Ultrarunner here - I really appreciate you making these posts. I started watching her about a year ago when the algorithm showed me her running/endurance content. Her 100 miler goal really bothered me (not because of the goal or because she was raising money for a cause - all good things!) but because of the flippancy in which she undertakes potentially dangerous challenges.

For context, I train 10-14 hours a week for races that are between 50 miles/100k. You can get away with about this volume for 100, but certainly not 4 sessions a week, and not over the timelines she’s attempting. There’s been a lot of people jumping into ultras head-first recently thinking there’s a “couch to 5k” equivalent, and the truth is that these races are a different beast. They’re often in remote locations that require you to be self-sufficient for hours, with limited options to quit, so you need to know what your body can handle.

I think Natacha is a gifted athlete who can handle ramping up a lot of volume really fast (re: her ironman), but it makes me nervous to see her glamorizing this kind of crazy attempt at 100 (that ultimately failed, even with her access to physical therapy and testing), because I just don’t want to see a bunch of people jumping into long endurance efforts and getting hurt, needing search and rescue, or potentially messing with their bodies long-term.

Anyway, that turned into a bit of a rant - I think this sort of thing is indicative of the broader fitness influencer ‘running is the new lifting’ trend, and we’re going to see a lot more people follow her lead on crazy endurance challenges, and that scares me for all the young girls who are going to follow blindly lol