Courtney Dauwalter

Courtney Dauwalter was born February 13, 1985 in Hopkins, Minnesota. Her early athletic identity was Nordic skiing — she was a four-time Minnesota state champion in high school and went to the University of Denver on a Nordic scholarship while studying biology. After a master’s in teaching from Mississippi via the Mississippi Teacher Corps, she spent several years teaching biology, chemistry, and physical sciences to middle and high schoolers in the Denver area before turning fully professional in 2017.

Her ultrarunning emerged out of long-distance trail experiments while teaching. By 2017 she had won the Moab 240, a 240-mile race through the Utah desert, finishing first overall — beating the entire men’s field by more than ten hours. She set the women’s 24-hour run record at 155.391 miles, won the Western States 100 in 2018, and at Big’s Backyard Ultra in 2018 ran for 67 consecutive laps to log 279 miles before finishing second overall to one man, Johan Steene, who outlasted her by a single lap.

The 2023 season is the one that ended the conversation about who was the greatest female ultrarunner in history. She started with a course record at the Bandera 100K in January, then ran Western States in June and broke the women’s course record by 79 minutes — a 15:29:33 finish that put her sixth overall in a field that included the world’s best male runners. Three weeks later she ran the Hardrock 100 in Colorado and broke that course record by 64 minutes; the previous record had stood for 11 years. Then in September she ran UTMB, the most prestigious 100-miler in the world — 106 miles around Mont Blanc through Italy, Switzerland, and France with 32,000 feet of elevation gain — and won it. She had become the first person, male or female, to win all three races in one year. Only Kilian Jornet had ever won all three across a lifetime.

She is married to Kevin Schmidt, who crews her races and runs his own ultras. Her mother Tracy got into ultrarunning in her sixties and has run a 100K alongside her daughter. Dauwalter does not change her uniform, training plan, or media schedule for any race. She runs in baggy basketball shorts. She gives interviews while smiling at the worst hour of the worst race. She has talked openly about the “pain cave” — the mental space ultra runners enter at the deepest point of a race — as a place she actively goes looking for, on the theory that the only way to find your real ceiling is to drive past where you thought it was. The lesson holds whether you run trails or not.