In May, an unsponsored physical therapist from Alabama won the Cocodona 250, her 11th consecutive first-place ultramarathon finish. Those who have been watching have seen her arrival coming from a long way off.
Rachel Entrekin, 32, had been running for 38 hours, and was clicking off miles at a swift pace through the blossoming Sonoran Desert at twilight, when a bout of debilitating nausea forced her off her feet. Entrekin had been running among the top three women in the Cocodona 250 for much of the 145 miles across the heart of Arizona, but the sound of her retching was squelching any hope of a podium finish. For the moment, the dream of a physical therapist from Alabama shocking the ultrarunning world at Cocodona appeared to have crashed onto the desert floor alongside her.
I met Entrekin four months earlier on a trail run in the Topatopa Mountains near Ojai, California, with little knowledge of who I was running with. As we get into her car, she asks me to excuse the clutter. A first-place belt buckle from the Ute 100 Mile Trail Run falls out of her passenger door. Rocks representing a dozen different geologic epochs line her dashboard. “Sorry, I kinda live out of my car,” she laughs. I notice a spine of wood emerging from the seat pocket and slide it out further. Rio Del Lago 100 Mile Endurance Run. First Place Overall Female.
Entrekin’s won eight 100-miler races over the past two years, including the Badger Mountain Challenge ultra in eastern Washington this past March, where she battled food poisoning for the entire course en route to a first-place overall finish. On fastestknowntime.com, she owns 15 different records for established routes in the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, the Transverse Ranges and even Catalina Island. She is also the champion of several fixed-time races, including Across the Years 48-hour last December where she ran 212 miles in less than 47 hours—a course record and more than 42 miles farther than the second-place male or female.
Despite her bona fides, Entrekin entered Cocodona mostly unknown and unaffiliated with any brand-backed racing team that might classify her as anything other than a for-the-love-of-it-all amateur athlete.
Tim Stroh, 62, is the race director of the Plain 100 Endurance Runs and has been a fixture in ultrarunning since 1997. He met Entrekin after she won his Plain 100k event in 2017, where she set both the female and overall course records. Stroh told me he’s never talked with anyone more coherent and nonchalant after an ultra event.
“I didn’t know Rachel until she finished, but when she did, she truly looked like she hadn’t done a thing that day,” Stroh said via email. “At that point in my career I’d run 150+ ultras and about sixty 100-milers and I’d been to a lot of finish lines. I honestly hadn’t seen someone run such a good time but look like she hadn’t put out any effort.”
Before the start of Cocodona, Entrekin brushed her teeth and departed her hotel in Anthem for the longest and most significant race of her life. She offered another competitor from the UK a lift to the start line, filling the only remaining seat of her packed Toyota RAV4.
A race official attached a GPS device to the shoulder strap of her backpack just before she found a spot in the starting corral toward the front of the herd of 271 runners. Strips of black duct tape covered the holes in her Salomon running pack and her sunglasses were an oversized $8 pair of aviators from a gas station. She wasn’t even wearing a hat, let alone a watch. Entrekin said she pieced together the rest of her gear by borrowing from friends and last-minute purchases at REI.
Photo Howie Stern
On a brisk, dark morning, with saguaro cactuses silhouetted against the dawn sky, the race begins and Entrekin disappears into the fray.
By mile 83, Entrekin is the first-place female and ninth overall.
Entrekin admitted that by entering Cocodona she was venturing into an unknown distance. “I think this is a hard thing that is actually a reach,” she said to me on race day eve. “I’ve been slam-dunking some stuff lately, and this is not a slam dunk, necessarily. Or maybe it is, but I will only know that after it’s over.”
Entrekin completed Cocodona’s first 100 miles with 19,000 feet of climbing in around 24 hours. Now, more than four consecutive marathons into the race, she ascends nearly 3,000 vertical feet to the Mingus Mountain aid station for a brief stop. “I wish I’d seen this when I got here!” she says of the dusty piano in the corner of the retreat center. She plays an out-of-tune C chord and bounds out the door and into the morning light.
Entrekin is still running in first place at mile 127 when she arrives with her pacer, Dan Bucci, at the mountain town of Jerome in the heat of the afternoon. She needs rest and falls asleep immediately with a cold towel across her forehead. Her crew makes a strategic decision to allow her to sleep through the hot afternoon, giving her two crucial hours of rest.
Crew member Jake Vail removes empty soft flasks from her pack and replenishes them with water, electrolytes and calories. Vail met Entrekin at a 100-miler in Malibu in 2022 that neither of them finished. He shakes his head and smiles as he holds up a palm-sized red rock ribboned with quartz removed from Entrekin’s vest, surely destined to join the other samples of geologic time on her dashboard.
Running far on limited sleep is familiar to her. Entrekin is the regional program director of a physical therapy center in Los Angeles that specializes in cancer rehabilitation. Shortly before Cocodona, she received a promotion, which took a bite out of her training time and sleep—or perhaps further acclimated her to running long distances on little rest.
Having fallen to third place during her pit stop, Entrekin eases into a groove as she descends out of the Black Hills and into the Verde Valley. She shares with me a vision that occurred on her previous leg. A girl had been sitting beside the trail ahead, wearing her orange sun shirt, stacking rocks. The girl turned and looked at Entrekin when she realized it was herself sitting there, stacking rocks, and that she had just experienced her first running-induced hallucination.
Red tips of blooming ocotillos lean over the trail as Entrekin continued her forward charge toward Sedona, her blonde hair shining in the sunlight. After spotting the shimmer of a shredded mylar balloon caught beneath a creosote bush, she hollered, “Grab that!” wanting to leave the trail better than we found it.
Photo Peter Deneen
Her confidence is surging at mile 145 when suddenly she feels nauseous and needs to sit. A day and a half of inhaling and exhaling dusty desert air has left her tongue raw and she’s unable to swallow. After several more collapses onto the desert floor, her dry heaving turns into productive vomiting. She throws up saliva and bile every few hundred yards until her exhausted diaphragm expels nothing at all. Frustrated that her legs feel strong but her uncooperative stomach is holding her back, Entrekin reminds herself aloud that she is choosing this.
It takes Entrekin two hours to cover the final two miles to the aid station at Deer Pass where she is forced to take rest. The crew concludes too many electrolytes with insufficient nutrition are to blame for her stomach issues.
After nearly an hour off the course, Entrekin awakens from her nap and sucks on crushed ice and eats a plain piece of bread. She feels good, she says, and is ready to run.
She struggles intermittently through the overnight climb into Sedona, as continued bouts of nausea worse than the previous evening further sap her strength. She has been running for 52 hours when she arrives at Schnebly Hill and takes a 30-minute nap. While she sleeps, Vail removes another rock from her pack, this time a smooth piece of beige chert. It would be her final sleep of Cocodona, a cumulative total of 3.5 hours.
Entrekin crossed the 200-mile threshold around 5:30 p.m., passing Brazilian runner Manuela Vilaseca earlier in the section. She’s feeling better but is still several hours behind frontrunner Mika Thewes, whose sleepless pace had opened a commanding 18-mile lead.
With her stomach issues finally stabilized, thanks to a consistent regimen of pretzels and water, she makes a brief pit stop at Fort Tuthill. Entrekin is not far behind the female course record as she enters the conifer forest southeast of Flagstaff to begin the 50-mile circumnavigation of the city.
I am pacing her once again and we are cruising through the undulating forested path along the edge of Walnut Canyon National Monument, when my phone vibrates with a text message from a friend in Ojai: “Mika dropped! Make way for Rachel!” With each burst of signal, more messages arrive. Thewes had apparently departed the course at mile 233 and Entrekin was now in the lead. “That sucks,” Entrekin said, sympathizing with Thewes. “I wonder what happened.”
Race director Steven Aderholt confirmed via email that at around 8:30 p.m. on May 8, Thewes fell and hit her chin full force on a rock. “She was bleeding from her mouth, and worried that she might have broken her jaw. They contacted race officials in order to drop from the race,” Aderholt told me via email. Thewes also said in an Instagram post that she was also battling stomach issues and then she fell twice back-to-back, forcing her to leave the course.
The unlikely had happened and Entrekin was suddenly back in first place.
Her initial shock for Thewes shifted to concern over the narrow gap between her and Vilaseca, now just two miles behind. The women’s race was suddenly tight again.
Photo Howie Stern
Entrekin was flying through the forest on her third night of running, around mile 223, when her foot caught the root of a Ponderosa pine and she slammed into the ground chest first. Her right thumb was tender, and her knees had a few new scrapes, but adrenaline drowned out the pain and she continued her flight toward the Walnut Canyon aid station. Over the course of the 17-mile segment, Entrekin would average a 13-minute mile pace, nearly tripling her lead over Vilaseca.
She ran through the night, summiting the 9,000-foot Mount Elden in the early morning, and crossing the finish line in downtown Flagstaff, moments after her fourth sunrise of the week. She completed Cocodona in 73 hours and 31 minutes after she began, more than four hours ahead of Vilaseca, and the second-fastest time ever for the course.
After 250 miles and 40,000 feet of climbing, one of the more remarkable (and perhaps frightening) things about Entrekin’s victory at Cocodona is the astonishingly good shape she emerged in.
“So easy,” she said sarcastically to Aderholt as he handed Entrekin her first-place award. “I am pretty sore, but nothing I don’t deserve.”
Upon returning to Los Angeles after her win in Arizona, Entrekin’s doctor confirmed that she fractured her left second rib in the fall she took in the forest outside of Flagstaff. Unknowingly, Entrekin ran the final 27 miles of the Cocodona 250 with a broken rib.
“I hate talking about my accomplishments. This isn’t even just my accomplishment. There’s no way I could have gotten to the start or finish line independently. I think that’s why I’m interested in this story being told because it’s not even about me, it’s about us.”
After a nap on the grass the afternoon following her finish, Entrekin skipped down a Flagstaff sidewalk wearing cushioned white slides, her tan calf muscles gleaming from beneath the gray blanket draped around her waist. A couple jogs past her on the sidewalk, “Oh look, people running!” she said. “I don’t want to do that right now—but I could.”