© Iko PB Photographer

Last year, Norwegian CrossFit athlete Kristin Holte clocked up a career-best second-place finish at the 2019 CrossFit Games, beating some of the sport’s biggest names to earn the title of second Fittest On Earth. Since then, Kristin’s repeated her national title win, earned a second-place finish at the Filthy 150 event and taken third place in the 2020 CrossFit Open, whilst gearing up for a very different spectator-free CrossFit Games this summer.

In this Q&A, Kristin, a former national pole vault champion and a member of the Norwegian heptathlon team, shares her journey to CrossFit, her training during lockdown, how she prepared for last year’s Games and some of her favourite workouts.

*N.B Kristin answered my questions last month before the controversy surrounding CrossFit’s then CEO Greg Glassman, which is why it is not covered in this interview*

Finishing a 100-mile running event is an unfathomable feat for most of us – an epic ultrarunning milestone that even experienced runners take years to achieve. But not Texas-based runner and amateur IRONMAN triathlete Roni Garrett– Roni achieved her goal in 2017 just three years after running her first marathon!

Here, in her own words, 37-year-old Roni (who competes in marathon, ultra-trail, duathlon, triathlon and aquathlon events) documents her experience running the Brazos Bend 100 race three years ago, sharing what it took to get herself across the finish line after 27 hours of running in minus temperatures.

Specifically, I can do better. When I started this blog, my mission was to share stories of women doing epic and inspiring things in the world of sport, fitness and adventure because all too often their stories were being overlooked. But the ‘if you can see it, you can be it’ mantra doesn’t work if most of these stories are white women’s stories.

I live in a world where the balance is tipped heavily in my favour because of my skin colour. This is wrong. I thought of myself as an ally because I find racism abhorrent, but that too is wrong because being passively ‘not racist’ is inadequate. So I have been reaching out and reflecting.

It doesn’t feel appropriate to share a new interview this week, so in the meantime, please read these past interviews with strong, inspiring women of colour. And, as always, if you know a woman who is breaking records, pushing the boundaries of endurance or doing something remarkable in the world of adventure, please email me at katie@lessonsinbadassery.com.

Katie x

Jo Jones fell in love with open water swimming when she was a child. By the age of 16, she’d set her mind on swimming the English Channel. At the age of 24, she achieved her goal, ticking the epic endurance feat off her bucket list.

So what does it feel like to achieve your lifelong dream in your early twenties? Joanne, now 27, shares her journey to Channel swimmer with me below and also chats about her recent and successful foray into ice swimming, which saw her take gold in the International Ice Swimming Association 500m freestyle earlier this year.

© Ryan Sosna Bowd

What’s it like to plan your racing comeback, take fourth at your first race in three years and then see your race plans crumble around you? Olympian and former triathlon world champion Helen Jenkins gives me the lowdown, as we discuss her fourth-place finish at Ironman Dubai in February, and the subsequent worldwide race cancellations that followed.

Helen, who is mum to one-year-old Max and 2.5-year-old Mali with husband and coach, Marc, is now juggling the demands of being a fulltime ‘lockdown’ parent alongside her elite athlete training. We caught up over the phone to discuss Dubai, future racing, lockdown training challenges and the realities of parenting two small kids while working.

In August 2019, 25-year-old Rosie Watson set off on a two-year journey to run from her home in the Lake District across Europe and Asia to Mongolia. The self-supported journey had a purpose beyond adventure alone: to find people tackling the ecological and climate crisis and share their stories of positive, healthy alternatives for how we live.

Living out of her tent or staying with strangers, Rosie was eight months into her run when the borders of Kosovo, where she was staying, closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, leaving her to wait it out in the country until the world gets moving again. During that time, Rosie answered some of my questions about her New Story Run via email about her adventure and experiences so far.

© Callum Jolliffe/Montane Yukon Arctic Ultra

Montane Yukon Arctic Ultra racer Shelley Gellatly is one tough cookie. The 56-year-old Canadian has finished the race – billed as the ‘World’s toughest and coldest ultra’ – multiple times across several of the ultra distances, including second-place finishes overall at both the 100-mile and 300-mile races more than a decade ago.

The non-stop race is self-supported and runs through Canada’s snowy Yukon wilderness, sometimes reaching temperatures as low as -50C. Having undergone chemotherapy for Stage 3 breast cancer, Shelley has to be especially careful not to develop frostbite as she no longer feels the cold in her extremities like she used to. Last year, she was forced to retire when she developed mild frostbite in her fingers. This year, she attempted the 300-mile distance on skis for the first time (racers may compete on foot, skis or bike) but sensibly withdrew after being unable to warm her feet up.

Shelley rocks and I’m very happy to bring you this Q&A with her which covers her many Montane Yukon Arctic Ultra (MYAU) race experiences, including a handful of DNFs which don’t bother her one bit.

Last year, American ultrarunner Maggie Guterl made headlines when she won Big’s Backyard Ultra, a ‘last man standing’-style event run by Lazarus Lake (organiser of the infamous Barkley Marathons) which sees runners cover a 4.16-mile loop on repeat. Each lap must be completed within an hour and starts again on the hour and after that, it’s a battle to see which competitor outlasts the rest. Last year, Maggie completed 60 laps to cover a mind-boggling 250-miles and win it outright – the first woman to do so.

Maggie has also competed for Team USA at the IAU 24-Hour World Championships, she’s won the Brazos Bend 100-miler outright, come second at the Georgia Death Race and 8th at Western States, amongst other things. However, in this email Q&A, we take a deeper dive into last year’s Backyard Ultra win.

I also chatted with Maggie over the phone earlier this week for separate feature, coming soon…

© Tommy Zaferes

Triathlete Katie Zaferes had a storming 2019 season, winning five out of eight World Triathlon Series races to take the ITU Triathlon World Champion title by a huge 849 point margin. The 30-year-old American athlete, who is also the Super League Triathlon champion, went into 2020 focussed on Tokyo Olympics success, but then came COVID-19 and with it an unknown race calendar.

In this Q&A, Katie chats about the challenges of training in lockdown, the uncertainty of an unknown race schedule, and her thoughts on the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics. Plus we dive into the mental aspect of Katie’s elite performance and how the 2016 Rio Olympics led her to focus much more on mental training.

When an inoperable hip injury crushed Nicole Mericle’s dreams of becoming a professional runner, the talented track and steeplechase athlete was forced to change plans. Her passion for climbing led her to find obstacle course racing in 2016 and, after placing second in the world at the OCR World Championships just months later (despite being a newbie to the sport), it’s fair to say she hasn’t looked back.

Last year, Nicole racked up win after win, ending the 2019 OCR season as the Spartan Race world champion, the OCRWC 3K world champion and Spartan Trifecta world champion. However, it’s climbing that’s her true passion, so we dive into this (along with her love of OCR, the training sessions she swears by, van life, and much more!) in the Q&A chat below.

Thanks, Nicole!