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
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 returning to her ultimate goal: running the Boston Marathon, for her 13th time.
Sapper was so thoughtful and complete through this pro...
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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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May 20, 2025 • 37 mins
Jessica Mena is a longtime runner now focused on ultra trail running. She’s continually driven to discover what she is capable of: beginning with her first marathon, at age 12!, to today, as she explores running long distances on the trails.
This episode focuses on Mena reaching one of her biggest goals yet: running 100 kilometers (62 miles) over hilly trails. She shares how it all went down, along with the running journey that ...
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May 13, 2025 • 42 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 episode of the Over 50, Sub 20, 5k Project, Part 9, left off.
As I mentioned in my last episode, I have decided to stop focusing so completely on this sub-20 minute 5k goal, so am just calling these running updates. I still have a sub-20 goal, but it's not my all-consuming singular focus...
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May 6, 2025 • 63 mins
Angel Tadytin shares the epic story of her first 50-mile trail race, and how it unfolded in unexpected and magical ways.
Tadytin is a wife, mother, social worker, and ultra runner, and she is from the Navajo Nation. She and her family currently live in Mesa, Arizona, but she’s originally from Page, Arizona, and the surrounding area.
Tadytin is also a lifelong hiker and outdoor explorer, and a
longtime weightlifter. In addition,...
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April 29, 2025 • 49 mins
This is a live recording from Sunday, April 20 at the Boston Marathon Expo. Once again, WRS host Cherie Turner teamed up with Julie Sapper and Lisa Levin from the Run Farther and Faster podcast to co-host an excellent panel.
This year's panel was titled Mental Strategies for Mastering the Marathon, and it featured exceptional masters marathoners Stephanie Bruce, Erica Stanley-Dottin, and Dot McMahon.
These women shared wisdom an...
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April 22, 2025 • 35 mins
This episode features prolific marathon runner and internationally competitive masters racer Gwen Jacobson.
Jacobson, who is 66, got started running in 2010, when she was in her 50s. She has run many distances, but without question she has the greatest affinity for the marathon: in the last 15 years, Jacobson has run over 120 marathons as well as one 50k.
In addition to loving the 26.2 mile distance, Jacobson loves big challenge...
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April 15, 2025 • 42 mins
This episode features Alia Qatarneh, whose running story is deeply infused with community and leadership, especially through the Boston area based TrailblazHers Run Co. Her story highlights the way the three forces of running, community, and leadership have coalesced to drive her running journey. And how that's led to her running the 2023 Boston Marathon—her first time running 26.2 miles—and then to running the 2024 Boston City 26....
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This is a special live recording featuring professional runner and 3x national champion Annie Rodenfels, in conversation with WRS host and producer Cherie; that's me. We sat down at the Tracksmith track house in Boston on Sat., March 22, with a wonderful crowd on a beautiful morning to have this fantastic conversation.
Annie Rodenfels is a born competitor. We get into how she progressed from being a high school soccer player who ...
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April 1, 2025 • 44 mins
This episode features ultra trail runner and mom Mayra Garcia, who is originally from Honduras and now calls Maryland home.
Garcia loves to run, and she loves to run very far: training for ultras is a big part of her life today. But not too long ago, Garcia wasn’t a runner at all. Not until one fateful day, when, instead of turning to coping with life's challenges in unhealthy ways, like using alcohol, Garcia decided to run.
Th...
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March 25, 2025 • 43 mins
This episode features longtime professional runner, entrepreneur, mother of three, wife, and so much more, Stephanie Bruce. In this episode Bruce, who is 41, shares the purpose and passion that’s driving her these days, as she moves into a new chapter in her running career. It’s a time of transition and exciting new paths forward.
As a professional runner in her early 40s, Bruce shares valuable experience and information about wha...
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March 18, 2025 • 31 mins
This is part 9 of the Over 50, Sub 20, 5k Project, where WRS host and producer Cherie Louise Turner is sharing her journey to break 20 minutes in the 5k, in her 50s, in real time.
Feel free to join the journey from here; it's not mandatory to listen to previous episodes in order to enjoy this one. Previous episodes will provide more context around this project and provide details about the many lessons Cherie has learned so far.
...
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March 11, 2025 • 35 mins
This is the transformative running story of Samantha Powderhorn, who is from the Sayisi Dene First Nations community, in northern Manitoba, Canada. She currently lives in Winnipeg.
Powderhorn’s story revolves around breaking cycles of addiction and healing trauma, for herself, her family, and her community.
Today Powederhorn is the first Sayisi Dene woman to have ever run a marathon. She is also an inspiration to her six childre...
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March 4, 2025 • 36 mins
Therese Munthe, 48, has always been athletic, and she's always been competitive. But she did not like to run. She believed she wasn't good at it—until she discovered marathoning, in her 40s.
That all changed in 2021. Munthe was looking for a way to connect with her father when he was facing the end of his life. This led Munthe on a journey that has changed her life and turned her into a serious marathon runner.
Just over the pa...
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February 25, 2025 • 34 mins
Molly Hurford knew she wanted to be a writer from a very young age. She also loved being active outdoors. But she had decided that, as a writer, she couldn’t possibly also be an athlete. That all changed in college.
Today Hurford embodies many identities, including owner/founder of Strong Girl Publishing, writer, podcaster, and athlete, including being an ultra runner.
This story is all about how Hurford developed into the athl...
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