Voice of the Mountains: companion essay for “The Long Way Around” with Krissy Moehl. Season 3, Episode 4 (recorded April 2026; slated for fall release).
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In 2000, at the start of her life in ultrarunning, Krissy Moehl said “I want to run the day I die.” She repeated it to me, just now, at forty-eight, with the calm of someone checking a compass. “I’m closer to that now than I was then. And it still holds true.”
Most goals in our sports are finish lines and summits. You stand on top or you turn around, then you look for the next one. Krissy set a bearing, a direction to hold for as long as she lives. A bearing demands patience from a woman who knows herself to be impatient. It teaches her when to stop. It makes her study her own body more honestly. Held long enough, it asks her to look at the day it runs out.
I came to our conversation feeling the weight of a belief I have spent years trying to shed: that my value was my output, the summits, the first ascents, and the writing. When my body began changing in my late forties, that belief got loud. Krissy has spent twenty-five years measuring something else, which is whether she is still moving. I wanted to know what that had taught her.
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It began with a run nobody assigned. Krissy had always run for coaches, and as an 800-meter runner she had never been allowed out longer than ninety minutes. On a student exchange in Ecuador, injured and with no one to tell her how to come back, she stopped running for two months. Then one day she put on a sports bra and shorts and was gone for two hours. “There wasn’t a coach that told me to go for a run,” she said. She loved what that represented.
Back in Seattle she returned to her old job at the running store where Scott Jurek’s first Western States trophy sat on the counter. I assumed a young woman in that world felt like an outsider. “I never felt like an outsider,” she told me, “and I also felt very brought in and cared for.” That crowd also set her baselines. She was thirty-five before she realized twenty miles a day was a lot. “Oh, I was raised by a pack of wolves, essentially.” She has repaid the pack by directing the iconic Chuckanut 50K, her first ultra, since 2003.
Stopping is a skill, and at the first Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in 2003, as a heat wave broke into storm, she went around Mont Blanc in a wind shell, a freshly-bought beanie, and a plastic garbage bag. Others dropped out at towns along the route. “Just because I’m so freaking stubborn, I decided to go all the way around.” With her IT band failing and her left foot no longer lifting, she walked the final descents sideways and backwards. She won by six hours.
Why not quit? She answered first as the woman she is now: “I have a better grace and understanding for stopping now than I did then.” The young Krissy kept her word to herself, and she was curious about what happens if she pushes too far. Now she knows. “It could mean I don’t run for six months, and that’s not something I’m willing to sacrifice at this point.” Curiosity is a good reason to walk into the unknown. Once you have lived with consequences, continuing becomes a choice.
Having a bearing has taught an impatient person patience, at least on the trail. For her first eight years she treated every race as an experiment in nutrition, training, and strength work; curious, as she puts it, “to make sure that I didn’t hurt myself.” She protects that curiosity in first-time ultrarunners, and she has an answer for anyone who thinks they have it figured out. “What I love about the sport is it will always hand it to you.” Your digestion changes, the food that worked stops working, the weather turns. “It will always humble and teach, at least in my experience.”
In 2009, for the first time, she raced for a result. She cleared a space on her shelf for the Western States trophy and raced from the starting line. She finished second, then spent six hours in the medical tent with two IVs while her mother stayed up all night. “That’s just not how I want to experience the finish line,” she said. “That’s not why I do this.” Eight weeks later she won UTMB, running it her way.
How you name a difficulty shapes what you take from it. Krissy calls a bad race a disappointment rather than a failure, because she learned something. She also embraces the runner who set out for a hundred miles, stopped at eighty, and calls it a failure; that runner has every right to the word. “80 is still a really long way to go. And I don’t know where you put ‘only’ in front of the word 80.”
Marko Prezelj taught me the same thing at a trailhead in Peru, after we had failed on our mountain. Someone asked whether we had been successful. Before I could say no, Marko answered: “What is success?” Past the marathon distance, Krissy says, it gets very hard to know what will shape your day: food poisoning, a sick kid, the wrong snacks. So she tells clients she believes in them, and adds, “You’ve got the tools to deal with whatever comes up.” Maybe, she says, a measure of success is how you deal with what you can’t control.
Her hardest-won knowledge came through fury. At forty she read ROAR, by Stacy Sims and Selene Yeager, and learned that her menstrual cycle had shaped her training since she was thirteen. “I was so mad that I did not have the understanding or the information for all of my life,” she said. All she had been told was to deal with it one week a month. Looking back, that week turned out to be her strongest. “I come back online at that point.” She is careful to say her pattern is her own and differs from woman to woman.
Her generation of women was also told, in effect, to starve. Underfueling harms anybody, she says, and lands harder on changing hormones. Someone who learns “do not starve your body ever” gains benefits over decades that even a couple of months in fuel deficit can put at risk.
I trained for a couple of decades inside a system built around male physiology, believing my knowledge applied to everyone, and for a long time I was afraid to ask an athlete about her cycle. A male coach will not have her anger to push him, Krissy pointed out, because the system was designed for him. “Your best bet is probably to learn from your female athletes.” She now offers cycle tracking as an opportunity instead of dancing around the subject, finds the athlete’s comfort level, and keeps the conversation going. Her anger points backward. Her gratitude points forward, to the young girls she is helping raise, who will meet these changes with far more to go on.
At every fork in her life, running keeps being the path. In 2010 she left the Conservation Alliance to try life as a professional athlete, when very few women could make a living at it. “If I’m eating beans and rice in the back of my Subaru, I’ll be all right.” Running keeps winning because of what it is for her. “Some people call it escape. I think it’s the answer,” she said. “If I need to go figure out something, I’m not escaping. I’m going for a run to work towards whatever it is I’m working towards.”
That answered my question. I built my identity on what climbing produced, and when production slowed, the identity wobbled. Krissy built hers on what running does for her: it is how she thinks and how she comes to know herself. Output declines with age for nearly all of us. A way of knowing yourself can keep working at any pace if you protect it, and protecting it is what her bearing has asked of her.
Two summers before we spoke, after about six years away from racing, she tested her bearings at the High Lonesome 100 in Colorado. She wanted her partner’s two young daughters to know this part of her. Her training was thin. The first fifty miles went beautifully. Then her stomach failed, and around mile eighty her period started. “Those two little girls showed up in such a big way, wiping down my face and handing me snacks,” she said. “It was really sweet being that vulnerable.” In the final miles she said what many say: “I still love it. This damn sport. I can’t quit it.” When I said what a thing it was to show those girls, she corrected me. “I’m not showing them anything, but I love to share with them.”
I asked what kind of athlete she wants to be in fifteen years. She gave me three words. “A moving one.” She let go of five-year goals long ago, and her life, she says, has unfolded beautifully without them.
When I asked how she wants to be remembered, she told me something I did not see coming. For five years, slowly and deliberately, she has been moving toward work as a death doula. “If ever there was a calling, running might be the first one,” she said. “Death doula would be the second.” The woman who wants to run the day she dies is learning to sit with people through their literal death. Hearing them weigh how they will be remembered shapes how she acts today. Her own answer: “A person that lived without regrets.”
A young woman in Ecuador goes for a run nobody assigned and discovers that this simple act, it belonged to her all along. A quarter century later she is apprenticing herself to the one day nobody can schedule. A finish line is something you reach once. A bearing asks you to choose again at every fork, and so far Krissy has chosen the path that moves.
The full conversation with Krissy Moehl is on Voice of the Mountains.