Rachel Entrekin Just Became the First Woman to Win the Cocodona 250 Outright. I Talked With Her Before Her Breakout Season.

I sat down with Rachel Entrekin this past February, before her 2026 season had really started. At the time she was a two-time Cocodona 250 women's champion who most of the sport still quietly filed under "really good, but she hasn't run the big ones." A few months later she went back to Arizona and became the first woman ever to win the Cocodona 250 outright, beating every man in the field and taking more than two hours off the overall course record. This is the conversation we had before any of that happened, and in hindsight it explains exactly how she got there.

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Rachel Entrekin is a professional ultrarunner who specializes in the distances most people cannot imagine, the 200-milers and multi-day fixed-time races where the challenge is measured in nights, not miles. Before she ran full time she was a physical therapist working in oncology rehabilitation, and she still talks like a clinician: precise, funny, a little skeptical of hype. She loves cats, cooking, and piano, and she will happily tell you that she cannot make rice.

The short version of her running résumé sells her short. She has won something like 20 ultras in a row. But for years the sport kept score differently, because she had not run the marquee qualifiers everyone points to. What this conversation makes clear is that the record was never really the point for her. The process was.

She started running in college in Birmingham, Alabama, mostly to stay athletic and to explore a new city on foot. Half marathons in 2009, marathons in 2010, and then so many marathons that the endurance became a given. In 2013 she ran her first 50K, a trail race in the southeast where the aid stations traded Gatorade and bananas for candy, Mountain Dew, and the occasional shot of whiskey.

From there the distances stretched. She found fixed-time racing, ran her first 100-miler on a 24-hour loop course because it let her control every variable, then moved west, landed in Seattle, and discovered the mountains that would become her favorite place to race. Her own pick for the breakout that made her believe was I'm Tough in 2019: a top-10 finish, a course record, and a time of 24:04 that she still remembers, run without a watch, carrying a plastic water bottle she had found in her car. What stuck with her was crossing the line without the usual imposter syndrome. For once, she believed the people who had been telling her she was good.

Carefully, and with a sense of humor. Her first Cocodona in 2024 had one goal: survive, and do not bring shame on the family. She got her nutrition and her electrolytes wrong, bonked hard, and hallucinated. She still finished. The next year she came back knowing the course, and the whole thing flipped. Instead of surviving, she could pace by memory, show her crew what was coming, and actually race. The number that scares her is not the mileage, it is the third night, the point somewhere past 200 miles where everything gets weird.

Her honest read on how she does it: patience, preparation, and refusing to treat any of it as impossible. She points out that most people talk themselves out of the attempt before they ever start. She did not, and that is most of the secret.

This is the part of her running she is most open about, because it used to be her weakest link. For years she raced on gas-station snacks and got away with it, largely because she tends to build a big lead early and can afford to fade. Then she started working with Precision Fuel and Hydration and their sports scientist, and the difference showed up fast: better fueling was the single biggest reason her Cocodona time dropped so much.

Her framework now is simple and worth stealing. Fuel by rate of perceived effort, not pace, because a hard effort is a hard effort whether you are running a seven-minute mile or a fourteen. Lean on liquid calories when solid food becomes a chore. Remember that every gel is also jump-starting the next run, not just powering this one. And she rejects the idea that slower runners need less fuel. The longer you are out there, the more it matters, not less. She is blunt that under-fueling shows up in your brain before your legs: the second she starts wondering where the next aid station is, she has learned to read it as a signal to eat.

The story she tells best is the grilled cheese at mile 250 of a 256-mile Cocodona. She was exhausted, it was getting dark, and every instinct said just get to the finish. Instead she stopped, split a grilled cheese with her pacer, and finished strong and happy. She calls it the best finish-line experience of her life, and she credits the sandwich.

Because for most of her career she literally could not get there. Every sponsorship conversation stalled on the same question, when are you running Western States? And she couldn’t answer. The reason was not talent, it was access. She was holding down a demanding full-time job in oncology rehabilitation, and the marquee races meant travel, entry fees, and time off she could not spare. She could manage about one destination race a year. So she won what was near her, over and over, and watched the sport treat that as a lesser résumé.

Her point, made without bitterness, is that this quietly filters out a lot of good runners for reasons that have nothing to do with running. Now that she has support, she is taking on the big ones on her own terms, a golden ticket race and a shot at UTMB among them, and she would like the narrative to change, and not only for her.

There was a stretch where she pinned her mood to her finishing place, and by her own account it was an unhealthy year. It ended with a stomach bleed at Cascade Crest from too much ibuprofen, a couple of DNFs, and a Tahoe Rim Trail FKT attempt she did not finish. The FKT is the tell: she and her partner had so much fun failing at it that she could not even be upset. That was the turn.

Since then she does not set goals to win. She sets process goals, like staying within four hours of Courtney Dauwalter at mile 100, and lets the result be the result. She credits strong competition, Dauwalter especially, with pulling performances out of her she would not have found alone. The reframe is the whole thing: you cannot control what kind of day everyone else is having, only your own.

Her working philosophy is that motivation follows action. You do not have to feel ready to start, you just have to start, and she has almost never regretted a run once she was out the door. She is gently allergic to "I could never do that," because the moment you decide you cannot, you are right. She did not know she would finish her first Cocodona either. She tried anyway.

Asked for the short version, she gave three things.

She is 34 and originally from Birmingham, Alabama. She moved to Colorado at the end of 2024.

She won the race outright in 56:09:48, becoming the first woman to win it overall and setting a new overall course record.

She is a physical therapist who worked in oncology rehabilitation before transitioning to running full time.

3:17.

Not as of this conversation. For years the travel and time off were out of reach while she worked full time. With sponsor support she has started taking on the sport's marquee races, including a golden ticket race and a planned run at UTMB.

She runs in Norda and fuels with Precision Fuel and Hydration, among others.

Full episode with Rachel Entrekin, recorded in Boulder this past February:

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Find Rachel on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachel__entrekin

See you out there.