. “Our goal was always to be developmental, and I think the sport has shifted a lot in the last five years,” she said.
And it was great to hear more from Uruguay’s Julia Paternain on I’ll Have Another.
Additional Episodes: Erika Kemp recapped her world championships experience on the Relay podcast | Sadie Engelhardt discussed making the move to collegiate running on The Running Effect | Runher founder Ashley Mateo was on Hurdle
Thanks again to Bakline for helping make this newsletter possible, and remember to use the code fastwomen at checkout for 20 percent off. I’ve been particularly intentional about how I spend my money this year, and Bakline is a company I feel very comfortable supporting and being supported by.
I hope you’re all able to enjoy the final days of September and that you have the best week possible.
Alison
Thank you for sharing the stories of these amazing women. Although I've never been anywhere close to a professional runner, as a 42 year old mom of two, it's nice to read how priorities around running have shifted with age and life.
I want to tell these women that the story isn’t over. The scenario may change but all of you have so many years left. (I hope!!) I’ve competed in several USATF master’s events and the best part, by far, is lining up with women who had to put running on the back burner for whatever reason but now had the opportunity to get out and see what they could do. It puts a new perspective on goals. Enjoy the ride and be open to where it takes you.