Sunny Stroeer spent years working as a business consultant before burnout pushed her to rethink what success looked like. She left the corporate world in search of adventure and went on to become one of the most accomplished endurance athletes in the outdoors, setting more than 20 Fastest Known Times across the globe. In 2024, she became the first woman to ski the full Iditarod Trail, a feat that cemented her reputation for taking on ambitious challenges in some of the world's harshest environments.
Sunny Stroeer spent years working as a business consultant before burnout pushed her to rethink what success looked like. She left the corporate world in search of adventure and went on to become one of the most accomplished endurance athletes in the outdoors, setting more than 20 Fastest Known Times across the globe. In 2024, she became the first woman to ski the full Iditarod Trail, a feat that cemented her reputation for taking on ambitious challenges in some of the world's harshest environments.
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Shelby Stanger:
One of the things I love about my job is that I interview a lot of people who built a conventionally successful life and then made a hard pivot to chase adventure. Of course, that really resonates with me. I left behind a salaried position in marketing to pursue a career as an adventure journalist. When I did that, it was terrifying, but that career switch has been one of the most fulfilling decisions I've ever made. Today's guest, Sunny Stroeer, knows exactly what I mean. For years, Sunny was a high-powered business consultant with a stressful lifestyle. After suffering from major burnout, Sunny chose to leave the corporate world to chase adventure. Since then, Sunny has set over 20 fastest known times on trails and mountains around the world. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
In 2024, Sunny became the first woman to ski the full Iditarod Trail. That's over a thousand miles in the dead of the Alaskan winter. Between all of her own adventures, Sunny runs a guiding company, as well as a foundation dedicated to supporting women as they go after their own wild ideas. Sunny, your name is German, you have a tiny bit of an accent. Where did you grow up?
Sunny Stroeer:
I grew up in Germany, born and raised, and I lived there until I was 18, came over to the US for school, and pretty much never looked back since. So at this point, I've been in the US for more than half my life, more than 20 years, and I very much consider this my home.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, I didn't realize you didn't grow up here. Were you always outdoorsy as a kid? Were your parents outdoorsy? Did they go camping?
Sunny Stroeer:
I grew up with parents that were kind of adventurous, but in a very conventional way. So they'd make me go outside, we'd go on hikes. We went skiing in the winter, and this is skiing in Europe, so it's very different from here. You could go and buy a resort ticket for 20 bucks a day and take the whole family. It was fine. So we would do all of that, but then we'd always come back to a comfortable bed and a hot meal at the end of the day. And I definitely never did any type of real crazy, insane, way remote, the type of stuff that I do now, but things change, right?
Shelby Stanger:
How interesting. So you went to school, university in the United States, you went to Harvard.
Sunny Stroeer:
I did.
Shelby Stanger:
So Massachusetts. From what part of Germany were you living in?
Sunny Stroeer:
I lived right close to Frankfurt, so kind of smack in the middle of the country.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay.
Sunny Stroeer:
And I actually started out my university years in Switzerland, but then after that first year, I transferred to Harvard. At Harvard, I started getting into backpacking and that kind of was the beginning of the end.
Shelby Stanger:
In college, Sunny joined a student backpacking trip to the New Hampshire's White Mountains. The hike was extremely challenging for Sunny, but she loved it. And the next year she became a student guide. When she wasn't adventuring in the mountains, Sunny was focused on schoolwork. After undergrad, she took a job in investment management before continuing on to get an MBA. From there, she went on to work as a strategy consultant for a major firm.
Sunny Stroeer:
For me, the choice to become a consultant was really predicated on the financial necessity because I walked away from my MBA with six figures in student loans and I needed to go and pay them back.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah.
Sunny Stroeer:
Plus, I was also so set up and so conditioned to pursue some form of a fast track, high-powered career, and consulting just ended up being the actual corner of the business world that seemed to fit the best for me. But really, it wasn't a choice that I necessarily questioned a lot when I was making it. I just thought that that's what I had to do. So I gained so, so much from consulting, but I also recognized quite quickly that that just wasn't something that made my heart sing.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, but it is a really good background to have and interesting because you probably worked with so many different people and saw how businesses run, and if you could take that to the outdoors, how cool.
Sunny Stroeer:
I had a moment when I was up for manager promotion, which is considered the hardest promotion in consulting to get, and I was debating if I should walk away, not because I wasn't going to clear the hurdle, but just because the work was not something that I really was passionate about. And a mentor of mine said, "You know what? You really need to stay. You need to get that promotion and you need to work as a manager for at least a year and here's why. Because if you do that, you are going to build a level of confidence that nobody can ever take. Once you're a manager, you're going to learn to tackle any problem and look at any challenge and issue in the world essentially, and you're going to have a way to think about it and to frame it and to start taking a bite out of it." And I listened to that advice and in retrospect, I think that my mentor was very, very right in saying that.
Shelby Stanger:
So what ultimately made you walk away? What was the decision? What was the moment?
Sunny Stroeer:
The moment I decided to walk away from my job was when I handed in the final deliverables on a project that completely broke my back and essentially just put me deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into burnout. I had a project where I worked 43 hours straight, literally started on a Tuesday morning, didn't go home until Thursday morning. And even when I went home on Thursday morning, I didn't get to go home because the work was done. I got to go home because I had to deliver the final presentation to the CEO at 8:00 in the morning and my team who are still working on trying to finish it up are saying, "Hey, you're not coherent because you haven't slept and you need to go and deliver this presentation, so you better go and get some sleep."
So anyway, that project was a turning point for me and it was a very illuminating exercise in A; how much I can get done with an amazing team, but also B; how fluid and unprotected my personal boundaries are. And the result from it was that I just found myself in acute burnout and I saw no path forward on the track that I was on and made a decision to quit.
Shelby Stanger:
Right then?
Sunny Stroeer:
Right then. Right then and there, I sent an email to the whole partner team saying, "This is it, I'm done." On a Friday afternoon. And then I finished up the project on Saturday and Sunday into Monday morning because there was still work to be done and I was the only person who could do it. And then by the time Monday morning rolled around, I thought through the rational consequences of my decision to quit. And at the time I still had a bunch of student loans. They weren't all paid off yet. And I also was and still am a German citizen. So my ability to be in the country was tied to my employment. And the minute that I walked away from my job, I was going to lose my work permit and have to leave the US, which is where I built my life.
So as those pieces kind of came into focus, I sent another email to the partner team and I said, "Hey, so by the way, I'm quitting. I told you that on Friday, but I'm not going to quit this week or in two weeks. I'm going to give myself until the end of the year." Which was like eight months out. "I'll go and see through my projects until the end of the year. And as of December 31st, I'm going to walk away."
Shelby Stanger:
Sunny used her last few months at work to plan her next move and she found herself itching to spend more time outside. She decided to try van life, which would give her the freedom to drive to any trailhead or mountain she wanted. It also meant that she could keep her cost of living pretty low. And with the money she'd saved from work, she could enjoy herself for a while without having to find a job.
Sunny Stroeer:
I had read an article about Alex Honnold, and in that article I saw a photo of his van. And I think that was the first time that I ever had any concept or idea of the fact that there's such a thing as van life and people actually go and live on the road and just pursue adventure. That was completely unknown to me at the time. And then I'd quit my job and I knew I wasn't going to have a lot of money, but I really wanted to go and have adventures. I was like, "Oh, I'm going to go and live in a van." So I bought a Chevy Astro van off of Craigslist for 2,800 bucks and started building it out and moved into it. And that's what started my adventures.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. I'm curious what song played in your head when you first moved into your van and you were like, "Oh, I'm so free."
Sunny Stroeer:
The reality was actually the complete opposite. So when I first got the van, it was a disaster and I had all these second thoughts and questions because again, I'd been working as a consultant, I'm traveling around the country and around the world on projects, flying comfortably, staying in really nice hotels. I actually didn't own a car at the time. I only had rental cars because I was traveling so much it didn't make sense for me to have a car in Texas where I was living. And then I buy this piece of junk for 2,800 bucks off Craigslist. It had like 200,000 miles on it, but it smelled to the high heavens. It was nasty. And I'm literally sitting in traffic, driving this thing home from where I picked it up. And I'm just thinking, oh my God, what did I just do with my life? This is terrible.
So for a little while, I had the van parked at the top level of my parking garage in Houston, and then I grabbed a couple of tools and started building it and got it done right before I had to move out of my apartment on the 31st of December. And that's the moment where that feeling of freedom really came in.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So you go, you live in a van, and then it sounds like your whole life just starts becoming wild idea after wild idea after wild idea.
Sunny Stroeer:
I would say that that's an accurate description in a lot of ways. And I will say, as I moved myself into this van and I completely pivoted, I think the most meaningful and most important thing that I did was that I gave myself permission to not think about the future for a little bit. All that I wanted to do for a couple of months was to just be able to live and to enjoy and to thrive doing the things that truly bring me joy and that I'm truly passionate about. And I knew that I had a super limited financial runway. I knew that I had no, at the time, legal way to make money again because I had given that up.
I was now back in the US on a tourist visa, so I really can't go and seek gainful employment. I had all of these constraints, but I just said, "You know what? It doesn't matter. I know that I'm okay in the moment. I know that I'm going to be okay for the next three to six months. And then I'm pretty confident thanks to my trajectory, my career, my experience, my education, that I will be able to figure something out again. So for six months, I'm just going to park all of the planning, all of the thinking, all of the worries, and I'm just going to be in the moment."
Shelby Stanger:
Sunny settled into her new life of adventure. She visited national parks across the country, rock climbed, hiked, and spent as much time outside as she could. During this time, Sunny kept coming back to a memory of a previous expedition she did to Aconcagua in Argentina. She'd always wanted to go back, so Sunny decided to put together an all-woman's expedition to go down to South America and climb the mountain together. Tell me what happens with a group of women who climb a mountain?
Sunny Stroeer:
So that was a big question that I had before I put together this team, because I figured it's a self-selecting crowd who shows up for a challenge like this. It's going to be a bunch of very strong personalities, probably very driven, very type A. You put all of these women into a pressure cooker of an expedition environment. What happens? I had no idea. I honestly had no idea. And I was prepared for it to be really, really tough and really challenging, and I was hoping for it to be really cool and really amazing, and it turned out to be both.
It was a really unique and really powerful dynamic that we fell in so, so quickly where we're open with one another, we're sharing with one another, we're vulnerable, we're communicating a lot. We're doing all the things that women kind of tend to do in normal life. We're just doing it in this pressure cooker environment. And comparing that experience to the experiences that I had had climbing with male partners and in co-ed teams and with predominantly men, I was like, wow, this feels really different. The fabric of the experience, the fabric of the social interactions is materially different and I love it. And I think there's something here. And I think if more women got to experience this, we would see a very different level of participation of women in the high mountain realm.
Shelby Stanger:
After the expedition, Sunny's friends went home while she stuck around Argentina a little longer to do something spontaneous. She wanted to climb Aconcagua again, but this time she'd set out alone and unsupported to break the fastest known time. What inspired you to do an FKT?
Sunny Stroeer:
At the time, I was really deeply invested in trail running. I was doing a bunch of ultra races. I'd been spending a bunch more time at high altitude, and I was curious what it would feel like to go and put those elements together. And I started to wonder and say, wow, I have some extra weeks on the mountain. I wonder, could I potentially go and run this thing?
Shelby Stanger:
So you got the FKT, you did it. And I'm just curious, how did that change you?
Sunny Stroeer:
When I got that FKT on Aconcagua, I was really proud of having done it and I was proud and happy that I was able to pull it off. But the reality is that that day was actually a really, really, really difficult day in the mountains for me. And I'm not at all proud of the process that allowed me to get the FKT. And the decision making that took me through that day was really, really poor and something that I'm still learning lessons from. So what I mean with that specifically, I had a really, really bad cough for probably two and a half weeks or so and was suffering from that right up until I tried for the speed record. And at the time that I tried for the speed record, which for what it's worth, was a run from base camp at about 14,000 feet to the summit at about 23,000 feet. It's a six-mile route, took me just under nine hours to do it.
But when I set out to go and pursue that record, I thought that I was recovered enough. I thought that I was healthy. So I got to the summit, I radioed down that I was up there, I took photos for proof, I stopped my watch, I had set the record, and I figured all that I had to do at this point was walk back down, which shouldn't be that hard. But guess what? The moment that I started walking off the summit, I realized that I couldn't breathe and I had zero energy left in the tank. I was way up at 23,000 feet on my own, and I ended up taking dexamethasone, which is a rescue steroid because I was so scared and so weak and I had no idea if my body was going to stay with me essentially to take me off the mountain.
And then eventually I ended up radioing to a friend of mine who was down at base camp and I said, "Hey Libby, can you please come meet me because I'm worried that I'm not going to make it back down by myself. I'm worried I'm going to sit down and just not continue on."
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, that's so scary. But you did make it.
Sunny Stroeer:
I did make it. I will say if Libby hadn't been there, she's a trained nurse and ICU nurse, if she hadn't been there, I think I probably would've gotten helicoptered off the mountain because I was so strung out and I was so not okay. I was severely tachypneic where I couldn't actually go and form a full sentence. I could say two words and then I would have to gasp for air, and that was still true 24 hours later. So if she hadn't been there to keep an eye on me, I would've gone to the medical staff at base camp and the medical staff at base camp would've looked at me and would've said, "You're in deep trouble and you need to go to a hospital right now."
So that's why I'm saying, yes, I set the record. Yes, I got the FKT. Yes, it was the first FKT that I set. Am I proud of it? Not really, to be honest. I'm grateful that I was able to do it, but my process and my risk management was absolutely atrocious. And what's worst of all I think is that I thought I was being safe and I thought that I was leaving gas in the tank until all of a sudden I realized that I was in deep, deep, deep trouble.
Shelby Stanger:
In 2017, Sunny Stroeer set an FKT in Aconcagua that garnered attention from adventure publications like Outside Magazine and National Geographic. A few months later, Sunny was in Nepal, after leading an expedition in the Himalayas, when she decided to try for another FKT, the 136-mile Annapurna Circuit, a famous and extremely challenging backpacking route.
Sunny Stroeer:
I had another 10 days or so before my return flight to the US was scheduled, so I was looking around and thinking about, okay, I'm really acclimatized. I'm pretty fit. What could I go do with these couple of days? I started reading about the Annapurna Circuit and I'm like, "Oh, that looks cool. I would like to probably hike that." And then I started thinking, "Oh, why would I hike it? If I can do it fast, might as well run it. If I run it, I might as well try to put a record on it."
Shelby Stanger:
Sunny ended up completing the circuit in just under four days, setting the fastest known time. A few months later, she headed back to South America and set an FKT on a different route on Aconcagua. Then in the winter of 2024, Sunny geared up to go after a totally new wild idea. She became the first woman to complete the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational in Alaska on cross-country skis.
Sunny Stroeer:
The Iditarod Trail is a household name for a lot of adventure folks in the US because there's a huge sled dog race on it every year, and it's a big, big deal in Alaska and nationally. But the race that I started looking at and that I've now participated in several times is not the dog race, it is the human powered cousin to the sled dog race essentially. So it's called the Iditarod Trail Invitational or ITI for short, and the ITI takes place on the same trails as the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. It's pretty much at the same time of year, and you can choose between a short distance and a long distance. The short distance is 350 miles, only 350 miles, and the long distance is the full 1,000-mile trail that takes you from somewhere close to Anchorage all the way up to Nome where the sled dogs finish their race as well.
Shelby Stanger:
Crazy. Had you spent a lot of time in Alaska? Why did you want to do this?
Sunny Stroeer:
I had spent almost no time in Alaska. The reason that I wanted to do it is because I had this crazy idea for me to go to the South Pole and try to do that solo and unsupported. The only challenge is that I'm not a cross country skier. I have no polar experience. I have no really extreme cold weather experience. I mean, I have this mountaineering background and the ultra endurance experience, but that's very different from being on the ice for 700 plus nautical miles and just being way out there in Antarctica.
So because I had this fixation with the South Pole, I was trying to figure out what I could do to get ready, and I came across the Iditarod race and I was like, "Oh, that seems like a pretty good warmup for it." You have extreme cold temperatures, you have a lot of difficulty, but you have a little bit of infrastructure, so wouldn't it be cool if I just attempted to do this and kind of earn my chops.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious, when you started this, did you want to get the FKT? Was that the goal as well?
Sunny Stroeer:
Not necessarily. It's not really an FKT type of thing since there's an organized event that happens every year. Now, the ITI is an invitational. You have to qualify for it and then you have to apply for it and then you have to be selected. And of course, I didn't have any qualifiers for the ITI. I'd never done a winter ultra endurance race in my life, and I just called up the race director and said, "Hey, this is what I want to do. This is who I am. This is what I have done. I'd really love the opportunity to go and race the ITI because I'm treating this as South Pole preparation." And the race director looked at me and said, "First off, you're kind of nuts, but I like it, so let's have a conversation."
We met for coffee, we had a conversation, and she says, "Okay, you know what Sunny? You're insane and this is very unusual, but I'm going to make an exception for you. I will allow you to go and participate in the race. You are not doing the 1,000-mile distance. You're welcome to try and do the 350. And then once you've done the 350 a couple times, then you can go and think about the 1,000-miles." And when she told me that, I was actually really bummed and pretty upset because I was like, "Oh, come on. I mean, if you're letting me in, can you just let me try and do the whole thing?" And she's like, "No, it's way too dangerous and nobody has ever managed to actually go and do the 1,000 unless they've done the 350 first." I'm like, "Okay, great. I love challenges. It sounds like it's right up my alley. Why don't you allow me to do the 350 and if I finish the 350, then I get to continue on to do the 1,000?" She's like, "No, that's not the way it works. You're going to do the 350, you're going to go back home, and then you come back another year and then you see if maybe you have the chops for the 1,000."
So anyway, that was the basic setup. And I show up to my first 350-mile race in 2021, and I knew absolutely nothing about extreme cold weather, ultra endurance, anything. I show up to the start, and I am just so scared because being there, I realized how serious this was and how out of my element I was. And I figured that there was a very high chance that within the first couple of miles or most certainly within the first day or two, I was going to have to evacuate from the race course because I was so out of my depth. Now, I did end up finishing the race barely, barely, barely. I mean, I finished with, I think, 25 minutes to spare on the clock. I was the last person to make it across the line before the cutoff, and I have so much more to learn. I need to come back next year and I need to do this again.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow. And so you did it in 2024. You decided, I'm going to do the whole thing.
Sunny Stroeer:
I decided to put my name in the hat to try and ski all the way to Nome, which is the 1,000-mile distance. And up until that year in the history of the race, nobody had ever managed to actually complete the 1,000-mile distance on cross country skis. It had been done on a fat tire bike a bunch of times. It had been done by a number of people on foot, but there hadn't yet been a skier who had managed within the context of the race to go and ski those 1,000 miles in 30 days.
Shelby Stanger:
No man or woman?
Sunny Stroeer:
No man or woman.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow.
Sunny Stroeer:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
What was it like to actually complete it?
Sunny Stroeer:
It was a nail biter. It was a complete nail biter. I mean, because it had become known amongst the race community that nobody had managed to ski to Nome, it kind of started to be this prize. There were a couple of guys who were working on it, and some of them, some amazing athletes, this guy Azburen who ended up doing it in 2024 as well and being the first person ever to accomplish the feat. So long story short, because the whole race community knew that nobody had ever actually skied to Nome as part of the Iditarod Trial Invitational, there were a bunch of people who were trying. And I think in 2024, when I first looked at the roster, there were 11 of us. There were 10 men and there was me. So there were four men who did it first, and then there was me who did it that same year.
Shelby Stanger:
Sunny crossed the finish line of the ITI after 29 days, 22 hours and six minutes, less than two hours before the cutoff. The course was relentless. The landscapes were barren and frigid, but it was still beautiful. The temperature swung between mid-30s on the warmest days to negative 50 at night. Sunny suffered plenty of mishaps along the way. She ended up losing the crown on one of her teeth from all the energy bars she was eating. On day four, as she was crossing the Alaska Mountain Range amidst negative 55 degree weather, she realized that she had left her big puffy coat, which was a safety layer, at her last stop. There are plenty of moments when she thought her race was over, but every time Sunny was faced with the choice of dropping out or staying in, she opted for the unknown of continuing on.
I think you are really interested in pushing the line between failure and success, and you always have been, it sounds like.
Sunny Stroeer:
I think that's a very accurate diagnosis. What's really important to me is I love dancing with uncertainty and I love that line between what you're calling success and failure. For what it's worth, when people talk about failure, I typically have a very different definition from how we use the term as a society. What I'm trying to say is yes, I love playing that line between success and failure, but to me, dropping out of something or stopping short of something or not finishing something isn't failure. What failure really is having a suboptimal process where I can't look in the mirror at the end of the day and say, "I'm proud of how I did that and I'm proud of the decisions that I made, and I feel really good about how all of this went down."
Shelby Stanger:
How do you deal with the mental part of all of this?
Sunny Stroeer:
The interesting part for me about the Iditarod Trail was that I really, really, really wanted to be there every single day. I question that sometimes because particularly early on... My husband was in the race as well. He was in the shorter race, the 350, and he was traveling on a fat tire bike, so it's not like we were racing together because we had completely different speeds, but I knew that he was out on the course and I knew that he was doing something that was a big challenge as well. Then we got some really, really bad weather three or four days in, and my husband decided to call it quits. I said, "You know what? Yep, this is insane, and I'm going to continue on."
So when that happened, I had to do a lot of soul-searching because it would've been so easy for me to just get on that little bush plane with them and be like, "Screw this, I'm out of here." The more I thought about it, the more I realized that even though every moment was so, so, so, so difficult, I wanted to be there. I had things to learn, I had things to discover, and I kept asking myself, "If I go home right now, what would I do with that time that I get back, the three weeks or so that I would be giving back at this point?" My answer was, "Well, I'd go back to running a business and writing and doing creative stuff and being behind my desk essentially, and that's not bad, but that's not what I want to be doing right now. I want to be here and this is where I'm supposed to be."
Shelby Stanger:
Ever since completing the Iditarod Trail 1,000 miles, Sunny has had some new wild ideas up her sleeves. She's continued to build an expedition company and an awesome scholarship program called the Summit Foundation that helps support women to go after their own wild ideas. If you want to learn more about Sunny and see what she's up to, check out her Instagram @Sstroeer, that's S-S-T-R-O-E-E-R. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce-Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Botulla and Joe Crosby. Thank you again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. As always, we love when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.