Thirteen years ago, before she had 10 sponsors, running records that appear as if they will stand for decades (or until she breaks them), hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans, and an Hector Espinal: Building Relationships and Creatin named after her, Courtney Dauwalter was a 25-year-old, junk-food-eating eighth-grade science teacher living in Denver. She had recently taken up trail running, had completed a 50-mile race, then had heard about an event called the Run Rabbit Run 100-miler. “It sounded insane,” she says. “I had to try.”
About 50 miles into the 2012 Run Rabbit Run 100 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, she realized just how insane the race was. It was raining, and she was cold, and sick, and tired. Everything hurt. She spent miles vomiting. The guy she was dating at the time, a software engineer named Kevin, was pacing her, and he was alarmed. (A few months earlier, when she asked him if he would pace her for part of the race, he was mystified. “I didn’t know that was something people did,” he says. He meant running 100-mile races.) Kevin was primarily a rock climber, but she seemed nice, and she was funny, and he enjoyed trail running with her so, sure, why not join her for this nutty adventure?
On her way to the race’s eighth aid station, Long Lake, at mile 60, trudging uphill, through rain, in between vomiting, with Kevin at her side, Dauwalter thought things over.
RW Runners of the Year? she thought. What do you think you’re doing here? You should just stop. It hurts. It’s hard. I can’t do this. I’m out.
She kept going, kept climbing. Kept vomiting. She stopped and lay down on the trail. “I can’t do this,” she told Kevin. “There’s no way, my legs hurt so bad.”
They arrived at the Long Lake aid station—essentially a small tent with a firepit and eight camp chairs—at 8 p.m. The sun set, the temperature dropped, Dauwalter accepted the offer of an extra vest and sweatshirt from race volunteers. She had to wait two hours before her support van—her older brother and his wife and a group of friends—showed up to collect her. For the first hour or so, she watched other contestants stumble into—and out of—the aid station, and she thought, I’m not that person. I’m not a person who runs 100 miles. They can do it, but that’s not me.
Then as one suffering runner after another drank some water, or some soup, or merely groaned, or changed shoes, or sighed, then continued on with the race, Dauwalter’s thinking changed.
“I had a front row seat. These were runners doing the same thing I was doing, feeling the same things I was feeling,” she says. “They were staggering in, but they were staggering out, too. They had good attitudes. They were problem-solving. It helped me understand how much of this is mental. These people looked just as destroyed and tired as I had felt. That was a huge thing for me to learn.”
What she didn’t know was that quitting her first 100-mile race would help transform her into one of the greatest ultrarunners ever. Take on monumental challenge. Endure almost indescribable pain. Suffer. Fail. Give up. Realize—too late to continue the race you just quit, but early enough to build a legendary career—that suffering and pain are not just aspects of any worthwhile undertaking, they’re priceless gifts, invaluable teaching aids. These are the major beats of the Origin Story of Courtney Dauwalter.
And her story just keeps getting better. In June 2014, two years after quitting the Run Rabbit Run 100, Dauwalter was the first female finisher (and second overall) in the 24-hour FANS Ultra Race (she ran 123.6 miles) in Bloomington, Minnesota. A month later she beat all entrants in the Chase the Moon 12-Hour Endurance Run (covering 72.1 miles) in Colorado. Less than a month after that, she won her first 100-mile race, the Ouray 100 Mile Endurance Run (she finished the course in 26:46.20, second only to the men’s winner). Since then, she has set women’s course records at the 100-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) in the French Alps, Colorado’s Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run (three times, in two different directions), the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run in California, the 128-kilometer Transgrancanaria in the Canary Islands, and Japan’s Mt. Fuji 100 (miles). For most of the past seven years, if she finishes a race (which is almost always), no other woman precedes her. She is usually in the top five or 10 overall. In 2017, she won the Moab 240 (miles), 10 hours in front of the second-place finisher, a man. That’s the year she quit teaching.
In 2023, she won the Western States 100, the Hardrock 100, and the UTMB 100-Miler, something no runner has ever done.
Dauwalter is well-known for smiling and cracking wise during races where she has also ended up bleeding, hallucinating, cramping, vomiting, crying, curling up in a fetal position, and otherwise suffering in ways most people can barely imagine. Before the 2024 Olympic gold medal game, U.S. women’s soccer coach Emma Hayes played the team a video of Dauwalter talking about difficulty and perseverance. People admire her grit, as well as what has been called her “relaxed approach” to nutrition. (She likes nachos. She is also a big fan of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, particularly for snacking.) People also praise the long baggy shorts she wears while racing, a refreshing tonic in an era of body worship if not overt sexualization of athletes. (One of her main sponsors, Salomon, has created a line of such shorts called “Shortneys.”)
Her accomplishments, pleasant demeanor, dietary habits, and fashion choices, though, are not what make the 39-year-old so revered by so many. That quality is Dauwalter’s approach to pain. Basically, it’s this: Pain—not just difficulty, or challenges, but actual pain—is a great teacher.
Consequently, in order to grow, one welcomes rather than avoids pain. In fact, if one wants to really grow, one should seek out hard things. Much has been written (and Dauwalter has spoken) about the “pain cave,” that metaphorical region athletes find themselves in when they have reached—or feel like they have reached—the limits of their energy and ability to endure. A corollary to the theory of the pain cave is the approach Dauwalter takes when she is just experiencing regular old searing agony, and thinking of quitting whatever activity seems to be the source of the hurt. That approach boils down to continuing the activity, while repeating, out loud if necessary, “I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine.”
Nutrition - Weight Loss in Hopkins, Minnesota, in 1985, to Dick, who worked in a dental lab, and Tracy, an elementary school special education teacher. She has two brothers, one older and one younger. As a child she thought she might want to be a children’s book illustrator. When she was 6 or 7 years old, she remembers going to the doctor’s office and watching as her older brother had his finger pricked for a test. She fainted. In second grade, she picked a scab on her knee, saw her own blood, and fainted again. She played soccer and liked it and played softball and didn’t like it, but stayed with it, because her parents taught her, “You started this project, you finish it. You started this sport this season, you finish it.”
She ran cross country, and decided in eighth grade, with a handful of her running team girlfriends, to try Nordic skiing. The girls spent much of the winter eating Skittles from the cafeteria vending machine, fooling around on their skis, and falling on the snowy soccer field. A new ski coach arrived when she was in ninth grade, watched the Skittles-eating skiers, and told them the endurance they had developed running would help a lot in their cross-country ski races, but what would also help was learning to stay upright. He would teach them technique.
By the time she was finished with high school, she was an all-state runner, had won four state Nordic ski championships, and had been named an all-American Nordic skier three times. She had decided to pursue a career in the sciences (she was hoping she had outgrown her tendency to faint at the sight of blood) and was considering multiple college scholarship offers for her skiing accomplishments.
She chose the University of Denver, where she raced on the Nordic ski team, which in 2005 won the NCAA Championship. She studied biology, because she liked science, and she wanted to help people, like her mother did. She thought medicine would be a satisfying career, but when she went on some shadow tours with doctors, she learned that no, she had not outgrown her tendency to faint at the sight of blood. She could still teach, though.
She graduated with a degree in biology and was accepted for the master’s program at the University of Mississippi. She joined the Mississippi Teacher Corps, and spent two years in Potts Camp, population 416, where she taught science and coached the high school girl’s cross-country team. She thought “small town, rural Mississippi sounded cool.” Two years later, she moved to San Antonio, Texas, where she taught ninth-grade biology. She ran in the mornings, before work, for fitness and fun. In March 2011, she entered the local Prickly Pear 50K and finished first among women and 12th overall. She ran the Run Rabbit Run 50 Mile Race in the same year, where she finished sixth among women and 32nd overall. She decided she was ready for a 100-miler.
And that’s when, at the 2012 Run Rabbit Run 100, at mile 60, in Steamboat Springs, she asked herself who she thought she was, and quit the race. That’s when she realized “how important our mindset is during difficult things.” (She didn’t yet call it the pain cave.)
Dauwalter lives in Leadville, Colorado, and we discuss her life over the course of a few afternoons in the lobby of Leadville’s Delaware Hotel. She is 5-foot-7, blue-eyed, with streaked blonde hair and a wide smile. She tells me she doesn’t use a running coach or a detailed training schedule. She doesn’t use Strava. She runs about 115 miles a week. She wears socks with individual toes because they help prevent blisters (one of her sponsors is toe-sock maker, Injinji).
She says that after a couple cups of coffee in the morning (she likes flavored creamers, but regarding coffee brand, “the only thing I’m picky about is how quickly it can be in my hand”), she does some strength work, then heads out for her morning run. “I don’t have a plan. Sometimes, I don’t even know if I’m going to go out for 45 minutes or for four hours...I’m just listening to my body, otherwise not getting too caught up on what I do every day, just getting in good, solid miles, and figuring out how to do it all better.” (Kevin Schmidt, the nice rock climber she married in 2015, says “I have learned to not worry till four or five or six hours have passed.”)
The rest of the day she’ll spend answering email or sitting in Zoom meetings, then doing another workout—a run, a bike ride, no planned mileage—in the afternoon. At night, she and Kevin will have dinner and watch TV. They might go for a walk or sit by the firepit.
During our interviews, Dauwalter is gracious, funny (“The best thing about being sponsored? Free clothes!”), polite, aggressively optimistic (in 2023, she told her 66-year-old mother who had joined her in Arizona’s Javelina Jundred 100-miler and had, after 13 hours running together, mentioned she did not feel so well, that “that’s not useful thinking, so let’s not think it”), and hyper-articulate. Some of her answers, though, seem like they might have been uttered by the love child of Oprah and Tony Robbins after being focus-grouped and polished by a team of consultants dedicated to marketing ultrarunning as the athletic equivalent of sunshine, Zoloft, and lollipops.
She says (and has said to other reporters) things like:
“Winning for me is not on the list of importance. Connecting with people, making shared memories, that’s what it’s all about.”
And:
“If we can stay positive and just keep believing, we can do more than what our body might give us the signs it wants to do.”
And:
“My hope is that [her record-shattering summer of 2023] is just a stepladder for the next group of women to come along and elevate all of our games. I hope that I can just be one rung in that ladder but that in a few years, many people have set more rungs.” (In fact, in 2024, 32-year-old American Katie Schide took the win at UTMB, shattering the course record Dauwalter set in 2021 by 21 minutes.)
I ask Dauwalter if she had ever thought how her life might have turned out differently if she had moved to the east coast for college (Middlebury, among others, offered her a scholarship) rather than going to Denver, where she discovered the mountains. “I don’t know. Maybe I would have been drawn here anyway,” she says. “I’m definitely an eyes-forward person. I’m not dwelling on what happened or didn’t happen.” The best bit of advice she had ever received from a coach about running or from someone else about running or from anyone about anything? “I don’t think it was spoken advice, but I do think I had really incredible coaches who taught me so much throughout all of my years in organized sports.”
I had read that she had developed a “two-day bummed-out” rule for those races (rare!) where she disappointed herself with her performance (which, for the record, had less to do with winning and more to do with failing to exert maximum effort). Could she elaborate on some of the feelings she had on some of those recent 48-hour periods of being bummed out?
No, she couldn’t.
Okay, well, I understand the whole pain cave deal, how not just accepting, but embracing and seeking pain can help us grow. She says that the pain cave was revelatory, not just regarding ultrarunning, but when it came to some of the most difficult parts of life.
ldquo;I can’t give you, like, a concrete example of that right now.&rdquo?
“I can’t give you, like, a concrete example of that right now.”
Steve Friedman is a writer based in New York whose work has appeared in interviewing another ultrarunning legend, who was so angry at some of his competitors who had doubted his ability to run at altitude, because of his midwestern roots, that he spent 15 minutes alone in a shower after winning a 100-mile mountain race, screaming, “What do those fuckers think of the flatlander now? Huh? What do those motherfuckers think of the flatlander now?!!”
I hiked (gasping, sweating) with a Hardrock champion one late summer afternoon in Ouray, Colorado, and listened as he told me that people who focused on things like time in regard to trail running in general, and ultras in particular, were idiots, and those who raced for prize money and sponsorship and records and fame were greedy, self-centered idiots.
I shared breakfast at 4:30 a.m. once with an ultrarunner known as Mr. Mellow, who had just won the Hardrock 100 race in Silverton, Colorado, which features icy river crossings, 13 peaks over 12,000 feet, a total elevation change of 66,394 feet, and the very real possibility of death by lightning strike, drowning, and/or dehydration. When asked 29 and a half hours after the race what was the most memorable part of the course, he said, “the wildflowers were just amazing.”
I have spent time and gotten to know a lot of ultrarunners and ultrarunning champions—vegans, omnivores, atheists, men and women of faith—and some have expounded on some of the reasons they got into and even excelled at the sport, including abusive fathers, dying mothers, unwanted pregnancies, untreatable illness, addiction, horrible breakups, and life crises in general. I have heard it said, and I agree, that ultrarunners as a group tend to represent the flat ends of the bell-shaped curve regarding humanity—which is to say, they are unusual in their drive, zeal, and habits. They tend to be, among other things, recovering addicts, garden-variety obsessives, those with a bottomless hunger to prove themselves, as well as a bunch of plain, occasionally pleasant, sometimes very grouchy, and super-fit oddballs. Also, a few wildflower-loving Zen masters. But after spending time with them, I could always find, or least I thought I could find, some inner drive, some past trauma, some high-altitude metaphorical Rosebud, that explained the desire (if not need) to spend full days and nights running and walking and stumbling and gasping over terrain that might cause death and would certainly cause a lot of discomfort if not gruesome injury. Almost definitely puking.
Then I met Courtney Dauwalter, content, serene, self-possessed. Cheerful. Nothing to prove. Had I missed something with her, or imagined things with the others? Or maybe it was selection bias: For a journalist, raging ids and insatiable needs make for better copy than sensible and well-adjusted.
The more romantic of Dauwalterians, including the Olympic coach who played her video to her gold-medal-winning soccer charges, like to focus on the instructive value of failure and the awesome power of the human spirit. But Dauwalter is also strategic. She knew, as her high school ski coach had pointed out, that she had a good engine. She also knew she needed to improve her technique. Just because she had excelled at a 50-mile race didn’t mean she could excel at a 100-mile one. And just because she could run for a long, long time didn’t mean she could run for a long, long time in rough terrain.
She used to do her daily runs mostly on roads or the sidewalk. After quitting the 2012 Run Rabbit Run 100, she started training on trails more. She practiced picking up her feet, the better to avoid roots, rocks, and boulders. For the next few years, she ran with a lot of scabs, bruises, bloody knees, and bloody palms. (She still doesn’t feel “super fluid” on technical downhills.) She practiced running while carrying a pack. She entered a 24-hour race in 2013 and invited her family and friends and neighbors to run with her at different points, because she knew how isolating long races could be and she wanted to try running a ridiculous distance with a support group (roughly 20 people came out). All that—plus some weight training and stretching she added in 2019, after leg pain forced her to quit the Western States 100, plus the aforementioned awesome power of the human spirit, plus the unalloyed, infectious joy she brings to running, particularly running in the mountains—began to pay off.
Mike Ambrose, who was an athlete manager at Salomon and brought Dauwalter onto their roster, started running with her in 2017, when he traveled to Denver. They’d meet at 5 a.m. for runs along the city’s bike paths. He has paced her during the last three record-setting Hardrock victories. In 2022, every time she sped up, she began puking, until he told her to slow down. “I don’t want to dog it,” she said, and he told her she wasn’t dogging it, she was just avoiding puking. The next year, after she slowed down and stopped puking, the two bantered, swapped inside jokes, and as they descended, on mile 56, from Ouray to Telluride, tried to come up with their own country song, until they realized that “country music is really hard to write.” In 2023 and 2024, she didn’t puke as much, and Ambrose urged her, in a couple places, to “just scoot a little,” or speed up, and she did so.
She says she and Kevin “are not super enthusiastic about food, but we like to eat because it fuels us to do the things we like to do.” During training, or “normal life,” she’ll eat “anything and everything I want,” including Goldfish crackers, quesadillas, string cheese, jellybeans, gummy worms, and “anything you’d find in a kid’s lunchbox.” She keeps her race nutrition to a very small group of race foods: chews and gels from Tailwind, a sponsor (she has her own Tailwind “Dauwaltermelon” drink-mix flavor). “If the race is multiple days long (200-plus miles), then I’ll eat some real food like pancakes or McDonald’s.” She likes to drink beer after races.
Her hallucinations while running ultras have included Mickey Mouse standing on a stage throwing T-shirts out to a crowd, a circle of giant teddy bears hugging each other, and a leopard in a hammock “just sort of lounging.” Also live puppets playing on a swing set.
Must-Read Feature Stories.
She hasn’t hallucinated in a while (it could be that hallucinations occur most often in runners who spend the longest amounts of time on the course without sleep and as she has sped up, the hallucinations have stopped). “Yeah, I’m sort of missing my friends.”
When we spoke this past May, she told me she wanted to try Hardrock again, because “I feel like I have more to find out about myself on that course, and both years that I finished it, I finished with a feeling of, like, I learned a lot, but I could do better in this way or that way or whatever, and so it feels like I want to give it one more shot to see what else I can squeeze out of it.”
(She won, setting a third consecutive record.)
Dauwalter says she and Kevin “are trying to...squeeze as much living out of life as possible” and have realized “we don’t actually know what’s on the next page or in the next chapter, and so let’s just live this one as fully, as all-in as much as we can and have fun while we’re there....” They like Ted Lasso and often watch home renovation shows on HGTV.
She says she wants to be involved with ultrarunning for the rest of her life. “Whether I’m running the races or working the aid stations or, you know, cheering people on, I want to be part of it.”
She says her credo regarding running is, “You can be working really, really hard at something and you can be caring all the way about its results and how well you do at it, but you also can be having fun.
“Those things aren’t separate.
“You don’t have to always be serious if you care about something.
“You can be smiling and enjoying it and trying hard.
“And so my attitude going into races is always get to the finish line as best as you can today.
“Whatever you have today, let’s leave it all out there.”
Kevin says Dauwalter has “taught me lessons I even bring into my job.... If I’m worried about something that seems hard, or unobtainable, I try to take that first step, learn from mistakes, and keep driving forward....”
I emailed Dauwalter in August, three months after our days together in Leadville.
“We discussed examples from life (not running) where you have used the idea of the ‘pain cave’ to help you through challenges, and you mentioned that you would try to think of some examples. Have you thought of any?”
“No, sorry!”
Is Dauwalter simply not very self-reflective, or does the superhuman focus that world domination requires leave very little room for things like rehashing past difficulties? Is she just a private, polite person doing her best to deflect personal questions? Or does her obvious intelligence, combined with the demands of corporate sponsorship, mean that in this day of social media and viral everything, the very best answers are always the most anodyne ones?
I am not the only one who wonders. “A lot of ultrarunners have struggles or addictions,” says an ultrarunner, in voiceover, at the beginning of The Source, a documentary film that, according to Dauwalter’s website, “explores elite ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter’s source of will. How does the candy-loving, beer-drinking athlete crush 200+ mile races?” (Off camera, one can hear Dauwalter chuckle.)
In 2017, podcaster Joe Rogan, after interviewing Dauwalter, said, “She seems so normal. There’s no demon there. I’m like, ‘Where’s your demon?’ It’s a quiet demon. But it’s there. It has to be.”
Or does it? Maybe she is just one of those people who is constitutionally inclined toward optimism, incapable of too much self-defeating introspection or chronic self-doubt.
Maybe she’s smart enough not to give up anything too personal or painful. Maybe time in the pain cave and her ascension to ultra greatness has sanded off whatever sharp edges she might have once possessed, healed whatever hurt had formed her, until she embraced the awesome indifference of the natural world that ultrarunners seem to love so much (“The mountains don’t care!” more than a few have exclaimed to me, as they explained how liberating that felt), the uncaring majesty of the mountains that challenged her daily, until she was egoless, unattached to things like worries and fears and regrets.
Blithe spirit in baggy shorts or silently suffering champion who can’t—or won’t—bleed on the record? Who knows? Does she? And would it matter if she did? When it comes to articulating what drives us, who among us can claim even remotely reliable-narrator status?
So she isn’t too concerned, or too forthcoming, regarding her inner life. So what? What she has done astounds, no matter what she says or doesn’t say. So maybe we should just enjoy this once-in-a-few-lifetimes talent and stop looking for demons.
She’s one of the greatest ultrarunners ever. That’s plenty. That’s more than enough.
How It Felt to Set a World Record in Running Running Was His Life. Then Came Putin’s War, the Washington Post, and often watch home renovation shows on HGTV, New York magazine, Bicycling, Runner’s World and many other publications.
