Women's Running Stories
Women's Running Stories features inspiring stories told by exceptional women runners about their running experiences. Hear about the many ways women are achieving excellence and changing their lives through the sport of running. Get motivated to reach your own running goals by women who are making it happen.
Episodes
October 9, 2025 • 14 mins
This is a special Part 2 episode featuring runner, role model, and groundbreaking racer Shawanna White. If you have not listened to part 1
of Shawanna’s story, which is just above this episode in your feed, I suggest you go back and start there.
This episode picks up where that episode left off. Shawanna had finished that part of her story discussed being inducted into the National Black Distance Running Hall of Fame, which hap...
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October 8, 2025 • 32 mins
This episode features Shawanna White, a very prolific competitor who has been recognized for her many accomplishments and contributions to the running community. Among her accolades, White was featured in the running documentary Breaking Three Hours, Trailblazing African American Women Marathoners; in 2022, she was inducted into the National Black Distance Running Hall of Fame; and she helped create The List, which keeps an account...
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September 30, 2025 • 58 mins
This episode features Nadia Ruiz, who is a hugely prolific runner, with a special fondness for the marathon. This is a love that began when she was a teenager. Running has been a source of strength, empowerment, and self-confidence, as well as healing: running has seen Nadia through good times and also through some dark moments. Up to today, when Nadia is hitting new highs in the sport, in her 40s.
In addition to her long histor...
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September 23, 2025 • 24 mins
This episode features Marwa Ali, who is from Kabul, Afghanistan, and now lives in exile as a refugee in Paris, France. How and why she left her home country and the part running and sports played in that journey is what her story is about. Moreover, it's about the power of being an athlete.
Marwa Ali, who is now 24 years old, has been an athlete
since childhood. She grew up in Afghanistan during a time when the rights
and freedom...
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September 16, 2025 • 38 mins
Verna Volker first started running as a way to improve her health. Over time, however, her relationship to the sport has grown and changed, to become a more personal and powerful part of her life. She started out pursuing road marathons and then moved to the trails, stretching her limits in ultra trail running. As her journey has evolved, so have her motivations.
This is a story about how Volker has shaped her running journey to b...
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September 2, 2025 • 33 mins
This episode features Mary Cass, one of New England's most competitive masters racers. At age 63, she is crushing it, and she's also one of the most generous racers you'll meet. Mary has that wonderful combination of being really open about sharing her knowledge and advice before and after races, and then from the time the gun goes off to the finish line, she's a fierce competitor.
Mary is undoubtedly an inspiration, and she has...
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August 26, 2025 • 29 mins
This is an update from me, WRS host and producer Cherie Louise Turner, about my running, training, and racing. This picks up from where the last update, which dropped mid-May 2025, left off.
It's been a summer of training and getting back to racing; surviving the heat, building back speed and strength, and looking ahead, with a new coach.
Plus, a shout out to the power of breathwork, especially for managing anxiety.
Mentioned...
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August 19, 2025 • 35 mins
Arielle Knutson has been an athlete since she was young, and this has shaped her life. She starting with gymnastics and then moved on to road running, triathlon, and trail running.
As she developed in her adult years and her career life, Arielle discovered strong connections between her work and athletic life. She went with it, and the two became strongly intertwined. And, in both realms of her life, Arielle goes all in.
In thi...
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August 12, 2025 • 46 mins
Summer Confuorto, a Gros Ventre, Cree, Mi’kmaq woman, tells
the story of running her first marathon: the 2025 Boston Marathon, representing the Ohketeau Cultural Center Natives Run Initiative.
Summer tells her story, from running along the water during her youth in her hometown of Falmouth, MA; to how running connects her to her own and also the local native communities; and then about her first marathon, the 2025 Boston Marathon...
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August 5, 2025 • 44 mins
Ultra runner and long-distance fast packer Jessica Pekari on the podcast! She shares the story of her most recent fastest known time (FKT) adventure: completing the 500 mile Colorado Trail.
Jessica is an Army veteran—having served as a medic in Iraq—and mother of three, with Blackfeet and Mexican heritage. She started exploring ultra running in 2015, and ran her first 100 miler the next year. Jessica then went on to win the triple...
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Professional runner for Oiselle and social media influencer Allie Ostrander is on the podcast! Allie is here to share what running and racing has looked like from her over the past couple years as she returned to elite level competition, in all the many running disciplines that she pursues, after going through treatment for disordered eating—a journey she’s been very public about.
Allie Ostrander has been an exceptional runner an...
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July 22, 2025 • 40 mins
Welcome Amy Ortiz to WRS! Amy is a runner who, over the past several years, has become a community builder and leader in the running scene, and now she's a coach, with a focus on creating space for women, especially women of color.
In this episode, Amy shares how she arrived where she is today in the running world.
A long-time resident of the Bronx, Amy's running is deeply intertwined with her interest in community building. S...
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July 15, 2025 • 42 mins
In this episode, Lisa Levin tells her running story through to today, where at 51, she’s more excited than ever to challenge herself and set motivating goals.
In addition to being a longtime runner with a particular interest in running marathons, especially Boston, which she has run an astonishing 22 times, Lisa is also a coach and podcaster, with Julie Sapper, who
was featured on WRS last week. Lisa and Julie co-host the terrifi...
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July 8, 2025 • 44 mins
Runner, running coach, and podcaster Julie Sapper is on Women's Running Stories! Her story here is focused on her return from a long-term injury: an ACL tear.
She tells about her thorough approach to healing and recovery and the nonlinear path to returning to running injury-free, all the way to reaching her ultimate goal: running the Boston Marathon, for her 13th time.
Sapper was so thoughtful and complete through this process...
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July 1, 2025 • 63 mins
This episode features runner, adventurer, and creator of the wildly popular Tough Girl podcast and Tough Girl Challenges, Sarah Williams.
These days, Sarah is well known for taking on incredible challenges, but it wasn't always that way. Here, Sarah tells her adventuring lifestyle origin story: how she transitioned from working in wealth management in London to exploring the world through epic adventures to challenge herself, to ...
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June 24, 2025 • 43 mins
This episode features the running story of Mireille Siné, a marathon and ultra runner, a coach, and so much more. And intertwined into Mireille’s running journey is an autoimmune condition she’s been navigating since college: lupus.
Since childhood, being active and participating in sports has been part of Mireille’s life, and that included running. Running became a more central part of her athletic journey through college and af...
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June 17, 2025 • 59 mins
I am bringing you a reair of a terrific episode.
I'm taking this one-week break because I've been working on a new project that we just announced, and that I know you'll be excited about: the podcast EARTHMOVERS, with Alison Mariella Désir, Stefanie Flippin, Verna NezBegay Volker. It will launch Aug 14. Keep up with news and information about EARTHMOVERS now on Instagram: @EARTHMOVERSpodcast. I'll be back next week with a new epi...
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June 10, 2025 • 60 mins
This is a special live report from the inaugural We Out Here Trail Festival that just happened this last weekend on June 7, 2025. It took place outside Seattle, WA, at St. Edwards State Park.
The trail scene is and has long been the whitest, most male dominated sector of the running world. Instead of continuing to wait for the system to change, RDs Aaliyah Earvin and Alison Mariella Désir stepped up and made the event that they h...
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June 3, 2025 • 54 mins
Sara Aranda is a trail runner and outdoor adventurer who has developed a strong interest in going after FKTs, fastest known times. But her outdoor passions are about much more than setting records: Aranda's motivations are spurred by processing life and death, grief and hope, fear and joy.
Aranda's passion for trail running began while she was in college. It was a space where she could process the death of her mother, who'd died...
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May 27, 2025 • 31 mins
Becky Croft’s life experiences have led her to becoming not only a performance minded runner but also a sought-after running coach. She’s developed a specialty in guiding runners through their menopausal years—pre and post.
Croft brings her own experience of post-hysterectomy menopause, which resulted from of a long history of endometriosis.
Croft shares her whole running story, which began later in life, in her 30s. She disco...
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