Hello and welcome to the free trail podcast. Of course, I am your loving host, Dylan Bowman, here today with Jennifer Lichter, a pro trail runner for the North Face living in

Missoula, Montana in 2023.

Jen was fourth at the Short Trail World Championships landing her on the international radar in a big

way early in her career.

But it's this season where Jen has clearly taken her game to a new level, winning and

setting course records at both

the Broken Arrow 46K and the Speedgoat 50K, two of the strongest 50K performances of the season so far.

And next month, Jen will be one of the anchors on a star-studded Team USA for the Long Trail

World Championships, a race that will be the longest of her career so

far. I have to say this is one of the most powerful episodes we've ever recorded here. Going

into it, I really didn't know much about Jen or her story. And I believe this is the first time

that she's talked about her background in detail publicly.

I'll let you hear it from her directly in the episode, but let's just say Jen's path into

trail running superstardom was anything but typical. The daughter of troubled parents in

Bogota, Columbia, Jen found herself living on the streets, then in an

orphanage, and then by some divine intervention being adopted with her siblings by a family

in Wisconsin, laying the foundation for a new life and a new beginning here in the USA.

It is really an amazing story, and I'm honored that Jen would share

it here on the podcast. In addition to exploring this terrain and detail at the beginning of the show,

of course, we also talk at length about Jen's racing career, her near metal performance of the

2020-23 World Championships, her season so far,

including course record wins at Broken Arrow and Speedgoat, and of course look forward to her race

...