The PowHERful Podcast with AJ McCord

“Being brave is not an absence of fear, you need fear to be brave.” Kelsey Pfendler is trying to do what no woman her age has done before - row from Monterey, California to Oahu, Hawaii by herself, completely unsupported, rowing a boat utilizing only her own power to get across the 2,400 mile stretch of Pacific Ocean. It sounds crazy, but for Kelsey, who’s been a professional whitewater rafting guide in the Grand ...

Women’s surfing is entering a new era, one of equal pay, consequential waves, an excitement for the sport that feels unquenchable. Six women are leading the way and in a groundbreaking Red Bull Media House Film they share their Now Days. Highlighting the surfing of world champions, Olympians and ceiling shatterers, four of the women sit down to share where they see women’s surfing going, how they’ve created collab...

CURIOSITY | Para-snowboarder Brenna Huckaby describes her journey from Louisiana to professional snowboarding as a bit of a “Jamaican Bobsled” story. After losing her leg to cancer, she was introduced to the mountains through a hospital program designed to help recent amputees rebuild confidence — the idea being that if they could conquer a physical mountain, the metaphorical ones ahead might feel a little less da...

RESILIENCE | When Oyuna Uranchimeg visited the US in 2002 from Mongolia, she had no idea how her life would change. A car accident left her paralyzed, in a foreign country, with a six-year old son at home who needed her. As she prepares for her 2nd Paralympics representing Team USA in wheelchair curling, Oyuna shares how she showed up for herself, despite days when she wasn’t sure she could. This is a story about resilience, ...

INTUITION | Natalie Allport appears to be absolutely fearless. A former member of the national snowboarding team in slopestyle, former competitive Crossfiter and current member of the Freeride World Tour where she snowboards off cliffs on raw mountain faces around the world, she takes on everything that comes her way without faltering. However, in this episode, Allport shares how developing a relationship with her intuition has hel...

SELF-BELIEF | Biathlete Deedra Irwin is chasing history in Milan-Cortina, trying to earn Team USA their first ever Olympic medal in Biathlon. With a military background, there was plenty of crossover for Irwin into a sport that involves multiples laps of cross country skiing and shooting. Her fight for a medal comes as she, along with her teammates, also fought to overhaul a culture within the sport that allowed sexual harassment t...

FIGHT | Annika Malacinski competes in the exact same sport, at the exact same level as her brother but he’s going to the Olympics and she’s not. The Steamboat Springs, Colorado native takes us inside the fight to get women’s nordic combined into the Olympics as the only sport in the entire Games that does not have a women’s division. This episode is for equality and the big and small things each of us women&...

LEGACY | Four time Olympic speed skater Brittany Bowe will be competing in her final Olympics in Milan Cortina and this episode is a reflection. It’s a reflection of her incredible accomplishments on the ice, World Records and Olympic medals included, but more than that it’s about legacy. It’s about how she’s lived every day in a way that transcends sport. This is for anyone who’s every felt like they ...

PROCESS | Jaelin Kauf has won nearly every accolade possible in her sport of moguls; an Olympic silver, seven-time US Champion, 16 World Cup wins and the reigning World Champion. But this small-town Wyoming athlete is leaning into something entirely different heading into the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics - the process. She explains how a mindset shift set her up to win the silver in Beijing and how leaning further into the present...

CONFIDENCE | Kaysha Love exudes the kind of confidence that is so true and solid it’s contagious. The Team USA Bobsled star shares her journey from gymnastics to track to bobsled, detailing how she’s stayed true to herself every step of the way. In this episode you’ll learn how Kaysha and her teammates get their sleds to Europe (spoiler alert it’s RIDICULOUS), what her favorite part of the sport is, and the ...

SUPERMOM | Canadian free skier Cassie Sharpe has added a new job title to her resume since her last Winter Olympics: mom. She says while it’s her favorite one yet, she’s still Cassie the pro skier too. While juggling both titles can be a bit chaotic when trying to travel the world and compete in the halfpipe, she dives into why she’s embracing being one of the trail blazers among female action sports athletes who ...

PURPOSE | At 20 years old snowboarder Maddy Schaffrick thought she would never pick up a snowboard again. The sport that had been her life, her career as a pro snowboarder out of Steamboat Springs, Colorado had wrecked her, ruined her, and left her wondering what on earth to do with herself as someone who spent very little of her adolescent years in the ‘regular’ world. She became a plumber, then a coach to little kids ...

CALM | Skeleton racer Mystique Ro has officially locked in her spot for Team USA and is heading to her first Olympics! In this [BEST OF] episode, get to know the daughter who grew up as one of the oldest of 11, how that chaos led her to an individual sport she calls her “kernel of chaos,” and what she’s learned from the trail blazers who came before her about creating a legacy that’s lasting in this episode ...

ADAPTABILITY | Sophia Kirkby is making her Olympic debut, along with her sport of women’s doubles luge, in large part thanks to her ability to adapt. She started luge at 7, but switched to doubles in her early 20s. Her father, her biggest cheerleader and the man who got her into the sport, passed away, now she carries his words on her gloves on race days. This episode is for those who’ve loved and lost, who’ve cha...

FEAR | In this [BEST OF] Episode of The PowHERful Podcast, AJ McCord sits down with Olympic Great British free skier Zoe Atkin. The Stanford student is entering the 2026 Winter Olympics as one of the top contenders to bring home a gold medal in free ski halfpipe. In this episode she gets vulnerable about her relationship with fear and how one psychology class at Stanford changed the way she approached the fear that would sometimes ...

OPTIMISM | At first Anna Gibson thought the idea of joining Team USA’s ski mountaineering training camp was a bit ridiculous. She’s a professional trail and track runner, and diverting into ski mountaineering, a sport that will make its Olympic debut in Milan-Cortina, wasn’t in her 2025 plans. But then she asked the question ‘what if?’ and had the courage to look at the positive possibilities. Instead ...

As women’s sports continue to rise, women’s surfing isn’t just riding the wave — they’re leading it. Lakey Peterson, a veteran of the World Surf League Championship Tour, represents a pivotal generation of female trailblazers. She recalls a time when winning a contest earned her $15,000, while the male winner of the same event took home $100,000. Since then, she’s witnessed the league evolve, ach...

Picking yourself back up after a fall is never easy but it’s something competitive mountain biker Jess Blewitt knows how to do all too well. When you look at her last few years it would be so easy to focus on the injuries, but that is far from what the first ever female entrant to Red Bull Hardline has done. Instead she shares a lesson about the power of presence and managing fear in a world where we're constantly told if we'...

Paris 2024 marked another meaningful step forward for equality in Paralympic sport, but the work is far from over. As winter Paralympians look ahead to their own moment on the world stage in Italy, they’re also bracing for the all-too-familiar media narratives that often reduce their complex journeys to a single moment or medal.

In this episode, 2x Paralympian Dani Aravich joins us to unpack what it means to shift the lens. T...