Forget the winning. “Hillygoat” learned the most from the fall that nearly took her life.
Hillary Allen, nicknamed “Hillygoat” for her ability to zoom across steep, technical mountain terrain in an ultrarunning sport known as skyrunning, was ranked No. 1 in the Skyrunner World Series in 2017. She was on track to become the first American woman to win the circuit — until she stepped on a loose rock going around a sharp turn in Tromsø, Norway, and tumbled 150 feet off a ridge line.
The Fort Collins native and Boulder resident broke 14 bones in the fall, including both wrists, both feet, five ribs and two vertebrae. The months that followed proved that the only thing that could match Allen’s endurance was her resilience.
“I saw it as an opportunity to discover how strong I really am, because up until that point, I don’t think I had the opportunity to really experience that,” Allen recalled. “It made me completely rebuild from ground zero.
“I remember thinking in the hospital bed that my life was over. … I had relied on (ultrarunning) to be my identity, then in an instant, it was all stripped and taken away from me. I was faced with a choice of either giving up or I could make the decision that I could run again, no matter if medical experts were telling me that I couldn’t.”
Allen chose the latter, and in the process, underscored her legacy as one of America’s greatest skyrunners.
Now 36, Allen burst onto the ultrarunning scene in her mid-20s, despite being only a recreational runner before that. After earning her undergraduate degree from Coe College, where she played tennis, the Fort Collins High School alum joined a running group that met early in the morning each Tuesday at George Washington High School.
Allen, then working on her master’s degree in neuroscience, physiology and structural biology from CU Denver, lived nearby. What she found in the runner’s group was a mentor in J’ne Day Lucore, as well as other women who schooled Allen in the art of endurance.
“Yeah, we were (kicking her butt),” recalled Day Lucore, a former professional runner and Colorado Running Hall of Famer. “She couldn’t keep up on the intervals. But it was clear from early on that she had the talent, the curiosity and the work ethic to be a good endurance runner. I just don’t think she knew how good she could be, and how far she could go.”
Turns out, Allen could go pretty far.
She won the US Skyrunner Series in 2014 as a rookie. After quitting her PhD program to pursue the sport full-time, she landed her first contract with The North Face a year later.
She placed third in the Skyrunner World Series that year to become the first American woman to make the podium on the circuit. That same season, she won the Speedgoat race in Utah and the Quest for the Crest race in North Carolina, both efforts resulting in course records. Based on her success, she also received an invitation to compete for Team USA at Festival des Templiers in France.
The ascension continued in 2016, when Allen finished second in the Skyrunner World Series. And she kept impressing in ’17. She won the Madeira Sky Race in Portugal with a course record and took third at Transvulcania in Spain until the fall at Tromsø changed the course of her career.
In the months after, one of Allen’s primary surgeons told her that she would be lucky if she could run recreationally again. For a woman accustomed to ultrarunning in skyraces that took her up and down elevation gains sometimes surpassing 20,000 feet, “‘jogging’ is like a four-letter word.”
“When I heard the doctor say ‘jogging,’ I had flashbacks to women with fake boobs and pink tank tops holding little pink one-pound weights and I was like, ‘That is not going to be me,’” Allen said with a laugh. “When (the doctor) told me that, I had two broken wrists at the time, and my instinct was I wanted to punch her in the face. But I couldn’t obviously. So I was just really sad instead.
“And in the end, I was actually really glad she did tell me all that, because it sobered me into the seriousness of the situation. That running wasn’t guaranteed, and in order to make it happen again, I needed to be fully committed and so serious about my recovery and so intentional, purposeful and tenacious in my physical therapy.”
Allen couldn’t get out of her hospital bed for nearly a week. In the initial stage of her recovery, her longtime physical therapist Matthew Smith recalled “deep, dark moments throughout that process that were pretty visible.”
“She started to question why the accident happened in the first place, and look back more than forward,” Smith said. “… In about half our sessions early on, there’d be tears, there’d be bargaining. She was going through the whole steps of loss.
“I remember her lying on her belly, with her leg off the side of the table, lifting her leg so it was equal to the rest of her body and she would get the shakes, she would start to sweat. It was really basic, phase-one post-operative work, and she would be full-on exhausted from the effort it took to produce a couple reps of one simple action.”
But Allen stacked small victories like those on top of each other — all the way to winning her first European event just 11 months after her fall.
Allen set a course record in the victory and sent a postcard to her doubtful doctor afterward. It served as further proof that the best way to motivate “Hillygoat” is to dare her she can’t.
“We were ecstatic at that point,” recalled Adam St. Pierre, Allen’s coach from 2017 to 2022. “Recovery had gone about as well as recovery can go. We were looking ahead, starting to make big plans, then some more setbacks happened. … There were more surgeries, more adversity. She was feeling a lot of self-doubt, wondering if her body was broken and if it was meant for this.”
There was surgery in 2018 to remove broken screws in her foot, put there as part of her initial recovery. She broke her right ankle in ’19 after slipping on ice. In ’21, she broke her left foot in an injury related to the fall, and she required another ankle surgery in ’23 that kept her off the trail for nearly a year.
During that period, Allen picked up gravel cycling and mountain biking. She’s since competed five times in the Unbound Gravel 200-mile, one of the top gravel bike races in the world, finishing as high as 17th. In three of those races, she competed while injured. She also wrote a book about her journey — “Out and Back: A Runner’s Story of Survival Against All Odds” — published in 2021.
“She’s just continued to show up for herself,” Smith said. “In her sport, that’s hard to do. It seems like there’s a lot of people who come and go, and there’s a lot of stars for a couple weeks and then people fade. But she just won’t (expletive) quit.”
It’s all a reflection of Allen’s mantra: “Your best days are ahead of you.”
“Competing at the elite level is a finite period of time, but sport is for forever,” Allen said. “It’s a lifestyle. I believe you can constantly continue to PR no matter how old you are — it’s just a relative PR.”
Going forward, Allen believes she still has more in the tank while also continuing to diversify her interests.
She started a coaching business. She’s gone back to school to get another master’s degree, this time in applied sports psychology. She’s become a speaker and delivered the keynote address at this year’s Sportswomen of Colorado gala. And she’s getting more invested in intertwining her career with the community, including hosting her first running camp in September.
In March, the Brooks-sponsored runner took third at the Run Through Time trail marathon in Salida, a race won by renowned ultrarunner and Colorado resident Courtney Dauwalter. Earlier this month, Allen won the Tiger Claw 50K in Washington state.
And upcoming this summer, she has a full slate of races ahead of her, including the Broken Arrow Skyrace in California, the Restonica Trail 100K in France and the Squamish 50/50 in Canada, with some bike races to follow in the fall.
In each of those skyraces, a healthy Allen will be grateful to toe the starting line. But she’s also still got the engine to win.
“In ultrarunning, and especially with women, we’re seeing women perform better and better as they age,” observed Karley Rempel, a runner who trains with Allen in Boulder. “It used to be if you weren’t in your 20s, the thought was you couldn’t be a pro runner. But women like Hillary are extending the boundaries of the age you can be elite at. And Hillary has the relentless positivity and love of the sport to keep pushing the envelope of what she can achieve.”
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