Ruth Croft Opens Up About Her Eating Disorder in a New Adidas Documentary

Ruth Croft, the New Zealander who won UTMB in 2025, describes in a new Adidas documentary how an eating disorder took hold of her as a teenager, beginning with a meeting at school about her weight, and how it followed her through her college running years in the United States.

Directed by Alexis Berg, Roots: The Ruth Croft Story went up on Adidas’ YouTube channel on Oct. 14 after premiering at this year’s UTMB festival in Chamonix, according to iRunFar. Its 53 minutes move between New Zealand’s West Coast, where Croft grew up, Wānaka, where she lives now, and Taipei, where she spent five and a half years in her twenties.

“I was skinny, but I don’t think I ever looked unhealthy,” Croft says of herself at the time. The meeting, held in a classroom with her parents, her running coach and her basketball coach, ended with an ultimatum. “I got told that if I didn’t put on a certain amount of weight in a certain amount of months, that I wouldn’t be allowed to run,” she says. She was put on estrogen, given a weight-gain supplement and weighed regularly. Her body was changing quickly, and “the only way I felt like I could then control everything was to start restricting myself,” she says, and before long she had also become bulimic.

A running scholarship took her to the University of Portland, where stress fractures kept coming back for most of her four years. She had no period through high school or college, and it only arrived for the first time the week before she left Taiwan to move home. “I’m not proud of the fact that I was 27 when I got my first period,” she says. “There’s a lot of females that end up going down that path, and I also want to tell them that you can turn things around.” A missing period and repeated bone injuries are two of the classic warning signs of relative energy deficiency in sport, or RED-S, which develops when an athlete takes in too little energy for the training she is doing.

Croft carried resentment toward the adults at that meeting for years, and only came to see it differently while working with Jin, a practitioner she turned to after severe mouth ulcers, part of a long stretch of immune problems, kept her from starting UTMB in 2023. “Everyone in that room, at that time, all they cared about was me. And it came from a place of love,” she says.

She moved to Taipei almost on a whim, for a job teaching English, and calls it “the first time in my life where running hadn’t dictated where I live or what I do.” For most of that first year she kept to other foreigners and was, in her words, “partying a lot and drinking a lot and doing a lot of recreational drugs,” which she now describes as escapism. Things shifted once she started learning Mandarin, and a Wednesday training group got her running again. A friend from that group known as Rocketman says he predicted 2:47 for her first proper race, the Taipei Marathon, and she ran 2:46.

“Of all places, I never thought that Taiwan would be the place that would make me fall in love with the sport again,” Croft says.

She moved to Wānaka at the end of 2017 to train seriously, won Western States in 2022 in 17:21:30 and finished second to Katie Schide at UTMB two years later. Then came the UTMB win in 22:56:23 in 2025, which made her the first woman to win the OCC, the CCC and UTMB. The film also goes back to Transvulcania that May, where she started as defending champion and course record holder and hypothermia ended her race on La Palma. With a bad forecast coming into Chamonix, she reminded herself that she had dropped out there without the right gear. “So imagine running UTMB when you are prepared,” she says.

“Winning UTMB doesn’t matter at all,” Croft says of the finish in Chamonix, adding that “the real meaning and all of that was sharing it with my friends and family.” She had been chasing that win for a decade, and says that once it was done, “it didn’t change me in any way.”

Croft is now studying for a degree in health science, naturopathy and Western herbal medicine, and she wants to use it with women in the sport. “I think I see myself working with female athletes and just helping athletes not go down the same road that I ended up going down,” she says.

She withdrew from UTMB two days before this year’s start, writing that her “heart and mind want to be elsewhere.” The film came out the day before the Diagonale des Fous on Réunion Island, her first time at the race. She won the women’s race in 27:13:23, 11th overall and more than an hour clear of Alyssa Clark, according to u-Trail, on a course of 180.8 kilometers (112 miles) with 10,191 meters of climbing.

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is available at (866) 662-1235.