Rachel Entrekin won Cocodona 250 outright in May, beating every man in the field. She races her first UTMB on 28 August against Ruth Croft and Courtney Dauwalter.
Photo Credit : @scottrokisphoto | @howiesternphoto | @_anastasiawilde
When Rachel Entrekin crossed the finish line at the Cocodona 250 in May, she had just done something no woman had ever done in the race’s history.
She had run 254 miles across the Arizona desert in 56 hours, 9 minutes and 48 seconds, beating every man in the field and taking almost eight hours off her own women’s course record.
The men’s previous course record, set by Kilian Korth, went with it.
On Friday 28 August, she runs her first UTMB, against Ruth Croft and Courtney Dauwalter.
Who is Rachel Entrekin?
Entrekin is 34, born in Madison, Alabama, and lives in Conifer, Colorado.
She has a doctorate in physical therapy and used to work at an oncology rehabilitation centre before turning full-time to running.
She did not compete in any sport at school.
Her own explanation, quoted in her hometown paper, is that she started running while pursuing an undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama and did not stop.
The credentials nobody was watching
Before her breakout Cocodona 250 win in May, most casual trail fans did not know her name.
They should have. In 2025 alone she won the Cocodona 250 (women’s), the High Lonesome 100 (with a course record), the Whiskey Basin 88K, the Pass Mountain 50 and the Aspen Backcountry Marathon, and finished second overall at the Mammoth 200.
She was named fourth in the 2025 UltraRunner of the Year vote, an extraordinary result for a runner who was still classed as “unknown” in mainstream previews.
She holds 15 fastest known times on established Sierra Nevada routes.
She lives in her car for weeks at a time between races.
What she did at Cocodona 250, in numbers
Cocodona 250 is a 407-kilometre point-to-point across the Arizona desert with more than 38,000 feet of climbing and extreme temperature swings.
Entrekin ran it in 56:09:48 and slept a total of 19 minutes, split across three short naps of under 10 minutes each.
Her average moving pace, including those stops, worked out to a 13:20 mile across three days on desert singletrack.
She beat Kilian Korth’s previous men’s course record by more than an hour and became the first woman to win the race outright in its history.
The nearest historical comparison for that kind of overall win is Courtney Dauwalter’s 2017 Moab 240, when she beat the field by 10 hours. Entrekin is now in that conversation.
How she got the UTMB start line
Auto-entry, not the lottery.
In March 2026 she took third woman and 14th overall at the Chianti Ultra Trail 120K, one of the UTMB World Series races that offers a guaranteed elite entry.
The race itself is a preview of everything that will happen on Friday. Dauwalter passed Entrekin with less than nine miles to run, and Entrekin’s post-race description captured the moment better than any journalist could: “I am hauling ass, she is just hauling better ass.”
Dauwalter has now faced Entrekin at Chianti and at Cocodona 250. UTMB is round three of the season.
The problem: UTMB is not Cocodona
Every UTMB rookie faces the same wall.
The 174-kilometre loop around Mont-Blanc has 9,900 metres of vertical gain packed into a single stage, most of it above 1,800 metres, most of it on technical singletrack, and a substantial portion of it run in the dark.
It is not a 250-mile desert race with sleep stops.
It is a compressed, high-altitude, weather-exposed climb-and-descent race that punishes fast starts and rewards climbers with quick recovery.
That is one first-time winner in six years, and it happened to be one of the greatest ultrarunners of the modern era.
What is in her favour
The physiology is there.
Cocodona rewards the same durability that UTMB does, and Entrekin has more of it than almost anyone in the field.
She has spent 2025 and 2026 training almost exclusively on high-altitude terrain, stacking weeks of 100 to 110 miles with 20,000 to 25,000 feet of climbing.
Her fuelling is a known strength.
She works with a dedicated nutrition coach and has crewed for enough Alps races that she understands what UTMB aid stations do and do not carry.
What to watch for on Friday and Saturday
Watch the first climb up to Le Delevret. If Entrekin is in the front pack there, she has decided to race with Croft and Dauwalter rather than run her own splits.
Watch the descent into Courmayeur, around kilometre 80.
That is where the wheels came off for Courtney Dauwalter in 2025, and it is where every projection has Entrekin either committing to a top-five finish or slipping into a survival race.
And watch the last climb out of Vallorcine, around kilometre 150.
The bigger story
Whatever happens on Friday night into Saturday afternoon, Entrekin’s UTMB debut is the most significant expansion of the women’s elite field since Katie Schide arrived in 2023.
She is the answer to a question the sport had stopped asking.
What happens when a 250-mile runner comes down to 100 miles?
She is running against Ruth Croft, the only woman to have won all three UTMB World Series Finals races.
She is running against Courtney Dauwalter, three-time UTMB champion and the current UTMB Index leader at 859.
And she is running her first UTMB. Never even started one before.
The 100-mile UTMB starts on Friday 28 August at 17:45 CEST from Chamonix.
Rachel Entrekin has spent five years quietly building the deepest ultra-running résumé nobody was paying attention to. That stops this weekend.
