Rachel Entrekin breaks the internet - and a little book cover reveal

It always starts as a flicker in the background of my feed. A name keeps popping up. In this case, a diminutive figure in a bright tracksuit top covered in cartoons, wearing funky white sunglasses. Why did she keep appearing so often? Oh, she’s leading the Cocodona 250? Is that a big race? Wait, leading it overall? And Courtney Dauwalter is in the race? And a woman called Rachel is winning, and ahead of the course record?

By the time she sprinted across the line looking like she was finishing a short road race, virtually every post in my phone’s algorithm was about Rachel Entrekin. People were calling it the greatest performance in trail running history. I was still trying to get my head around it.

For anyone who didn’t hear, Entrekin won the highly competitive Cocodona 250 ultra marathon in the US, smashing the overall course record and beating all the men - and Courtney Dauwalter. Is she, in fact, the new Courtney Dauwalter, considering that Courtney first burst on to the scene (I seem to remember) after winning a 240-mile race outright.

If you want to read more - by people who know more about the race than me - then Runner’s World did a story with the headline How Rachel Entrekin Led a ‘Paradigm Shift’ and Became the First Woman to Win Cocodona 250 Outright

And as a sign that it was a result that reverberated beyond the confines of the niche world of trail running, the BBC even had a report on the race: Mashed potato & 19 minutes’ sleep - Entrekin’s epic race

Apart from the incredible performance by Entrekin, I had a few other thoughts. Firstly, that is a very long race. (253 miles, in fact.) If we think of the absolute standout ultra running performances by women, the ones where they left even the top elite men trailing in their wake, we have Entrekin at Cocodona (253 miles), Courtney Dauwalter winning the Moab 240 (240 miles) overall by over 10 hours, Jasmin Paris winning The Spine Race (268 miles) by around 15 hours. There’s a definite pattern here.