Rachel Entrekin Runs On Joy: How She Won The Cocodona 250 Outright By Letting Go Of The Outcome
Rachel Entrekin, a physical therapist and ultrarunner, discusses her historic outright win at the 2025 Cocodona 250-mile race, where she beat all competitors including men's champion Killian Korth. She shares how shifting from outcome-focused to process-focused racing, prioritizing joy and gratitude, and solving her nutrition strategy transformed her performance across three consecutive wins. The conversation also covers her recovery from anorexia, the spiritual dimensions of ultrarunning, and how attitude functions as a performance variable.
Summary
Rachel Entrekin appears on the Rich Roll Podcast following her historic win at the Cocodona 250-mile ultramarathon — the first woman ever to win the race outright, beating all male competitors including men's champion Killian Korth by over an hour. It was her third consecutive win at the race, completed seven hours faster than her previous year's effort in 56 hours total.
Rachel breaks down her three-year progression at Cocodona. In her first year, she bonked severely due to poor nutrition, over-salted herself, vomited for 10 hours, and barely finished. By year two, she corrected her fueling strategy and shaved nine hours off her time. By year three, she partnered with Precision Fueling and Hydration, whose sports scientist Emily managed her nutrition (approximately 60g carbs and 300-800ml fluid per hour), allowing Rachel to offload those decisions entirely and focus on running. She also emphasized eating 'beige foods' — real, savory foods — to counteract the nausea that comes from relentless sweet sports nutrition.
A central theme is Rachel's conscious shift from outcome-oriented to process-oriented racing. After her 2024 win, in which she was miserable and harsh with her pacer on the final climb, she watched the second-place woman, Manuela Villaseca, finish with joy and gratitude despite placing lower. This prompted Rachel to set two explicit goals for 2025: improve nutrition and have a better attitude at the finish line — with no placement or time goals whatsoever. She argues this mindset shift directly improved her performance, citing Courtney Dauwalter as a long-time inspiration who demonstrated that joy and competitive excellence are not mutually exclusive.
A pivotal narrative moment involves a Hopi woman who appeared on the trail during the final climb up Mount Eldon — confirmed real via live stream footage — who gave Rachel cornmeal (a Hopi symbol of community and strength) and told her the implications of her lead extended far beyond sport. Rachel ran the entire final climb after this encounter, dropping her fresh camera crew despite having already run 240 miles, and later threw the remaining cornmeal off a cliff as an act of passing the gift forward, thinking of the struggling Killian Korth behind her.
Rachel also shares her origin story: a childhood marked by low self-esteem and body image issues, followed by anorexia during her junior and senior years of high school. She entered rehab twice, the first time faking recovery before relapsing, and credits the second rehab with genuinely turning her around. She discovered running during her eating disorder as a calorie-burning mechanism, but eventually reframed it as a performance tool, learning to eat as part of her job. She describes a moment at a race where she noticed her carb intake was lower than other athletes and felt a flash of disordered pride — followed immediately by recognition of how far she had come.
The conversation explores the spiritual and psychological dimensions of ultrarunning, including how extended time alone in nature forces confrontation with uncomfortable thoughts that modern life — especially phones and social media — allows people to avoid. Rachel connects this to addiction recovery principles, noting that ultramarathons function as psychedelic-like journeys of self-discovery. She also discusses sleep strategy: building a reserve of 10 hours per night in the week before the race, then running on just 19 minutes of total sleep over 56 hours during Cocodona, using five-to-seven-minute micro-naps taken only when literally falling asleep while running.
Rachel closes by discussing her upcoming UTMB debut, which she is approaching with the same curiosity-driven, process-focused mindset — no placement goals, just a commitment to experiencing it fully and performing to her potential.
Key Insights
- Rachel argues that setting no placement or time goals — only attitude goals — directly contributed to her fastest and most dominant performance at Cocodona, suggesting outcome detachment is a competitive advantage rather than a handicap.
- Rachel claims that watching the second-place woman finish with joy and gratitude after Rachel's own miserable 2024 win was more instructive than the win itself, prompting her to reverse-engineer the mindset she wanted before the next race.
- Rachel identifies the ability to 'roll with it' — adapting to unforeseen variables across 250 miles — as the single most important quality for success at Cocodona, above fitness or speed.
- Rachel describes outsourcing all nutrition decisions to a sports scientist as a critical performance unlock, framing her role as simply executing the fueling plan rather than managing it, which she calls 'witchcraft' in its effectiveness.
- Rachel argues that eating 'beige foods' (savory, real foods) alongside sweet sports nutrition is essential for preventing nausea and vomiting in long ultra events, summarizing it as 'counteract barfing with beige.'
- Rachel reports running on only 19 minutes of total sleep across 56 hours, using five-to-seven-minute micro-naps only when physically unable to keep her eyes open, and finding that such brief naps produced dramatically restorative effects akin to rebooting a computer.
- Rachel contends that her 2022 season — marked by a DNF after a fall and a stomach bleed from over-reliance on ibuprofen — was a direct consequence of being too focused on winning, and that this failure was more instructive than her subsequent victories.
- Rachel argues that mindset and response are the only things truly under one's control, and that the belief that external people or circumstances cause one's emotional states is a disempowering illusion she has had to consciously dismantle.
- Rachel describes her relationship with anorexia as having accidentally introduced her to running, which she initially used as a calorie-burning tool, but eventually reframed as a performance discipline — a shift she identifies as foundational to both her recovery and her athletic career.
- Rachel suggests that modern society's ability to offload discomfort onto phones and social media has made people less capable of sitting with uncomfortable thoughts, and that ultrarunning's enforced solitude is therapeutically valuable precisely because it removes that escape route.
- Rachel recounts a Hopi woman appearing on the final climb who gave her cornmeal — a symbol of community and strength — which Rachel credits as the catalyst for running the entire final ascent after 240 miles, an effort that dropped her fresh camera crew.
- Rachel argues that multi-day races like Cocodona provide a richer stage for athletes to reveal character than single-day events, because the extended duration forces participants to demonstrate who they actually are under sustained adversity rather than just peak physical output.
Topics
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