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Quick Facts: Rachel Entrekin at a Glance

Background and Early Life of Rachel Entrekin

Rachel Entrekin was born on June 17, 1991, in Madison, Alabama, the daughter of Robin and Karen Entrekin. She attended Madison Academy before graduating from Bob Jones High School in 2009.

Despite the elite endurance career that would eventually follow, Entrekin did not run competitively in school. She played youth soccer and basketball through Madison city programs but felt she lacked the natural athleticism for varsity team sports. Her interest in physical therapy began early, sparked by tagging along to her mother Karen’s sessions for a shoulder injury at a local clinic.

Entrekin attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), earning a Bachelor of Science in Exercise Science in 2012 and a Doctorate in Physical Therapy in 2016. Running entered her life almost by accident during college, starting with her first half marathon in 2010 and her first full marathon in 2011.

Rachel Entrekin’s Path Into Ultrarunning

Entrekin ran her first ultramarathon in 2013, while still in graduate school. She started at the 50K distance and steadily worked upward, telling her hometown paper that she “figured out I was pretty good at the races and just gradually increased the mileage and soon made the descent into insanity.”

After finishing her doctorate in 2016, she relocated to Seattle, Washington, where her running fundamentally changed shape. The Pacific Northwest introduced her to the world of Fastest Known Times (FKTs), and she began chasing records on iconic routes including Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail, Mount Hood’s Timberline Trail, and Section J of the Washington Pacific Crest Trail.

In her own words, her early trail years were defined by saying yes. She accepted “every type of run that every type of person at every type of speed asked me to do,” a habit that built both fitness and the community network that still surrounds her racing today.

She later moved to Los Angeles in 2021, then to Conifer, Colorado at the end of 2024, and finally to Salida, Colorado in early 2026, which she has called “paradise.”

Racing Style and Strengths

Rachel Entrekin is defined less by raw speed than by relentlessness, emotional regulation, and the ability to keep moving when the wheels come off for everyone around her. She has called herself a “vibes-based” runner, and the description fits.

Her trademarks include extraordinary mental durability, a positive on-course demeanor that holds up across multiple days of running, and an aggressive approach to downhills where many competitors choose to recover. At Cocodona 2026, her heart rate climbed above 170 beats per minute on multiple descents, a deliberate strategy to train the eccentric muscular load that defines the back half of 250-mile races.

She is famous for stopping mid-race to pet dogs, chat with strangers, and return to the finish line hours after her own race to cheer in friends like Sally McRae. As ultrarunning analyst Amy Clark of UltraRunning Magazine put it, “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.”

Entrekin herself has credited her edge in multi-day events to emotional management rather than top-end speed: “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.”

Rachel Entrekin’s Major Race Victories

2024 Cocodona 250: First Cocodona title. Won the women’s race in 73:31:25 and finished 11th overall.

2024 Rio Del Lago 100: First Place Overall Female.

2024 Ute 100: First Place Overall, taking the buckle outright.

2025 Badger Mountain Challenge 100: Won outright while battling food poisoning the entire race.

2025 Cocodona 250: Became the first two-time winner of the race. Set a new women’s course record of 63:50:55, dropped roughly ten hours from her own previous time, and finished fourth overall.

2025 Whiskey Basin 88K: Race winner.

2025 High Lonesome 100: Won in 21:56, breaking the previous course record.

2025 Aspen Backcountry Marathon: Race winner.

2025 Mammoth 200 (inaugural): Won the women’s division in 46:50:45, finishing second overall across the 214-mile, 31,000-foot-of-gain Sierra Nevada course. The win marked her 18th consecutive ultramarathon victory.

2025 Pass Mountain 50: Race winner.

2026 Coldwater Hundred: Won outright in January.

2026 Cocodona 250: Became the first woman to win the Cocodona 250 outright, finishing in 56:09:48, beating the entire men’s and women’s fields, and obliterating both the men’s and women’s course records. Her third consecutive title, earning her the permanent nickname “CocoQueen.”

Records and Achievements

Entrekin holds 15 Fastest Known Times on established routes across the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, the Transverse Ranges, and Catalina Island. Among her most prominent FKTs are records set on Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail, Mount Hood’s Timberline Trail, and Section J of the Washington PCT.

Other key marks on her record sheet:

Notable Performances Beyond Wins

2026 Chianti Ultra-Trail by UTMB (120K): Finished third female and 14th overall behind Courtney Dauwalter and Yngvild Kaspersen. Entrekin held second through most of the race until Dauwalter passed her with less than nine miles remaining. In her post-race blog she wrote, “I am hauling ass, she is just hauling better ass.” The race granted her UTMB Mont-Blanc auto-entry and is widely viewed as the moment she confirmed she could race the very top of the sport at shorter distances.

2024 Spartathlon: Completed the 153-mile point-to-point race in Greece, funded in part through a crowdfunding campaign. The Spartathlon entry sat alongside her first Cocodona on what was essentially a self-financed breakthrough year.

2022 Wonderland Trail unsupported mixed team FKT: Ran the 95-mile loop around Mount Rainier with Jeff Garmire in 27:04:41 after the pair, who had never met before, decided to attempt it together when their original race was cancelled by wildfire.

Rachel Entrekin’s Training Approach

Entrekin’s training is famously unconventional. For most of her competitive career she ran without a coach, without strict prescribed workouts, and for years without tracking weekly mileage or wearing a watch on training runs. Friends and journalists have described her as a runner who “just wants to go and run really far in the mountains and be with people she cares about.”

That said, her 2026 buildup represented a real evolution. After signing with COROS for her GPS watch and embracing more structured data, her weekly mileage climbed into the triple digits and she reluctantly added regular speedwork for the first time. She told interviewers that “speedwork is still the worst” but has acknowledged its role in the leap she made from 2025 to 2026.

Her Cocodona prep included deliberate downhill repeats designed to load the quads eccentrically, mirroring the demands of the back half of a 250-mile race. Nutrition planning, led by Precision Fuel & Hydration sports scientist Emily Arrell, was the other major shift, with carbohydrate loading flagged as the key area for improvement after her Chianti race.

While working as a full-time physical therapist she trained before dawn to fit 20-mile runs into 50-plus-hour workweeks, racing roughly half a dozen times per year. She quit her clinical job in June 2025 after her Precision Fuel signing, which freed her training schedule for the first time in her adult life.

Gear and Sponsors

Entrekin spent the bulk of her early career unsponsored, funding races such as the 2024 Spartathlon and Cocodona through GoFundMe campaigns. Her current sponsor roster is:

Influence on the Sport

Rachel Entrekin’s 2026 Cocodona 250 win is widely regarded as one of the defining performances in ultrarunning history. Beating the entire men’s field outright in a 250-mile race, while setting an overall course record, helped place three women in the overall top eight and reshaped the conversation around women’s competitiveness at multi-day distances.

Coverage of the win extended far beyond the trail running press. The Guardian, BBC Sport, Bloomberg, Reuters, Good Morning America, ABC News, El País, and Spain’s AS all carried the story.

Runner’s World noted that her victory completed three long-stated goals for women at Cocodona simultaneously: a woman winning overall, a woman placing in the overall top three, and three women finishing in the overall top ten.

Her broader influence rests on more than a single race. She has become a public argument for a different model of becoming an elite ultrarunner, one without a traditional coach, without obsessive data tracking, and without a linear progression from junior racing. The fact that she funded her own breakthrough year through crowdfunding and held a full-time clinical job until age 33 has resonated with a generation of amateur athletes who recognize themselves in her story.

Personal Life

Entrekin lives in Salida, Colorado, having moved there in early 2026 from Conifer. Outside of running she lists cooking, playing piano, petting dogs, and spending time with her cats among her hobbies. She is closely tied to a Colorado running community known as the Burrito League, an informal group whose stated goal is to run as far as possible in pursuit of free burritos.

She has spoken publicly about overcoming an eating disorder earlier in her life and has credited strength training as part of how she rebuilt her relationship with her body and her sport. Her parents still live in Alabama and have followed her career closely from a distance.

Where to Follow Rachel Entrekin

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