On Thanksgiving morning, I was awakened, as I had been every morning since Halloween, by a searing, electric pain in my face. It was as if someone were piercing my teeth, gums, tongue, cheek and lips with some kind of superheated electric needle. It was (and is) the kind of incandescent, white-hot, pure sensation that leaves very little room for thoughts of anything else.

Ferocity and joy; fury and compassion; laser-focus and panoramic vision; the ability to listen and speak not only from the head, but from the heart and gut – Jordan Marie Whetstone embodies all of these seemingly contradictory impulses, often in the same breath, the same thought, the same sentence.

Every June for a decade Kaci Lickteig has raced the sun from the ski village of Olympic Valley, California to the top of Emigrant Pass, four and a half miles into the Western States Endurance Run (WSER)... And every June for a decade, 95 miles later, Kaci Lickteig has burst from the following evening’s impending gloom and into the spotlit pandemonium of the Placer High School track, always and still among the top handful of women to finish the deepest, most iconic 100-mile race in the world.

Spend any time at all with Lickteig, though, and it will become obvious that the secret weapon behind her ultrarunning exploits is not her mighty legs and respiratory system, nor her font of Cornhusker pluck, but rather her seemingly bottomless reservoir of joy...

“The conversation is changing, and these things that women used to consider limitations are being taken off the table,” says RADrabbit athlete Latoya Harwell, who has nine children between 4 and 26 and is still chasing marathon PRs.

On February third 26 rabbit athletes were among the field of America’s fastest marathoners, toeing the line at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, in Orlando, Florida. Here are four of their stories.

Her voice is infused with a power that pulls a listener in close. Her words radiate joy and wonder. When she speaks—and when she writes—about moving through the world, at speed and under her own power, she taps into those experiences all endurance athletes treasure, but too often take for granted: the feeling of the wind in our faces, the sun on our skin, the world flying past in a blur as our well-trained muscles, hearts and lungs power us through the landscape

“To celebrate movement and play (pray) outside, I think about going back to that deeper meaning, of ancestors and their place on this earth, and acknowledging them, celebrating them, and being mindful about the beauty of every day. If you have the ability to do that, to be outside, to move, to run, to walk, then do so, because that’s a way of celebration.”

Justin Grunewald is back home in Colorado, fresh off a third-place showing at the Grindstone by UTMB 100k in Virginia. He has returned just in time to work back-to-back double shifts at one of the two hospitals – one in Minneapolis and one in Boulder – where he sees patients.

Any dream is more multi-layered, more nuanced, less easily described than what fits on the “short answer” section of a quiz. And Phil Shin is not one for the glib, hashtag-friendly answer. His undertaking is a difficult one, and a whole lot of people he loves and respects are on the journey with him, so he is thoughtful and expansive in his responses. He wants you to understand.

But for women, there is another layer to lonesome, another connotation: the notion of being exposed. Exposed emotionally and physically, exposed to the misogynistic mockery of those who oppose the very idea that a woman should explore a rocky trail in the middle of night, in the middle of nowhere. 

Our Tale of Two Women begins at the start line of the High Lonesome 100, on the morning of July 21, 2023, in the post-dawn brightness of the Sawatch Range, a playground of Colorado peaks rugged and extensive enough to inspire and intimidate the most seasoned trail runner.