How She Did It: Abby Hall’s 2025 Western States Victory

 

All athletes must persist through a series of highs and lows, great performances and serious setbacks. Abby Hall’s journey from a 28-hour first finish at the 2019 Leadville 100 to winning the 2025 Western States Endurance Run in the fourth fastest female finishing time (16:37:16) was anything but linear.

Abby Hall’s Troubled Journey to Western States

Almost exactly two years ago, Abby Hall was nearing the end of an everyday run, less than a mile from home, when a simple misstep led to a knee hyperextension that tore most of her knee ligaments and broke her tibial plateau. It was a devastating knee injury that threatened to end her career as a professional runner. Prior to the injury in 2023, Abby had progressed to back-to-back podium performances (2021 and 2022) in the 100-kilometer Courmayeur/Champex/Chamonix (CCC). But following a major knee surgery, there was no guarantee she’d ever return to elite-level performance. The process of returning to elite-level competition required more patience and grit than most people possess.

Fueling Problems

During the long and gradual recovery from knee surgery, Abby returned to competition in medium-distance trail races. Although her training was progressing well, her race performances were all over the map. There were a lot of variables in play, including psychological factors related to the risks of reinjury, so it was difficult to pinpoint a reason for the inconsistent results. One variable I didn’t anticipate (before and after the injury and surgery) was the fact the Spring Energy brand carbohydrate gels she relied on contained only 40 grams of carbohydrate instead of the 70 grams listed on the nutrition label. During runs where carbohydrate oxidation was not a limiting factor, like moderate-intensity endurance runs or even shorter but more intense interval sessions, her performances were barely affected. But with the benefit of hindsight, it was clear she’s been seriously under fueled during longer and harder races. Even after Spring Energy was exposed for shorting their carbohydrate gels and Abby moved to a different product, it took her several months to adjust and train her gut to consume the amount of energy she thought she’d been consuming all along. 

Qualifying for Western States

With the nutrition saga sorted out and her knee fully recovered, Abby made good progress in competitions, but she’d been away from the top of leaderboards long enough that qualifying for WSER25 was going to be a challenge. She set the goal of grabbing a Golden Ticket at either The Black Canyon Ultras (February 2025) or the Chianti Ultra Trail (March 2025) by UTMB. Fifth place at Black Canyon (at the time) wasn’t enough for a Golden Ticket, and neither was fourth place in Chianti. It wasn’t until May that Abby learned she would have the opportunity to race WSER25 because a racer who finished ahead of her at Black Canyon used WSER’s new pregnancy deferral policy. From a training perspective, ramping up to be competitive in February and again in March, followed by uncertainty until May, was not the ideal scenario for someone aiming to win Western States.

Western States 2025: How The Race Was Won

After the twists and turns involved in Abby’s journey to just get to the starting line, it even more rewarding to watch her execute a near-perfect race plan to win the 2025 Western States Endurance Run. I could talk for hours about all the details of her running and strength training, her nutrition program, and more, but three core aspects of her preparation and race-day execution really stick out:  

Training: Using the past to optimize the future

I’ve been working with Abby Hall for nearly  eight years, so going into 2025 I had a lot of training history to reflect on. Abby’s race results are split between great performances and forgettable ones. Her career is also bifurcated between before and after injury. To build for WSER25, I wanted to take a simple and straightforward approach, one that leveraged training that had proven effective before and that Abby could associate with prior success. So, we went back to the training build that led to her career-best performance, the 2022 CCC, and used that as the basis for her WSER25 training.

Obviously, it was not a cut-and-paste training plan. Rather, Abby’s 2025 training harkened back to workouts and training blocks she remembered from 2022. And as her fitness developed, so did her confidence because she could relate the current sensations to positive memories from a time, pre-injury, when she was ramping up to the best performance of her career (to that point).   

One of the lessons I teach my colleagues at CTS is not to be afraid of repeating something that works. There’s a temptation in coaching to always try something new, even if it’s just making changes so an athlete can see a difference. Innovation is good, for sure, but when you find a training strategy and workout pattern that works for an individual athlete, double down on it! Not only does it work from an adaptation standpoint but knowing what worked before provides athletes with confidence they’re on the right track again.  

Innovation: Core temperature pills in training optimized race-day decision making

There’s a larger story afoot regarding the different heat training strategies elite athletes used before WSER25. Abby lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and her parents have a place in Fountain Hills, which is outside of Phoenix. This provided Abby the opportunity to use both passive (sauna) and active (running in a hot environment) heat training protocols. Prior to some of her hot weather runs, she swallowed pill-sized core temperature monitors that connected to an app that showed her how her body responded to exertion in the heat in real time. Although there are less invasive ways to measure core and/or skin temperature, they are neither accurate enough nor respond quickly enough for this application. The internal pills are currently more accurate and reliable than wearables. Most important, the pills showed how cooling interventions directly affected core temperature and (could) improve performance.

Across a series of trials with the core temperature pills, we were able to establish a personalized relationship between Abby’s core temperature and running performance. We also learned which cooling strategies worked best for her (e.g., cooled core temperature by 5 degrees Celsius) and how long she needed to apply cooling interventions for maximum effectiveness.

The effective cooling interventions (full-body cold water immersion, dousing with cold water, etc.) were nothing new. The important part was showing proof that those interventions were worth the time and effort required on race day. Pausing to sit in kiddie pools of ice water at the Michigan Bluff aid station costs precious time, so athletes need to buy into the purpose and effectiveness of interventions before they’ll commit to them. And although we applied this process to cooling strategies, the same process applies to nutrition, recovery, and even workout strategies.    

Attitude: Abby’s section-by-section mental plan kept her on track all day

Executing the race you want to run, on your terms, is not easy. There are variables you cannot control, competitors who have their own plans, and outside pressures that are difficult to escape. Abby learned a lot from being in the spotlight earlier in her career, dealing with a major injury, and then being watched by the media and fans as she struggled to rebuild her form. She learned how to deal with attention and still stay focused on executing her race.

Before the start of WSER25, she created a section-by section mental plan that defined the attitude she would bring to specific portions of the race. These included:

• “Assert yourself early.” Abby did not want to sit back and let others dictate the pace. She wanted to race her race from the very beginning. As a result, she was the first female runner to the top of the escarpment. It’s a risky move to burn extra energy so early, but she was confident in her fitness and wanted to race from the front.
• “After Robinson Flat, run like you’re at home.” Managing mental focus is critical in an ultramarathon because it is difficult to maintain heightened attention for 16-plus hours. The course past Robinson Flat reminds Abby of her home training grounds, so associating that section with running at home allowed for some mental relaxation and fun.
• “Burn matches in the canyons.” Just as important as finding places for mental relaxation, competitors must also find places and times to lock in and commit to hard efforts. Abby decided the canyons were the place to burn some matches, apply pressure to her rivals, and hopefully create the conditions that would lead to victory.

At each inflection point, Abby was able to do what she said she was going to do. This allowed her confidence to build as the race went on. It’s important to note, her mental plan was grounded process/instrinsic goals (things she could control) rather than outcome/extrinsic goals (run at or faster than record pace).

Final Word

Abby Hall’s WSER25 performance was years in the making and is an incredible comeback story. I am proud and humbled to play a role in her journey, and I’m grateful for the trust she placed in me. She was one of the first athletes to buy into the idea of the CTS High Performance Coaching Program when I wanted to build a performance team around her that included Sarah Scozzaro for strength training and Meredith Terranova for nutrition, along with a few other domain experts as needed. She committed to the process fully, and in the end that meant she completed a very high percentage of the training as intended, including the heat acclimation protocols that required significant planning and travel.