For Amanda Basham, professional runner for Altra and mom of two, nothing about how she approaches the sport is traditional. All photos: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Welcoming Committee
When I knock on the door of a house perched in the forested hills above Boulder, Colorado, it may be Amanda Basham who opens it, but she’s definitely not the first to greet me. That would be Maeve, Amanda’s three-year-old daughter. Maeve wastes no time ushering me inside and telling me all about Luna, a nine-month-old cattle dog the family adopted a few months ago, who is also part of the enthusiastic welcoming committee. She also tells me that she just learned how to swim, a fact that her older sister, Rylan, who is observing quietly in the background, doesn’t seem impressed by. Four-year-old Rylan quietly says, “I can swim, too,” as she hangs back with Amanda’s older cattle dog, Marley.
Barely inside the door, Maeve shows me a picture of her mom that she carries around before changing into her Elsa — from the film “Frozen,” obviously — dancing shoes, which are in a pile of footwear mostly dominated by Altra trail running shoes. The two girls run off, and Amanda and I have a chance to officially meet. We’ve probably spent 15 minutes talking with the girls and petting the dogs by the time we get past, “Hi.”
Amanda’s youngest daughter Maeve shows off a picture of Amanda that she likes to carry around.
I’m there to see what a day in the life of an Altra-sponsored professional trail runner and mom of two is like in the lead-up to her biggest race of her year, the 2025 CCC in the Alps. Thus far, I know far more about the girls’ dance camp than any of her training plans and goals. The integration of running into Amanda’s life is clearly a family affair.
Getting to Know Amanda Basham
It’s a Thursday in August, about two weeks before Amanda leaves for Europe to race CCC in three weeks’ time. It’s a race that Amanda placed second at in 2019, coming off a four-year streak of results that included two fourth-place finishes at the Western States 100. It was before meeting her partner, before the COVID-19 pandemic, before moving to Boulder, before having two kids, and before having to figure out how to combine being a professional athlete and a parent, a feat not commonly seen in the sport, especially amongst elite women.
While most athletes evolve gradually over time, Amanda has had two very distinct parts of her career, punctuated by 2020 and 2021, the two years that changed nearly everything in her life and running — except for her trademark bright red hair, her now eight-year relationship with her primary sponsor Altra, and her desire to race at the front of the most competitive events in trail running.
Roller skates, Cookie Monster Crocs, and Altras fill the family shoe closet.
Three weeks out from the race, while many of the other top runners racing CCC have already traveled to Europe to train on the route and get over jet lag, Amanda is staying home with her family for as long as possible. It’s a risk, and probably not one that she would have taken before having kids, but nothing in Amanda’s current life situation is traditional or necessarily planned out or conducive to ideal race preparation. While others might panic at the lack of daily structure or ideal training and recovery ahead of an important race, Amanda, after more than a decade of success in the sport, seems to have the experience, or at least the acceptance, to make it work.
Breakfast of Champions
Luna, the overgrown and over-excited puppy, shadows me as we head into Amanda’s kitchen, clearly deciding that I’m her new best friend. I comment on the beauty of the house and location, which is a 30-minute drive up a steep, winding mountain road from Boulder. It’s ideal for a trail runner, sitting at around 7,000 feet, with dirt roads and trails from the door, away from the bustle of Boulder down below. But Amanda explains that the location has its drawbacks also: It’s nearly impossible to get childcare at the house, and getting together with others to run has proven challenging, between the time it takes to drive to town, managing two kids, and scheduling with her partner, Justin Grunewald, also an Altra-sponsored athlete and a doctor who leaves for a week at a time to work in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Bacon for breakfast, electrolyte mixes for runs.
Bacon sizzling on the skillet, we’re mid-conversation about Amanda’s decision to quit her day job with Nike in 2014 in pursuit of a running career when the two girls return, now changed out of the running camp t-shirts they were in and into dance costumes. Maeve fails to play the song she wants on a small speaker, lapsing into a mini-meltdown in Amanda’s arms while the incorrect song blares from the speaker. Amanda quickly changes the music to the desired KPop Demon Hunters song, which she explains is a big improvement over the ABCs song the girls were previously obsessed with.
Training After Kids
Breakfast is on the table when Justin returns from his morning run. His first move is to turn the volume down on KPop Demon Hunter several notches. He’s getting ready to race the Leadville 100 Mile, which will take place right before this article publishes, and tells me about a niggle with his sacrum as he foam rolls on the living room floor. The girls entertain themselves while the dogs lounge.
The pair takes turns watching the girls to ensure that they can each get their training in. It’s a juggling of schedules with many moving parts, and one that’s never set in stone. Amanda explains that when she first became pregnant, the pair committed to finding ways to continue working toward their running goals.
The girls play, Amanda’s husband Justin Grunewald foam rolls, and Marley the dog lounges on a Thursday morning at home.
Amanda returned to racing six months after her first pregnancy and three months after her second one. Postpartum, she’s had a string of impressive results, including winning the Broken Arrow Triple Crown in both 2024 and 2025, after finishing second in 2023, and placing fourth at the 2023 Bandera 100k while in search of a Golden Ticket to the Western States 100. But the return to racing has included disappointments as well.
I ask her if she was more regimented in her training and preparation before kids, and she looks at me like I’m crazy. “I hear ‘Mom’ 100 times before breakfast.” Instead of having the structure of eat, run, and recover like other top runners, she’s working around scheduling runs with Justin, the girls whose energy and inclinations often run the household, and other unexpected disruptions. She laughs, “My mom says Maeve is just like I was when I was little. And that this is payback.”
Family Strength Workouts
Amanda’s training today involves a strength session and a two-hour run. Her strength coach, Chris Lee from Kinesis Integrated in Boulder, prescribes four sessions a week, two strength and two mobility. “I get the strength sessions done,” Amanda explains. “But the mobility …” she trails off. “If I get three sessions total in a week, it’s good.”
For the strength workout, we head upstairs to a room with two treadmills, a stationary bike, a weight rack with different types of straps hanging from it, and an assortment of recovery tools. A collection of medals and trophies adorns the back wall. While she goes to the gym in Boulder to train with others when she can, the extra time and logistics are often prohibitive.
Gym shoes of choice for this family: the Altra Solstice XT 2, Elsa dancing shoes, and none at all.
The girls follow us in, but the dogs get locked out. Amanda pulls up her workout on an app and puts on a pair of Altra Solstice XT 2 gym shoes. Rylan joins her for the initial warm-up, eyes on her mom’s every move. Maeve, still wearing her Elsa shoes, heads for the bands.
“They usually start doing whatever with me, and then they go off and do their own thing,” Amanda explains of the girls, who regularly join the strength sessions. In between sets of lunges, pushups, step-ups, and band work, Amanda helps the girls hang from the pull-up bar, mitigates tears when Maeve can’t turn off a massage gun, and negotiates that the girls can get on the treadmill after her workout is done. A focused person could finish this workout in about 30 minutes, but with the kids, it takes well over an hour.
A strength session also includes hanging on the pull-up bar.
After the workout, Amanda is straight back into mom-ing, first helping the girls change into costumes and then reading a book. Unlike many elite athletes, there is no pause for a recovery drink or snack. And there definitely isn’t time for a nap.
A Decade in Ultrarunning
With the morning in the rearview mirror, we sit down to talk more formally about Amanda’s running career. She hands the girls over to Justin, and we close ourselves off from the rest of the house.
It’s the first moment of calm we’ve had since I walked in her front door several hours ago, and the transformation between Amanda the Mom and Amanda the Professional Athlete is immediate. There’s a focus and drive that seems masked, or perhaps intentionally hidden, with her girls. These traits immediately reveal themselves when I ask her about her history with CCC and the UTMB Mont Blanc festival of races.
“When I did [CCC] in 2019, I remember thinking, ‘This is the most competitive CCC has ever been, but now comparing that year to now, it’s like, ‘Holy crap.’ Where it’s gone has just been insane.”
Amanda has been at the leading edge of the sport for a decade, and she’s not convinced that all the changes she’s seen in that time are good. She says that the sport’s professionalization, while great from a financial perspective, also has drawbacks. “More people are more focused on, ‘I am here to do well and perform to then get a sponsor and get paid better,’ and that’s the objective.”
She feels like things were different before there was quite so much money and hype around the big events. “People were doing it because they loved to do it. Yes, you want to perform well and you have big goals, but the main objective was, ‘I’m here to enjoy this place, see what I can get out of myself, and have a good time.’”
After her strength workout and before her run, Amanda reads with the girls.
As both Amanda and the sport have grown, so has her sponsor, Altra. When she first signed with them in 2017, it was a small team operating a relatively new shoe company with a unique vision. In their subsequent decade of massive growth, she says that they’ve stayed true to the core values of what first drew her to them. “They want the human version of the athlete,” she explains, saying that it’s not all about the podium finishes. In 2020, after three years of being sponsored by them, she says, “I wasn’t quite as worried about having kids because I had been with them for so long, it just felt like more of a long-term partnership.”
While we’re talking, Maeve walks in, explaining that Justin has sent her upstairs for a bit of a timeout. She sits on the floor, promising to be quiet.
Defining Success at the 2025 CCC
Since her first visit to the UTMB Mont Blanc festival in 2017, Amanda has had mixed success in her six subsequent visits. Her pre-pregnancy second-place finish at CCC in 2019 set her standards high, but she dropped from her second attempt in 2021 after finding out that she was pregnant with her second child just three days before the event.
Amanda says that returning to CCC this year isn’t about redemption from 2021, but a chance to race with confidence again. She explains that early in her running career, she had the confidence to run at the front of any field — even against the advice of people who told her to race more conservatively — but lately she’s been hanging back, worried about her postpartum fitness and body, and feeling like she is not part of the race.
In the final weeks before the 2025 CCC, Amanda makes every training session count.
Amanda admits that her lead-up and preparation to CCC this year is far from traditional, but that her time in the sport and long-term relationship with Altra have given her valuable perspective, freedom, and confidence. Her goals lie not in her final result but in her race execution and strategy. “I’m going to go out there and just be riskier and be in the race. I don’t think I’m going to be happy with it if I sit back and then the race gets away from me again.”
She also notes that she’s committed to running with happiness instead of a focus on the final result. “I think you have to have the joy factor, no matter how professionalized and competitive and how much people get paid.” She pauses. “At least I can’t, I can’t function that way. It’s not going to go well for me.”
Rylan walks through the door, the polkadot onesie she’d insisted on wearing just 30 minutes earlier removed, her third outfit change this morning. She and Maeve begin playing, first quietly enough for Amanda and me to continue talking, but their game escalates in enthusiasm and volume.
While there’s still much I want to ask, the cadence of the hours and activities are controlled not by Amanda, but by everything else going on around her.
Relentless Forward Progress
Next, Amanda has a two-hour run on the schedule. Having always coached herself in the past, she hired Robbie Britton, who also works with runners like Hayden Hawks, Dan Jones, and Caitlin Fielder, in late 2024. “Robbie is more quality over quantity,” she tells me, explaining that while some weeks she only runs 60 miles, it’s with several speed sessions included. Prior to working with Britton, she’d been a high-volume runner and always had a hard time convincing herself to do speedwork, opting for long runs on trails instead. “I’m still not completely sold on the low-volume training,” she admits. “But it seems to be working.”
Relentless forward progress.
Getting ready to leave the house, Amanda laces up a pair of Altra Experience Wild 2 shoes. Her home’s entryway is filled with both her and Justin’s Altras, and she shows me her pair of Altra Olympus 275, the brand’s newest lightweight, highly cushioned trail racing shoe. She’s debating between these two models for CCC, weighing the advantages of comfort over weight, a 4-millimeter drop versus zero drop, and lug size. “If it’s dry, I think the Wilds are going to be good,” she tells me.
All in the Family
With Justin taking care of the girls, we drive a few miles down the hill from her house to a parking lot that she says is normally full. It’s midday already, and the temperatures are pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit. She remarks on the empty parking lot. “It’s too hot out for anyone to be out here,” she says, unloading running gear from her truck. I agree, thinking to myself that it would take a lot for me to put on a pair of shoes and run in these conditions. It seems that everyone else in Boulder who wanted to run today has long since gotten their miles in and gone home.
Cookies for trail snacks!
She stoically loads her running vest with a bag of cookies. Her vest is otherwise filled with her CCC mandatory kit and a significant amount of water, and she heads out on a route with two major climbs. She only has a few hours before needing to be back home to her family, and with only a couple of weeks left of training before flying to Chamonix, every mile counts.
Justin has his 100 miles in Leadville. After that, Amanda will be at the CCC start line. All the while, the girls will play, do strength workouts with their mom, and have very little idea of their parents’ lofty goals. But they will see their mom working hard, and as Amanda tells me, “They don’t really listen to what you tell them. They see and follow everything you do.” And regardless of how CCC turns out, the lessons she can teach her girls through running are invaluable. “How can I tell them to keep trying if I don’t do it too?”
With a decade of experience in the sport, Amanda is approaching the 2025 CCC ready to race.
[Editor’s Note: This article is sponsored by Altra. Thank you to Altra for its sponsorship of iRunFar, which helps to make iRunFar happen and free for all to enjoy. Learn more about our sponsored articles.]
