Jenn Lichter Just Won Western States in a Course Record. I Talked With Her Last November About How She Got Here.

I sat down with Jenn Lichter last November, a few weeks before her first 100K. At the time she still hadn't raced farther than 50 miles. This past weekend she won the Western States 100 in her 100-mile debut, crossing the track at Placer High School in 15:28:05 and breaking Courtney Dauwalter's course record by 88 seconds. The conversation we had back then, in hindsight, explains exactly how she pulled it off.

Jenn Lichter is a professional trail runner for ACG who, as of this weekend, holds the Western States 100 course record. But the short version undersells the unique path she took to get here. She didn't grow up dreaming of this. The first day she ran cross country in seventh grade, she hated it. It was uncomfortable, it was painful, and she remembers thinking, how do people like this. There was no lightning bolt. There was just a kid who had hit her ceiling in basketball at five foot two, a mom who said try this out, and someone who loved a challenge too much to walk away from one she had started. So she didn't quit. That refusal is the quiet engine under everything that followed.

Almost by accident. Running kept pushing its way into her life in every phase, and every time she tried to let it go it came back in some new form. High school, then college she never planned on, then a hiking-guide summer in Glacier where she ran the mountains on her off days for no reason other than that they were there. She didn't know trail racing was even a thing until she lined up at The Rut in 2021. One race later, The North Face had found her. She runs for ACG now, but the pattern was set back then: show up, stay curious, refuse to quit the hard thing.

Control, and what she learned both from losing it and from once having none of it. Lichter's beginning was far harder than most people watching her cross that finish line will ever know. As a small child in Colombia, she was homeless on the streets, her family caught up in the violence the drug cartels left behind. She spent years in an orphanage, and in 2005, at nine years old, she was adopted and moved to Wisconsin. Running did not become serious until her teens, and the trail running that would turn her professional did not arrive until 2021, more than a decade after she landed in the US.

Set against that, it makes sense that control means so much to her. Running, she says, became a kind of therapy, the first thing in her life that was fully hers to decide. How much she trained. How hard she went. What she asked of her body.

She is honest that the same control could cut the other way. There was a stretch when the sport that grounded her also fed an unhealthy relationship with food, and getting through it meant relearning something most of us take for granted: that you cannot think clearly, race well, or make good decisions on a body you are not feeding. Recovery, for her, was less about willpower and more about nourishment coming first.

Years later that lesson hardened into a professional standard. A bone stress injury in 2022 made the stakes plain: if she wanted to last in this sport, fueling was not optional, and figuring out how to do it right became its own kind of curiosity.

She doesn't talk about pain tolerance. She talks about debt, the good kind. The months and days and workouts already in the bank. On a hard day, when the fatigue comes, she goes back to a brutal double after a big morning session and remembers, I felt this way then, and I got through it. Race day is just collecting on the work.

The other half is plainer, and she is unembarrassed about it: there is an animal in her that likes to win. She won't win every time. But the one thing she can always do is try, and never hand herself an excuse not to push. You could see all of it on the Cal Street descents at Western States, where she and Riley Brady traded the lead for hours before Lichter finally broke the race open in the last fifteen miles.

Yes, and that is the whole point. For four years Lichter owned the marathon-to-50K range, and for four years she watched the sport tug everyone toward the 100K and the hundred-miler, the distances that pull the attention. She didn't bite until she actually wanted to. When we talked in November, her first 100K was still ahead of her, and she was clear that it was coming out of plain curiosity, not pressure, and only because she finally felt ready. A year earlier she would have told you no. She didn't want to push too far too soon and burn out chasing someone else's idea of what mattered.

Watch what that patience produced. In February she debuted at the 100K distance at Black Canyon and won it in a course record. Four months later she stepped up to 100 miles for the first time at Western States, the most history-soaked start line in the sport, and beat a record many people thought was untouchable. She did not rush the timeline. She waited until she was ready, and then she was very, very ready.

There is a version of this that has nothing to do with podiums. Lichter tells a story about her friend Nate Bender, who, asked what he was training for, said simply: to do the things I love. A spur-of-the-moment rim to rim to rim in the Grand Canyon that nearly broke her, and that she is grateful she said yes to. The idea that if you are bored of one thing, the road or the trail, you try the other, and maybe that saves your relationship with running entirely.

It sounds like something Devin Yanko told me on this podcast back around episode four, in 2019: chase whatever's fun, and when it stops being fun, chase something else. Four hundred plus episodes later, it still holds. And it is worth remembering that the woman who just rewrote the Western States record book got here by chasing fun up the mountains of Glacier, with no plan to ever turn pro.

Full episode with Jenn Lichter, recorded last November:
[Spotify] · [Apple Podcasts]

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See you out there.