Katie Arnold is a writer and journalist who took the ultrarunning community by surprise in 2018 when she won one of the toughest ultramarathons in the country, the Leadville 100. Her training was “unconventional," but it totally worked.
In 2018, writer and journalist Katie Arnold took the ultrarunning community by surprise when she won one of the toughest ultramarathons in the country, the Leadville 100. When an opportunity arose to compete in this famous 100 mile race, Katie committed to training for Leadville her way. Her training was “unconventional”, but it totally worked. At 46 years old, Katie completed the course with one of the fastest women’s times in race history.
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Katie Arnold:
Early on running was always just a way to move my mind. It was not about competition, it was not about racing. Although I did race with success, but I think that's where my story is so different from other pro runners. I didn't want to have this idea that I was trying to win Leadville. I never went into it thinking that. I wanted to run for the feeling I felt in the mountains, not for a goal.
Shelby Stanger:
In 2018, writer and journalist, Katie Arnold took the ultra running community by surprise when she won the Leadville 100. If you haven't heard Leadville, it's one of the toughest ultramarathon races in the world. The hundred mile race takes place annually in Colorado. It spans rugged mountain terrain and dirt trails at elevations over 10,000 feet. Participants have 30 hours to run the race and many don't even cross the finish line in time.
But at 46 years old, Katie Arnold completed the course with the seventh fastest woman's time in race history. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. Unlike most professional athletes, Katie Arnold didn't compete as a runner in high school or even in college. She grew up running on her own because she realized that moving her body outside helped her creatively and mentally.
Then in her late 30s, Katie started ultra running and she took it pretty seriously. When an opportunity arose to compete in the famous 100 mile race, Katie committed to training for Leadville her way. On the morning of the race, she wrote herself a meaningful reminder on the back of her hand.
Katie Arnold:
Smile and flow is what I wrote in Sharpie on my hand at probably 2:30 in the morning in the dark of the kitchen, in the rental house where I was staying in Leadville, Colorado about an hour before the start of the Leadville 100 which was my first a hundred mile race.
I do that before races kind of words that I want to run by. It's not premeditated. I go with what comes out of me in that moment. And in the hours before Leadville, I wrote those words because I wanted to just be in the joy that I always have felt as a runner for my entire life since I was seven years old.
I have a pretty unconventional story as an elite runner, I guess. But it was always for me about the pleasure of running. Not every day is pleasurable, right? But this sort of deep, pure joy that I feel when I move my body through the wilderness or as it was as a child around my neighborhood. And flow was a philosophy that I wanted to bring to the race. I wanted to stay in that flow state where it's not that it feels easy, but it has this effortless quality, this deep presence in the moment.
I like to think of it as like inhabiting the race moment by moment. So the more I smiled and was just joyful and sort of expressing my truest self, the more I flowed. And the more I flowed, the more I smiled. So it was this really perfect, completely accidental feedback loop that I just got in and I rode for 100 miles.
Shelby Stanger:
That sounds amazing and almost impossible. How did you get into running and how did you become the accidental champ?
Katie Arnold:
That's so funny you said that. I mean, I didn't put winning Leadville as the focus or as the goal, but I did practice. I've been running up the same mountain in Santa Fe. It's this little mountain called Atalaya. It's probably 2,000 feet of vertical gain. The high point is 9,200 feet. I've been running up Atalaya once or twice a week for 20 plus years. So that's not an accident, right? That's a practice.
So for people to say, "Oh my God, it was such an accident, or you came out of nowhere," I kind of laugh at that because I know how diligent I've been in my practice.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, let me put it this way. You're a little bit of an unlikely runner. The people that I think of who do Leadville, they're just 100 percent sponsored runners now. It seems like that's their job. You have this other job.
Katie Arnold:
Yeah. Also, I would more say that I'm the natural runner, not the unlikely runner. I think that my path actually challenges that much more narrow perception of what a pro runner looks like, which is competing in high school, running yourself to the bone in college. My path was really different, but it feels so natural to me. I've discovered very early on when I was seven, six or seven, that when I moved my body outside, stories started to flow in my mind.
I always knew I wanted to be a writer probably from age five or six when I first started reading. So I just discovered that when I played outside or when I shoot baskets in the backyard that repetitive motion puts your mind in this relaxed state so that your subconscious can bubble up and you have ideas that you don't have when you're trying to think them. And that's when I learned that there was this inextricable link between movement and the imagination.
So early on, running was always just a way to move my mind. It was not about competition, it was not about racing. Although, I did race erratically and with success. But I think that's where my story is so different from other pro runners is that it started from this intrinsic place of like I want to tell stories and running is how I unlock those stories in my body.
Shelby Stanger:
For years running has been Katie's secret weapon to get those creative juices flowing. She made her career as a writer and she worked as a managing editor for Outside Magazine for 12 years. Her award-winning work has been featured in the New York Times, Men's Journal, Marie Claire, Runner's World and more. A lot of Katie's writing talks about how to raise active adventurous kids. In 2019, she published a memoir called Running Home. In her book, Katie talks about how running became a healing force in her life especially after she lost dad. It's hard for me to describe why running helps so well with grief, but it does.
Katie Arnold:
I mean, we have such a similar story, although you were so much younger. I was older. I just had my second daughter. She was two or three months old. And my father died not suddenly, but over the course of 10 weeks, which is pretty sudden. I had this really intense grief response, which I'm sure was a mash up of postpartum and grief and a little bit of that sort of like approaching midlife existential crisis of like, "Oh my God, we are all mortal." Right? I was 38.
We are all mortal. We are going to die. And then you see you have this baby and you're like, "I cannot die. I just brought this creature into the world." But yet I know I will because my father just died. So my grief really came out as intense anxiety that I was dying. Again, I'd been running up the mountain, Atalaya in Santa Fe many years before this happened.
But in that grief state, I tried so many different things to ease my anxiety. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. So there's tons of different healers. And I tried so many of them. And the thing that would heal me was the thing I'd been doing my whole life which is running. I just realized that nothing worked better than going out into the wilderness and running.
Running as an adult has been a way to get into nature faster and farther and deeper than I can walking. So I would go out. I found that because I was more peaceful and not dying in my mind when I was running I wanted to elongate that feeling. So that's sort of why I got into these ultra distances because I wanted to make that feeling last.
For me, the big piece, I think for healing was to be in nature because when you're out in the wilderness whether it's big mountains or at canyon or the high desert or a forest is you feel small compared to nature, right, compared to the mountain or the Grand Canyon. And that smallness is not a frightening feeling for me, it's actually a consoling feeling of like, "Wow, you're part of something much bigger and it can hold your grief."
Shelby Stanger:
The rhythm of running helped Katie move through her deep sadness and anxiety. She was forced to be present breathing in the fresh mountain air as her body moved. This was her introduction to ultra running and it wasn't long before she started to enter races. Katie wasn't expecting to perform so well, but in 2014, she won the TransRockies three-day trail run. She went on to win several other 50K and 50 mile races. Then in 2018, she decided to enter a lottery for the Leadville 100.
Katie Arnold:
One of the reason I put my name in the hat for Leadville like many ultras right now, it's a lottery. There's way more demand than they have spaces. So you have to put your name in the lottery and just hope to get picked. I put my name in the Leadville lottery because in my life before our children, I was really big into mountain biking, while running the whole time. But I would say mountain biking was my more of my sport. And then I had kids and I was like, "I cannot maintain a bicycle and breastfeed my babies at the same time."
It was too mechanical. I was like, "I need something simpler." So I switched over to running because it was like my brain I just needed shoes and I could go out the door. But that said when I was really in my big mountain biking phase I always wanted to ride the Leadville 100. I never put my name in the hat. But it was always this thing I'd wanted to do. So when I came time to try to do 100, I was like, "I'm going to put my name in for Leadville."
The other reason was that a few years earlier I had done the TransRockies which is a three-day stage race. I had won the race three days. It goes over Hope Pass which is the main climb at Leadville and I had this incredible run up Hope Pass at TransRockies. I was the first woman over the pass and I just was like, "This is my element. This suits me."
So those two things are why I signed up for Leadville. And then when I got in, I was like, I was so surprised. I just remember the email came in and I just blurted it out in front of my husband. I'm like, "I'm running Leadville, which to me is always a good sign." When you say it out loud, it means you're serious. My training strategy was that everything counted like all time on my feet counted toward training.
So walking my kids to school, walking the dogs at night, someone once told me that 100 miles is all about time on your feet. So I was like, "I'm just going to log as much time as I can on my feet every day and condition myself to run when I'm tired." So that was my plan and coaching my kids lacrosse counted like riding my bike to the river to meditate counted.
So it was this very inclusive training plan. It was also way really fun. It was just what I love to do in the world for me. I've always been unconventional that I've been self-coached and I make up my own plan and I don't have a structured plan. I just sort of wake up each day and be like, "Where do I see myself running? How do I want to feel when I run?" And I follow that.
So I don't run with a watch. I don't really keep track of my pace generally speaking or I never track my miles. I couldn't tell you my weekly mileage leading up to Leadville. But what I did was I did like a bunch of training races. I knew I had to hit certain distances. I guess I did like a DIY 50K. My own run that I did was 30 miles. And then I did a 50 mile race in may and then I did a 100K race in June. And then I did the Leadville training camp, which I highly recommend because you get on 60 miles of the course.
So I had a couple of amazing days at that camp where I was like, "Oh, this is the feeling I need." That's when I think I knew I was going to do really well because I had these just incredible flowing days where I was tapping into the mountain's energy." I felt like the mountains have this energy that's way bigger than mine.
I'll run out of energy way before the mountains do. So I just need to flow with the mountains and ride their energy. So that was sort of the origin of that flow feeling. But I didn't start trying to figure out my pace until like maybe a week out, honestly, when I was like, "I need to tell my pacers when to expect me." And I would just tabulate what I thought I was running.
I had checked my watch a few times. But when I added it up, it came to like 21 hours. And only then did I look at the previous finishes and I was like, "Oftentimes that was a top one or two finish." But it was really important to me that I didn't put the cart before the horse or whatever. I didn't want to have this idea that I was trying to win Leadville. I never went into it thinking that. I wanted to run for the feeling I felt in the mountains, not for a goal. But when I added it up, I was like, "I potentially could be quite fast."
Shelby Stanger:
Katie's training plan might sound unconventional, but it totally worked. When race day finally came, Katie ran an average pace of 11 minutes and 53 seconds per mile which was one of the fastest paces in Leadville 100 history. When we come back, Katie talks about the nitty-gritty of moving into first place at Leadville and her secret to healing from injuries.
Professional athlete and writer, Katie Arnold ran a hundred mile race in just under 20 hours. Even though she was moving at a record winning speed, 20 hours is a long time to run. She had to eat and drink on the trail and stop for bathroom breaks. And to stay awake she drank caffeinated soda. The Leadville 100 course itself is no joke. There are steep inclines, rocky footing. And once it gets dark, runners have to use headlamps to navigate the difficult terrain. For Katie, this was her first time running a hundred miles all at once.
First of all, you had never run 100 miles before you did Leadville?
Katie Arnold:
No. I'd run several 100K's so that 62 miles. So everything after 62 miles was totally unknown to me.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you do it? What did you eat? What did you say to yourself? How did you keep going? That's crazy.
Katie Arnold:
Yeah. I did it in many ways. I had a lot of help. So I had great pacers. At Leadville, you can have someone running with you or in 2018 at least from mile 50 back. It's an out and back course. So the second half of the course. So I had great mental and moral support from my pacers. That's huge. I have a very good historically strong stomach for running. I'm finding wood to knock on. Very rarely do I have GI problems.
So I fuel religiously 300 to 350 calories an hour at that elevation. So that keeps my energy steady. And I eat goo. I mean, I straight up eat the gel. It goes right into my blood system. I know I need to eat if I start to trip a little, get spacey, if my energy starts to go down, I'm like, "Why am I out here?"
I take a gel and within three minutes, I'm kind of revived. So I ate constantly. I hydrated really well. I had trained during training to eat a lot of different things. So I say ate the gels. That's what I carried was goo. But when I come to an aid station, I'd learned... I'd trained at other races to eat the ramen or to eat watermelon or to look at the table and decide what I wanted and to get calories that way.
My amazing pacer, Wes, who had run Leadville before in Hard Rock 100 gave me great advice. He's like the race doesn't even begin until mile 63 which happens to be exactly the distance I'd run previously. But he said mile 63 because there's this long gradual climb out of the Twin Lakes aid station. And that was amazing advice because I went out real casual like not fast because I didn't want to go out fast.
I deliberately didn't want to know where I was in the pack. Probably about mile 15 I was climbing this hill and this photographer was there lying in the grass capturing the shot. And he's like, "Oh, you're in second place for females." My first response was like, "Oh no. It's too soon." I don't also want to know that. I wanted to stay in the flow and the smile and I was like, "Second place. All righty, shoot."
Right then and there, I made this conscious decision. Again, this was this mindset thing of like, "I'm not changing anything. Nothing changes. I'm not trying to catch up to her. I'm just doing my own thing. Smile and flow." And that continued the whole way. People would be like, "She's three minutes up. You're closing on her." And I was like, "We're just doing our thing."
I just smile and thank them and be like, "You're awesome." But nothing is changing. It was just ironic though that I actually caught up and moved into first place at mile 63 which is where the race began.
Shelby Stanger:
At 46 years old, Katie won Leadville. It was a massive physical challenge, but it also required mental conditioning and stamina. Over a decade ago, Katie started practicing Zen Buddhist meditation. Through meditating, she learned mindset techniques like focusing on her breath and acknowledging distracting thoughts. Katie uses those same lessons when she's racing and when she's facing obstacles too like injuries.
I know you've also had injuries. Every runner has them. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with when the thing that grounds you and is your meditation and is your mental health.
Katie Arnold:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
It contributes to... It's not is your mental health, but it's sort of medicine for your soul.
Katie Arnold:
Very much.
Shelby Stanger:
When that's gone, what do you do?
Katie Arnold:
It's hard. I've had injuries. I mean, as a competitive elite athlete, I've learned that it's okay to be injured and that's just part of the life I'm choosing. And as an outdoor athlete, that should actually predate the competitive elite ultra runner, right? I've always been an outdoor athlete. But it's really hard when it happens.
I'm taking some deep breaths because I just am getting over an injury. I broke my ankle about six weeks ago running down at the mountain and I was wearing spikes. So I was in a boot for five weeks. Very short term. In the scheme of things, it's not big, but it did take a mental toll.
I think the main thing is to know that it's not forever. Right? And this is what I learned sort of after I had this big accident five years ago that you have to get into this healing mindset. As an athlete, our bodies are so strong and we think of our bodies as our biggest tool and our best asset, but it's really our minds that are even stronger than our bodies.
And to get into that mental head space of healing yourself and believing that you're healing yourself. So the accident I'm talking about was a whitewater rafting accident. My husband and I do a lot of river trips. We're always on water. It's also medicine for my soul. This was in 2016 and we went to the middle fork of the salmon river up in Idaho, which is like a storied, whitewater run. 100 rapids and a hundred miles and big rapids. Lot of class four rapids.
This was a private trip. It was celebrating our 10th anniversary. And on the second mile, we flipped on a rock. Fluke, fluke. My husband is an amazing horseman. But we flipped. I fell out of the boat and hurt my knee. I had no idea what I'd done, but I turned out I'd broken it. I didn't know this and I stayed on the river for six days in the wilderness. Because it was easier to go downstream than to hike three miles back upstream with a hurt knee.
I got home and when the doctor told me it was broken, I was in disbelief. I knew I had a high pain threshold, but I couldn't believe it was broken. And he's like, "You need surgery and you're going to be on crutches for 14 weeks." And then I saw the surgeon and he's like, "If I were you, I would never run again." And that's that cinematic moment that his words echo like, "Run again, again, again." And it's like it goes. I was just gutted as you would imagine.
I sort of just took his story as true, right? I took his version that he knew that, that was going to be my story. He did the surgery and I started to recover. I suddenly realized that's his story, but it does not have to be mine. I took ownership and sort of authority over what my story was going to be. And this, again, no one really told me this in healing, but what I learned during that process was like simple things. But how you talked to yourself really matters.
So I never called it my broken leg, I called it my healing leg. And the minute I got out of surgery, I was healing. Right? And not only was my leg healing like passive voice, but I'm healing my leg.
It was just the way I spoke to myself. As a writer, and I'm sure you can appreciate this, I keep notebooks. You might call them a journal or whatever, but in my notebooks, I would write these affirmations of like, "I'm healing my leg quickly and completely." People would want to talk about the accident and I would tell them about it, but then I was like, "Let me tell you how I'm healing."
So I just reframed it from this brokenness to this healing wholeness and that was a practice. Meditation help with that visualization. Maybe four or five days out from surgery, my friend brought over a bike trainer and my husband set up my little cruiser town bike on it because I don't have like a stationary bike or a road bike or anything fancy.
He took the left pedal off and I would one-legged spin in my backyard on my mint green cruiser. And that was just to get my heart rate up and to feel human. To your point, you do want to try to do things to simulate that the energy you get from running. So I would spin in the backyard, but I would listen to podcasts. I listen to every ultra running podcast there was, and I then would go and write in my notebook visualizations of me running a hundred miles or me running through the mountains.
And again, it was just sort of intuitive. I didn't read a book on how to heal yourself. I just had to be very careful about the language I used to myself and what other people. Because when you have a broken leg, people are always like, "Oh my God." Or they look at you in the brace and they want to tell you their horror stories. You have to not let that in. So one morning I woke up when my leg was broken and I was like, "I need range like that sense of distance. I need to get out of my backyard and off this one-legged bicycle."
So I just drove to the trailhead with my crutches and crutched up this little sandy arroyo like a quarter mile. But that was so good for my soul.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, I've taken so much from this. I can relate to having someone in a white coat or like a figure of authority in the medical field giving me news. That was like so awful. And then deciding like, "Okay, that's your story?"
Katie Arnold:
The mind is so powerful.
Shelby Stanger:
So after you won Leadville, I mean, that had to feel-
Katie Arnold:
Amazing.
Shelby Stanger:
... really cool. Yeah. That's the most badass race you could win and you won it and you're a writer. It's not your full-time job to win races like that. So it's pretty badass. Did that change your relationship with running in any way?
Katie Arnold:
Oh, that's such a good question. I mean, yes. First of all, it just sort of like allowed... I'm just taking a deep breath because it actually was like a deep breath for me of like, "Oh wait." This thing I've been doing all my life and I felt is very natural and it's like a natural expression of myself and my mind, and it's like a natural thing my body knows how to do and does it well.
This was confirmation. Like not that I needed, but I think I must have because it just showed me that I belonged and that what I was doing was my path. I think it just made me realize that I didn't have to question myself. Right? We all have that very, some of us loud imposter syndrome voice in our head of like, "Oh, you're not a real runner because you are not sponsored or you're a 46 years old or you didn't follow the path that everyone does, which is training their brains out in their 20s."
I think with some wistfulness of like, "Boy, I wonder if I had started competing in my 20s, what a badass I would've been." And then I think in the same thought I'm like, "Well, I'm glad I didn't because my body is still so healthy and able to go so far." I don't know if I'd been just pounding it all those years. But I think it just finally... I have a pretty loud... That imposter voice can be loud in my head at times just for various reasons because I did follow a different path and this was like, "Oh, actually, Katie, you've known what you're doing the whole time. Your way is different, but it works."
Shelby Stanger:
There's a common thread through Katie's approach to healing, to training and to getting outside. Time and time again she trusts her body and her mind to work together. Running has helped her dream up stories and move through grief. She follows her own intuition to heal her body, to improve in her sport and to live out her wildest dreams.
Katie Arnold, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth Living. Your perspective as an outdoor athlete inspires me to look at life at age at injury and competition and especially at writing through a new lens. So thank you so much for this great conversation.
Katie leads running and writing retreats. Something I would love to go to called Running Home Retreats. You can find out about upcoming retreats and events on her website, katiearnold.net. You can also get Katie's book, Running Home on her website or anywhere books are sold. If you want to see what else Katie is up to, check out her Instagram @katiearnold. That's K-A-T-I-E A-R-N-O-L-D.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fasler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Chelsea Davis and our associate producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow this show, when you rate it and when you review it wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.