A much different athlete than she was in 2022 when she last lined up for the event and finished second, Stephanie Case arrives at the 2025 Hardrock 100 as a new mom. In the following interview, Stephanie talks about how her life has changed since her last time running the event, her win at the Ultra-Trail Snowdonia 100k earlier this year and the photo from it that went viral on the internet, and what training looks like as a working mom.
To learn more about who’s racing, check out our preview before following our live coverage during the race.
[Editor’s Note: If you are unable to see the video above, click here to access it.]
Stephanie Case Pre-2025 Hardrock 100 Interview Transcript
iRunFar: Meghan Hicks of iRunFar. I’m with Stephanie Case. It’s a couple days before the 2025 Hardrock 100. Stephanie, welcome back to Silverton.
Stephanie Case: Thank you. I’m so happy to be back.
iRunFar: You’re literally just arriving?
Case: Yes, just arriving and I’m bouncing with energy.
iRunFar: Literally bouncing with energy and bouncing with your daughter, Pepper. How many months old is she?
Case: She is eight months and a couple of days.
iRunFar: You were last here three years ago.
Case: Yeah.
iRunFar: You took second in the 2022 edition of the race.
Case: I did.
iRunFar: You were living an entirely different reality three years later.
Case: Yeah. I’m blonde now.
iRunFar: Yeah, there’s that.
Case: And I have a human. Yeah.
Pepper: [Crying.]
Case: Whew.
iRunFar: When you think about the process and the time and all of the things that took place between there and here, what’s your synopsis of that?
Case: I really wouldn’t have believed. I couldn’t have imagined three years ago that I would be where I’m at now. After I finished Hardrock in 2022, I found out I was pregnant and that really just made me suddenly want to become a mom. And while I unfortunately suffered a couple pregnancy losses and then went through a pretty difficult period of IVF.
iRunFar: This is amazing. [Pepper taking microphone]
Case: This is great. This is my reality. I’m just…
Pepper: [Crying.]
iRunFar: Tell us about it, Pepper.
Case: We’re all very emotional. I’m just so excited to be back here three years later from when I started that journey with the human, with my daughter with me. So training has not been ideal. There’s a lot less sleep, a lot less time, but coming back here just feels like a real celebration.
iRunFar: I can just hold it. [The microphone]
Case: Yeah.
iRunFar: Can you hear if I hold it?
Case: Coming back feels like a real celebration. This is exactly how my race is going to go, by the way.
iRunFar: We’re living a metaphor here of your 2025 race.
Case: This is what life is right now.
iRunFar: Yeah. So let’s touch on that for just a minute because yeah, 2022, you came, you were focused on performance, and then you left this race and you found out you were actually pregnant.
Case: Yeah, I mean, it was not something I was expecting at all, but it was such a pleasant surprise. I really didn’t realize how much I wanted to become a mom until I actually was one. But pregnancy loss is so common. It’s just we still don’t talk about it enough. It’s the kind of club that you don’t want to join and you don’t even know who’s a member of it until you cross that barrier. But it just instilled in me this desire to try to get pregnant and stay pregnant any way that I could, and it was a lot harder than I ever imagined it would be, but I feel quite lucky to be where I’m at right now.
iRunFar: During that time in which you were trying to get pregnant, experiencing loss, and eventually getting pregnant and having it sticking and here comes Pepper, you were still running all along the way. The way that I saw it from the outside looking in was that you were dead set on continuing to live life by your terms, despite this other stuff going on in the…
Case: Yeah, in a way. I mean, I really stepped back from running and I stepped back from racing. It was almost three years before I set foot on a race line again, and that was Ultra-Trail Snowdonia [100k] a couple of months ago, other than a race I did in Jordan.
Pepper: [Crying.]
iRunFar: Hi.
Case: It was really hard because there’s not a lot of research in between the connection between fertility and running, and even though there’s no science to show that training hard and training intensely can impact, people would question. People would ask me whether perhaps my running was affecting my ability to be a mom, and even the doctors and the medical professionals would give me advice to take really the most conservative approach. So I was kind of caught between this desire of not wanting this to affect my life and going out and doing what I love. Running is a big part of my identity, but also not wanting to feel like there was anything that I could have done more to help me become a mom. So I really fell quite a step back in my fitness and my running and definitely in my racing.
iRunFar: To talk a little bit about logistically where you are now. Pepper is how many months old?
Case: Eight months.
iRunFar: Eight months. And was it two months ago you came back to your first race?
Case: Yes, I raced Ultra-Trail Snowdonia when I was six months postpartum.
iRunFar: How has the return from giving birth and returning to fitness been for you? What’s that journey been like?
Case: I feel like I’m very lucky. Women don’t really know how difficult it’s going to be coming back from childbirth, and so I feel quite lucky that I was able to come back to running after six weeks and then really into racing. Being a mom has made me so much more dialed on my nutrition, on my training, because I just don’t have the luxury or the time anymore to be able to just go off into the mountains for hours and hours and kind of take a bag of chips here and there. Now I’m doing the high carb fuel thing and really trying to pay attention to making my training efficient and I felt really good before Ultra-Trail Snowdonia, and it worked out better than I thought it would.
But now that I’m back at work, I’m really experiencing everything that it means to be a working mom, and it’s so much harder. I just have so much empathy for all of the moms who came before me because it’s impossible to work all day and try to train and be present for your partner or for your baby, and to remember that we’re doing this for fun. So yeah, that’s kind of the mindset I’m trying to get in right now. This is supposed to be fun. So all of the travel chaos I had, all of the sleepless nights, it doesn’t really matter because this is a beautiful area to be running and I’m just incredibly fortunate.
iRunFar: I’m going to talk for just a second about Ultra-Trail Snowdonia.
Case: Okay.
iRunFar: Everybody and their mother heard about this race.
Case: Yeah.
iRunFar: You entered the 100k race.
Case: Yes.
iRunFar: You won it.
Case: Yes.
iRunFar: You were in one of the back waves because you didn’t have elite access because you hadn’t raced in several years.
Case: The last wave, yeah.
iRunFar: You didn’t know you were winning until the end when you crossed the line, and all the timings were figured out and they realized that you had the fastest time, and you were the winner. It wasn’t just ultrarunning that reacted to that. It was like anybody who had an interest in sports took an interest in that story. I want to ask you why. Why do you think that captured so many people’s attention?
Case: Yeah, so it was this photo that went incredibly viral of me breastfeeding Pepper while eating a piece of watermelon during the race. And I think the reason why it captured so much attention is because it was an image of a mom doing her own thing while taking care of her daughter. And those two things weren’t competing, they weren’t conflicting. So I was kind of showing how I could be a mom and be pursuing my dreams at the same time, and it works.
And even though it’s 2025, we still have very ingrained ideas about what a new mom should look like and how a new mom should be spending their time. There was a lot of pushback really about the fact that I was out racing. There was a lot of positive comments, but also some negative ones. The fact that something like this can be inspiring, which is great, but also still controversial, really tells me that we need to be doing a lot more talking about new moms and kind of reducing the judgment and reducing the stigma around how new moms spend their time. Because I think whether moms want to go run a 100k race, run a 100-mile race, or join a book club, or just take a bath, they should be able to do whatever makes them feel happy and all.
iRunFar: What was interesting to me about it was that… I love that there’s just so much happening in this interview.
Case: But really this is what my life is like. So this is my fault. I’ve brought you into my world.
iRunFar: And then there’s also construction. There’s great changing light. Everything is just fantastic.
Case: This is it.
iRunFar: But what was so interesting to me about that is that motherhood in sports was or is historically, as you said, something that is sort of hidden, put by the wayside, not celebrated. Women are expected to just bounce back or like, okay, you decide to be pregnant as a sponsored athlete, you just go off your sponsorship and then come back. There’s this historical expectation that that part of life cycle is not included in sports.
Case: Yes.
iRunFar: Yet so many people were so excited by your story. For me, there’s something there that I haven’t been able to figure out. What is that dichotomy that we’re looking at there?
Case: Well, I think there’s many different aspects of it, but one thing kind of touching on what you commented on, is that we assume that motherhood has to be something that holds you back and that is going to take away from your life and who you are. And I honestly think that I wouldn’t have won in Snowdonia if I wasn’t a mom, because Pepper has made me more efficient, she’s made me more focused, and she’s also made me more relaxed. So while there’s definitely some challenges to coming back into the sport as a new mom, I think it’s much more complex than that and we need to find different ways to support new moms to be able to continue in the sport, in whatever sport they want to do at whatever level really, and to give them the space to be able to navigate that themselves.
iRunFar: My last question for you. You started your relationship with Hardrock in 2022. You were chosen in the lottery and now it’s sort of like, I don’t know, twisted and turned its way into your life in so many ways. You’re back here as an athlete, you have joined the board of directors to help organize the event or work on the policy of the event. Why and how did Hardrock get under your skin like that?
Case: I think the deep connection that this run has to nature, to the environment, and to the communities really speaks to me. Even though this is a world-renowned race that people from all over the world want to come run, it still has that feeling of… There’s 146 runners in it and each runner is treated as important as the other one. So, whether you’re Katie Schide or whether you’re at the back of the pack, you are so important to the organization, to the communities, and I think that that’s really quite a beautiful thing and trying to help make this run, make this event open and accessible to more people is something I’m pretty passionate about.
iRunFar: Best of luck to you in your second Hardrock and best of luck juggling all that is you.
Case: Thank you.
