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The holiday season brings with it festive treats, sparkling lights, and The Radio City Rockettes. And, for many of these high-kicking dancers, running throughout the year ensures they can perfectly execute their routines multiple times a day all season long. In preparation for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, the women spend months rehearsing for six hours a day, six days a week. During the height of the Christmas season from the beginning of November through the beginning January, the 36 dancers are performing up to four 90-minute shows a day, as many as 17 per week. During this time, their...

Eliud Kipchoge captured the attention of the world when he broke the two-hour marathon barrier in October. Whether watching live or through replays and highlights, the Kenyan runner inspired runners all over the world. For Jon Ornee of Holland, Michigan, it certainly sparked a fire following months of recovery after being hit by a car while cycling in May. “I was inspired to really double down on getting after things that I love and make the best of this awesome life I’ve got,” Ornee, 38, told Runner’s World. “Once I was able to train again, I decided I wanted to...

In 2011, Allie Kieffer ran a 4:40.9 mile and placed third in the USA Track & Field Indoor Championships 3,000-meter event. She was fast. But she wanted to be faster. “We often hear that to run faster, you should lose weight,” Kieffer says. At 17 percent body fat, the now 32-year-old was already lean, but “everyone seemed leaner than me.” So, as she made the jump to the elite scene, Kieffer began cutting calories and fat. She lost 10 pounds and qualified for the upcoming Olympic Trials. She also developed a stress reaction in her tibia. Not only did running...

When Nate Boutcher was 22, he found out his kidneys were failing. He wasn’t totally shocked by the doctor’s news, since his dad had suffered from kidney failure throughout Boutcher’s childhood, but the diagnosis still hit him hard. Like most undergrads, he thought he was invincible at the time. “I knew that I had scarring on my kidneys when I was 18, but I didn’t think it would get any worse. When I went in at age 22, I had some swelling, but I thought it was because I needed stronger medicine—but it turned out, I had severe kidney failure,”...

“Why haven’t we been told this information?” A coach at a clinic asked me this near the end of a presentation I gave about my eating disorder, where I told my recovery story and offered strategies for what coaches can do to support their athletes. Disordered eating stories amongst runners seem to have been shared mostly through murmurs between coaches and private conversations between athletes who were feeling alone and struggling in silence. As a cross-country coach for Grandville High School in Michigan—four years assistant, two years head coach—I’ve noticed that eating disorders in sport is not a regular or...

Before her life changed last year, Lauren Ziegler hated running. The Grand Valley State University student, now 22, grew up playing team sports in high school, then joined a CrossFit club in college as a way to stay fit as an undergrad. “I started competing in CrossFit competitions in college,” Ziegler told Runner’s World. “I loved every part of my CrossFit workouts except for the running. It was my least favorite thing in the world. The most I would ever run was two or three miles a week.” One morning before class in December 2018, Ziegler woke up to find...

In her decade of living and running with cancer, last year was Carol Chaoui’s toughest yet. But in 2019, she’s mounted a remarkable comeback. She has stage 4 breast cancer and stage 4 thyroid cancer, but Chaoui, now 56, finished the New York City Marathon on November 3 in 5:39:34—faster than 13-minute pace—even though she has tumors all over her body, including in her brain. And she mostly walked for the last 19 miles after stumbling several times in the early going. “I’m a pretty fast walker,” she quipped after the race. Chaoui was first diagnosed with breast cancer in...

The stories make headlines and strike fear in the hearts of runners who read them. Athletes—often young and seemingly healthy—die suddenly at races, during training runs, or in the off hours between them. Often, the cause is sudden cardiac arrest, which occurs when the heart stops beating. It’s a short-circuit in the electrical impulses that govern your heartbeat. That’s different from a heart attack, typically caused by a blood clot physically blocking blood flow through an artery, though the two can be linked. According to the latest American Heart Association statistics, sudden cardiac arrest isn’t common among runners—about 0.54 per...

Around mile 10 of the Edmonton Marathon in August, Collin Jarvis was faced with a choice. One of the runners in the top pack pulled ahead at a pace that would lead to a sub-2:30 finish. Jarvis knew that he could either continue at a conservative effort with the group or risk hitting the dreaded wall while following the leader to a potential breakthrough. Just as he had done many times before in his life, Jarvis took the risk: He hung on to finish the race third overall, in a massive personal best of 2:27:30. Shaving 22 minutes off a...

Last summer, Kaitlin Gregg Goodman felt poised for another breakthrough. She’d just signed a new contract with the Boston Athletic Association High Performance Team and Adidas. Her training for the New York City Marathon was clicking—enough, she hoped, to improve on the 2:32:08 personal-best she’d set at the 2017 California International Marathon the previous December. All that changed in an instant. At the end of an easy second run one early August evening, about a quarter-mile from her Providence, Rhode Island, home, a distracted driver nearly struck her. She leapt to safety, but the fall partially tore the tendon attaching...

The last moment Tyler Moon remembers clearly in the Twin Cities 10-Miler on October 6 was seeing his parents and fiancée around the first mile. After that, he just has flashes of feeling off and struggling to breathe properly, followed by waking up in the ER with cuts on his face and a heavy, painful chest. Despite never having any heart issues in the past, the 25-year-old had experienced ventricular tachycardia, an irregular heartbeat that caused reduced blood flow throughout his body. Just after the 8-mile mark, the lower chambers of his heart were getting no blood at all, so...

Though Allison Longest had a normal pregnancy, soon after she gave birth to her son, Zachary, on December 16, 2013, she and her husband noticed that something was wrong. “He wasn’t eating very well, and after looking into it, the doctors at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health discovered that he had a heart murmur,” the 39-year-old from Indianapolis told Runner’s World. “But it was minor, and no one was that worried about it.” Two weeks later, Zachary was brought in for a heart check-up on Christmas Eve. To the surprise of his parents, the doctors diagnosed him...

A year ago, Secret Service Special Agent Rod Wellman never thought he’d be tapering for a 100K race. The distance was never something he thought would cross his path. He thought the same thing about lung cancer. Yet, on October 4, 2018, Wellman found himself at an urgent care center for a cough that hadn’t gone away after several weeks. Some scans and X-rays revealed the cause. “I’ve never been that sick before,” Wellman told Runner’s World. “I thought it was just a chest cold. Then, they told me I had stage 4 cancer in my lungs.” By the time...

At every mile marker of the 2019 Chicago Marathon, Jimmy Choi dropped to the ground for a burpee—complete with push-up—and then jumped back up on his feet before he got back to running. For each mile marker on the course, he did that same number of burpees—from one on the first mile to 10 on the 10th, all the way up to 26 on the 26th mile—adding another hard effort to the already grueling marathon distance. By the time Choi, 43, reached the finish line in 5:56:03, he had completed a total of 351 burpees in addition to running 26.2...

Jeannie Rice is faster at 71 than she was at 70. In October 2018, she stunned the running community when she broke 3:30 for a marathon, running 3:27:50 in Chicago. On September 29, almost one year later, she broke her own 70–74 world record in Berlin, running 3:24:48. She averaged 7:49 per mile. Rice, who splits her time between Mentor, Ohio, and Naples, Florida, ran even splits most of the race. All her 5Ks were in the 23-minute range, until the 35-kilometer mark (about 21.7 miles). Then she slowed to a 26:34. “I faded the last 5K, but I knew...

Eliud Kipchoge has become the first athlete to run a marathon in less than two hours, although it will not count as a world record. Kipchoge was supported by 36 pacemakers who accompanied him in alternating groups, one of the reasons the IAAF will not ratify the time as a world record.

When you get in the zone, your focus is on your run: With all that thought going to your pace, your exertion level, and the calculations of how many more minutes you have left in your tempo, you are left susceptible to some embarrassing midrun situations. We’ve all stumbled on a crowded trail, then looked around furtively to make sure no one noticed. Or had to pause our workouts to sneak into the nearest bathroom when long runs made our stomachs rumble. But we wondered: Are there any midrun situations that really get you blushing, even well after the fact?...

At age 35, with six months of chemotherapy and three weeks of radiation behind her for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Oregon resident Karen Baas didn’t feel relief because her treatments had ended. She felt poisoned. “Of course I was grateful to have had treatment and get past it,” she told Runner’s World. “But before I got cancer, I was a vet tech, and one of the chemicals we use for euthanasia is red. It turned out one of my infusion chemo drugs is also red. I can’t tell you how disturbing it is to make that mental connection.” Three days after her...

On Sunday, September 15, Marie-Ange Brumelot had just crested a hill in Central Park on her third and final lap of an 18-mile race hosted by the New York Road Runners. At that point, she spotted her husband, Luciano Medina, ahead of her. “I didn’t realize he was in the lead,” Brumelot, 26 of the Bronx, told Runner’s World. “There were nearly 5,000 runners participating, running anything from six minutes to 14 minutes per mile, so we were lapping people. Of course I wanted to catch him.” Brumelot, who is running the Chicago Marathon on October 13, planned a hard...

ANKENY, IA—Friends and family of Landon Carter expressed concern about his mental state after he revealed that he just runs for no reason whatsoever. "Yeah, I like running around the neighborhood, just for fun," said the psychopathic nutjob. "I get up in the morning and I run a few miles. It's enjoyable. In no way is it weird that I enjoy jogging around the neighborhood, with no destination and no apparent purpose." Carter says he runs even though nobody is chasing him and despite the fact that he doesn't have anywhere in particular to go.