Dakotah Popehn Is Publishing a Memoir About What Came Before the Running

Dakotah Popehn, the highest-placing American woman in the Paris Olympic marathon, will publish a memoir next summer about the part of her life that came long before any of it, including a period in middle school when she and her mother had nowhere to live.

Popehn announced the book on Instagram on Monday. You Think This Hurts? is due out June 22, 2027, from St. Martin’s Press, in hardcover, ebook and audiobook, and she wrote it with Bret Witter. The hardcover runs 288 pages and lists at $29.

“YOU THINK THIS HURTS? is about how the pain we choose helps us survive the pain we don’t get to choose,” she wrote in the announcement. “It’s about my very non-traditional path to the marathon, the struggles I had growing up, the relationships that almost broke me and the ones that built me back up.”

The publisher’s description is a good deal more specific than the post. It places Popehn and her mother, during her middle school years, on other people’s sofas, in an abandoned building and in a Walmart parking lot, and it presents the book as being about how hard getting by has become for working families in America, not only about a running career. It also says the book follows a relationship in her adult life that took her years to find the courage to leave, and the mother she went through all of it with.

She finished last in her first competitive race, a junior varsity meet. She missed the state championship as a high school senior, then ran at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, a Division II program, and graduated in 2017 still a long way from professional running. At the 2020 Olympic Trials in Atlanta she was 36th in 2:39:08. Four years later in Orlando she was third in 2:25:31, which put her on the team for Paris, where she led the American women home in 12th in 2:26:44. She raced as Dakotah Lindwurm through all of it and still posts under that name, having competed as Popehn since getting married after the Paris Games.

She ran 2:24:20 at the 2025 Chicago Marathon, seventh overall and second American, then went quicker still in April at Boston, 2:24:04 on a course too steeply downhill to count for records. In June she won the 50th Grandma’s Marathon in 2:28:51, a third title there that put her alongside Lorraine Moller and Mary Akor as the only women to win it three times. “Coming back to my home state and winning here means more to me than any other marathon,” she told WDIO in Duluth.

Witter has spent a career writing other people’s lives with them, among them Stronger with Jeff Bauman, who lost both legs in the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon finish line, as well as The Monuments Men and Dewey.

The last wave of memoirs by American women in distance running, from Kara Goucher, Lauren Fleshman and Des Linden, was largely a reckoning with what the sport had done to them. Popehn’s sits earlier than that, in the years before the sport was anywhere near her.

She races the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 11, and the book goes on sale three days after next year’s Grandma’s Marathon.