She Slept 19 Minutes, Ate Mashed Potatoes, and Beat Every Man in Arizona

The 34-year-old physical therapist from Birmingham, Alabama crossed the finish line in Flagstaff in 56 hours, 9 minutes, and 48 seconds, becoming the first woman to win the race outright in its five-year history. CBS Mornings featured the story this week, and the trail running world is still processing what they watched.

She didn’t just win the women’s field. She beat everyone.

The Race That Breaks People

The Cocodona 250 ultramarathon is not a race you ease into. Runners cover roughly 253 miles of Arizona terrain with 38,800 feet of climbing, starting in the Sonoran Desert at Black Canyon City, threading through Sedona, and finishing in the mountain town of Flagstaff. The cutoff is 125 hours. Most finishers describe it as survival.

Entrekin took the overall lead around mile 60 and never gave it back.

Her average pace across the entire course came out to 13 minutes and 20 seconds per mile. Read that number twice. That is her pace for 253 miles, over three days, on essentially no sleep, climbing the equivalent of nearly thirteen Empire State Buildings.

The Fueling Was Engineered, Not Improvised

Here is the part most people miss. Her plan was built with Emily Arrell, a sports scientist working with Entrekin’s sponsor Norda. Before Cocodona, Entrekin mostly ate when she felt hungry. Arrell looked at her habits and her output and rebuilt the whole approach around real food, not just gels and chews.

The gels and chews are sweet. After 30 hours of running, sweet stops working. So the plan stacked savory calories on top.

In her own words to Runner’s World: “Basically if it’s beige, I’m all over it.” Mashed potatoes. Rice. Ramen. Broth. Oatmeal.

The mashed potatoes were not a quirky detail. They were strategic. “You get tired of chewing and you don’t want to expend any extra energy doing that,” she said. By the back half of a 250-mile race, the calories you save not chewing actually matter.

Five Minutes In, Five Minutes Out

The aid stations were the other half of the puzzle. Her six-person crew had the routine down to roughly five minutes per stop. Come in, shed the vest, sit, start eating, shoes off, blisters taped, sunscreen on, shoes back on, vest on, gone.

One of her coaches called Cocodona “a 250-mile puzzle, and I think the people who do well here are people who can figure out that puzzle.”

She figured it out.

Three Dirt Naps. Nineteen Minutes Total.

This part still does not feel real when you read it back. Across more than two full days of running, Entrekin slept a total of 19 minutes.

Not in one stretch. In three.

Five minutes at Kelly Canyon near mile 200. Then two seven-minute naps on the floor of an aid station around mile 230. That was it. She still had enough left at the end to sprint the finish.

Why Women Hold Up in Multi-Day Events

This is the part of the story that most coverage skips, and it might be the most useful piece of it.

Entrekin has a theory about why she could beat the men in a race like this. She told the Washington Post: “Top-end speed is not the be all, end all in the multi-day-running endurance scene. I think women have a lot more practice, maybe, dealing with adversity and managing our emotional state and communicating.”

She made the point sharper in another interview. “Your attitude and your ability to combat stress is so important, they are at least as important as how physically fit you are, so I think the field is just so much more leveled at something like this.”

Amy Clark, editor of UltraRunning Magazine, put it from the outside looking in: “She’s so tough, and she goes hard, but she just has such a positive attitude. She doesn’t let those lows pull her back.”

In a marathon, raw speed decides it. In a 250-mile race, the person who manages the lows the best wins. Entrekin is arguing that women have spent a lifetime practicing exactly that skill, and the results at this distance keep backing her up.

Why Not You?

The line Entrekin kept coming back to during the race was a question.

“If anyone’s going to win this, why can’t it be you?”

She extended it specifically to women in an interview with USA Today. “Maybe even especially women, we tend to talk ourselves out of even trying to do things because we think that we’re not qualified or we don’t have the experience or whatever. But why not? Why not try?”

Worth sitting with for a minute.

How She Actually Got Here

Stories like this can feel impossibly far away when you’re lacing up for your first 5K. They shouldn’t.

Entrekin did not run as a kid. She grew up in Madison, Alabama and did not pick up running until college, while studying exercise science. First half marathon in 2010. First marathon in 2011. She got her doctorate in physical therapy in 2016 from UAB and kept stretching the distance.

In her own words: she figured out she was decent at racing, gradually added mileage, and made what she calls “the descent into insanity.”

That descent is just consistency stacked on consistency.

She has now won 17 straight races dating back to mid-2022. The streak includes High Lonesome 100, Mammoth 200, Coldwater Hundred, and three straight Cocodona titles. In 2024 her Cocodona time was 73 hours. In 2025 it dropped to 63:50. In 2026 it dropped to 56:09 and took the overall course record.

She does not measure her weekly mileage. She does not follow a coaching plan. She runs because she loves running.

A Sobering Note From This Year’s Race

The 2026 edition was also marked by tragedy. A participant died from a medical emergency during the race. Organizers paused to acknowledge the loss and asked runners and crews to carry that memory forward.

It is a reminder that these distances are real, the terrain is real, and the preparation that goes into showing up healthy is not optional. If you are building toward an ultra, build the base first. Respect the distance.

The Takeaway

You do not need to run 250 miles to take something useful from Rachel Entrekin’s race. The lessons are older and simpler than any single performance.

Build the base over years, not weeks.

Fuel like an adult. Real food matters once the gels stop working.

Manage the lows. The race is won in the part of your head you train the least.

Stop deciding you are not qualified to start.

Then go earn the next mile.