Courtney Dauwalter is coming home.
The ultrarunning legend from Hopkins, Minnesota, will line up at the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon on October 5 as part of the event’s new Best of the Midwest Invitational, a race-within-the-race that gathers 16 professional runners with ties to Midwestern states.
For Dauwalter, it’s both a homecoming and a new challenge.
Dauwalter, now based in Leadville, Colorado, is best known for rewriting what’s possible in ultrarunning.
She holds the women’s course record at the Western States 100, winning in 15 hours, 29 minutes in 2023, nearly 80 minutes faster than the previous record, and became the first athlete to sweep Western States, Hardrock 100, and UTMB in the same year.
Her resume includes victories and records at nearly every major trail ultra in the world, but a 26.2-mile road race is a rare appearance.
For Dauwalter, though, Minnesota has always been the place where her running life started.
She ran cross country and track at Hopkins High School from 1997 to 2003, where she says she fell in love with the sport, both the act of pushing limits and the friendships that came with it. In 2009, she signed up for the Twin Cities Marathon almost on a dare to herself.
“I couldn’t believe that people ran 26.2 miles with their feet. It sounded impossible and I had to find out if I could do it as well,” she recalled. She survived, loved it, and came back again in 2012 to run side-by-side with her two brothers.
That family connection is part of what makes this year’s race special. “A lot of my family still lives in Minnesota and we love coming back to visit as often as possible. I love Minnesota with all my heart, the people, the seasons, the summer lake life, and, of course, the hotdish,” she said.
Switching from her trademark 100-mile trail races to a faster, flatter road marathon is uncharted territory, but Dauwalter says she’s looking forward to treating it like an experiment.
She’s curious to see how lessons from training for ultras, endless climbs, unpredictable conditions, and the sheer grind of 20-plus hours on foot, translate into a very different racing environment.
“No matter what, running gives me so much joy. Keeping that joy in the forefront of it all will be a key part of the preparation.”
For the Twin Cities Marathon, organizers couldn’t have picked a more fitting hometown hero to highlight in the Best of the Midwest field. For Dauwalter, it’s less about results and more about connection, to her family, her community, and the state where it all began.
This October, Minnesota will get the chance to cheer back one of its most celebrated athletes, not just an ultrarunner pushing the boundaries of the sport, but a Hopkins native returning to the roads where her story started.
