"I'd rather suck at running and have my life back," Erin McDonald, who just won the 2025 Detroit Free Press International Half Marathon in 1:16. She objectively does not suck at running, but she does have her life back!

Erin McDonald recently opened up about her struggles with restrictive and rigid eating in college as a runner at Michigan State University. She was primed and favored to make nationals her senior year—staying "disiplined" with her food, rest, and training routine—but the race went totally awry. With a job lined up after graduation, she was ready for a long break from running. Four years, in fact.

When she came back to the sport, she had gained weight from fueling adequately and listening to her body, as well as taking care of her mental health. She was curious about the marathon, and was about to find out, she was pretty good at it! 

But as she shares in this episode, her motivation for recovering from restrictive eating and chronic injuries had nothing to do with fast times. She just wanted her life back, and in this case, the rest came together.  

Follow Erin on Instagram to cheer her on as she tackles another marathon this year, @sunkistErin. 

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Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

"Athletes aren't immune to that messaging of like, 'carbs are bad, you shouldn't have carbs, and they're the worst thing ever.' But we know that carbs are our body's preferred source of fuel, especially when you're doing these intense bouts of exercise like most athletes are doing," shares sports dietitian Lauren (or Lo) Segal. 

Segal is a now in private practice, after almost 10 years of working as a collegiate sports dietitian, most recently at the University of Utah. She's part of our Lane 9 Clinicians and Coaches Membership, and listed in the Lane 9 Women's Sport and Health Directory. 

We talk about her experiences as a D1 collegiate athlete, playing volleyball for Kent State University, and why that fueled her passion for supporting female athletes. She specializes in sports nutrition and REDs, and shares more information about what she wants collegiate athletes to know about nutrition, and accessing support. 

Connect with Lauren Segal RDN via Lane 9 here!

Follow @Lane9project on Instgram, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

" You can't ultimately control what happens in a race. And so you convince yourself you can, right? Or you tell yourself, well, if I control these other things, I might be able to control what happens in the race." 

Stephanie Reents ran for four years on the Amherst College women's Cross Country team in the early 90s, and is the author of "We Loved to Run" her debut novel. Reents wanted there to be a novel about women's running, stories about the identities athletes hold and how those identities shape and change team dynamics, friendships, and relationships...to themselves, to their sport, and to each other. She didn't shy away from including the full spectrum of a collegiate athlete's experiences—disordered eating, body shaming, navigating trauamtic experiences, and still, continuing to compete. 

In this episode, Reents shares her own experiences as both a high school and collegiate athlete, and of course, why she wrote the stories of these young women athletes from the perspective of their Cross Country team, on a quest to make Nationals. 

Buy the book: "We Loved to Run" by Stephanie Reents (Lane 9 Bookshop affiliate link)

Connect with Reents: @stephanie.reents on Instagram. 

Follow @Lane9project on Instgram, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

"I've never had a very lean body type. I kept showing up to these triathlons with lean-looking people and second-guessing if I deserved to be there...then smoking them on the bike and in the run, and gaining that confidence," shares Jess Cerra, a former professional cyclist, a sports nutrition entrepreneur, and now VP of Product and Community Development at Alete Active Nutrition.

Cerra joins us to talk about her unusual path into high level endurance sports, and then professional cycling, while studying aspects of sports nutrition, and eventually founding a sports nutrition company. She created the JoJé bar while competing professionally, and navigating her own highs and lows in sport. She shares her experiences with the stress of professional athletics, body image, disordered eating in cycling sports, and learning how to fuel her body. And, what the story behind her bar being acquired by Alete Active Nutrition.

Go to AleteNutrition.com and use code LANE920 for 20% off your order!

Connect with Jess Cerra on IG @JessCerra, and the Alete Active products via @SaltStick. 

Follow @Lane9project on Instgram, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

"I've found that athletes vastly underestimate their [energy] needs," shares Heather Caplan RDN, co-founder of Lane 9, in this Q&A-style episode. 

Listen for this one if you're wondering...

• How often is it okay to have sweet things/desserts?
• Is it possible to have REDs without weight loss/changes?
• Why am I not getting my period back, even though I'm eating a lot more?

This one tackles flexibility with food, decades of carb-fearing and how it probably still impacts what most people eat on a daily basis...even in sports, weight stigma in athletics and the variety of REDs symptoms, and what "a lot" might actually mean, when it comes to eating for energy availability. 

Have your own question to submit to Lane 9 for a future episode or resource? We'd love to hear them! Go to Lane9project.org and contact us. Or follow us on Instagram @Lane9Project and come on into our DMs. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

"Once I started to really add fueling into the long runs...I realized how much that was helping the next run," shares Dr. Leah Avery DPT. 

Leah Avery DPT was a D1 collegiate swimmer, who qualified for NCAA championships and the Olympic Trials (2008). On paper, her athletic story reads as inspiring and exciting for a young athlete. In reality, it was a pressure-filled struggle to keep up with expectations, training, and results. She was ready to be done. When she graduated and started her DPT program, she couldn't have been happier to stop swimming, and start running. 

"It wasn't all rainbows from there, though," she adds. 

We talk about Leah's story as an athlete, and clinician, and how she got into coaching runners after becoming a parent. From there, we dive into some training practices for runners to avoid overtraining, and REDs. Easy days, deload weeks, and more!

Dr. Leah Avery DPT is part of the Lane 9 Women's Health & Sport Directory. Connect with her here! Or follow her on Instagram, @Leahs.Runs.DPT

To build the rest of your women's healthcare and sport team, visit Lane9project.org/directory to connect with our dietitians, mental health providers, and coaches. 

Lane 9 on IG: @Lane9Project. 

"I weighed more as a professional runner than I did in college, and I ran faster as a professional runner," shares sports dietitian Maddie Alm MS RDN. 

You might know Maddie Alm from her Instagram account and podcat, Fueling Forward. She started her journey to becoming a registered dietitian after meeting with a sports RDN in college, as a collegiate athlete. In college, she was feeling exhausted between workouts and training sessions, but as she shares on this episode, "didn't even realize that fueling was important." That all changed with a pretty simple suggestion from the dietitian: Fuelg between workouts! In this case, with chocolate milk. 

We don't hate it! 

Alm shares her story as a walk-on collegiate runner at CU Boulder to becoming an All-American in her 5th year of eligibility. As she completed her additional dietetics coursework and then internship, she started training with Team Boss and began racing professionally. Now she works in private pracitce helping fellow runners fuel adequately and avoid REDs, while pursuing her own training goals on the other side of elite racing.

Connect with Maddie Alm MS RDN on Instagram @fueling_forward. 

Follow @Lane9project on Instgram, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

" When I eventually figured out my food intolerances and a better relationship with fueling, I brought [my marathon PR] down to 2:44 within a little under a year."

Jenny Grimshaw, VP of marketing at EQUIP*, and now a 2:36 marathoner, joins us on the Lane 9 podcast. Jenny is also a mom of 2, and navigating prophylactic surgeries to reduce her risk of breast and ovarian cancers (with the BRCA-1 gene). Her postpartum running experiences have been full of PRs, as she has figured out her own fueling needs, how to balance her identity as a runner with all the other things she does, and has worked with a coach to better balance her training volume and find her confidence as a runner. 

Jenny shares:

• her early experiences with food intolerances and GI distress that were assumed by physicians to be anorexia, but would later be more correctly classified as ARFID
• the anxiety and panic attacks that she dealt with as a young runner, and injuries that plagued her through college, related to fueling, mental health, and wanting to explore life outside of running
• why she got into longer distances after her collegiate T&F years
• the gastroenterologist appointment that changed everything for her
• how she brought her marathon PR from a 3:13 to a 2:36 (not to say "you can, too!" but to give just one example of how fueling and mental health impact our experiences in sport)
• why she was drawn to EQUIP, and her role there

*EQUIP is a virtual eating disorder treatment company that offers care in all 50 states. They're also part of the Lane 9 Directory.

Connect with Jenny Grimshaw on Instagram @jenny_gshaw, and follow her training for her next marathon!

Follow @Lane9project on Instgram, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

" I think young people often don't get that chance to like take a step back [from sport] and say like, is this working [for me]?" shares Kaleigh Cornelison, who specializes in working with teens and adolescents. 

Kaleigh is a licensed clinical social worker with over 15 years of experience working with teens and the adults who care about them. She leads workshops, creative resources, and writes the both, and newsletter for parents and professionals who wanna embrace both the challenges and the joys of the teenage years. She takes a balanced approach to social media use, acknowledging both the benefits and the downsides to how it impacts development, connection, experiences in sport, and more. 

This episode covers

• her experiences in sports growing up, through college, and training for her first half-marathon
• why she decided to specialize in working with teens and adolescents as a social worker
• the ups and downs, pros and cons to teens participating in sports—from social connection to identity to body image and disordered eating
• how social media can both help and harm our experiences in sport (and of course, as a human, in general)
• how to talk to teens in a way that actually connects with them, especially when it comes to the hard stuff (like disordered eating behaviors)

Connect with Kaleigh Cornelison through her newsletter bothandnewsletter.com. And on Instagram @kaleighcornelisonmsw

Follow @Lane9project on Instgram, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/Directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!

"There's nothing wrong with getting a little out of shape. It's okay! We shouldn't be in our peak or prime all the time," shares Stevie Lyn Smith, sports dietitian and endurnace athlete.

Stevie Lyn Smith is a Registered Sports Dietitian, avid endurance athlete, and dog mom. Her mission is to help educate and coach athletes on how to fuel their goals without sacrificing their health and happiness. And, she’s also part of our Lane 9 Directory of Women’s Health & Sport Clinicians!

This episode covers:

• Why she took 4 years off of training for triathlons
• Her year of racing (and PRs!) in 2025 after that long break
• Setting boundaries and structure for your own racing and recovery, especially when your social circles are also your training circles
• Why she doesn't want to hear that you "can't eat more carbs", and HOW to do that
• Fueling strategies for ultra-endurance endeavors, like an Ironman (of which she's raced 10!)
• and the importance of taking mental and physical breaks from training for big goals, even if it means you lose some fitness. It's okay!

As mentioned: Heather's episode on Stevie's podcast, episode 48 on Real Fuel with SLS. 

Follow Stevie Lyn on Instagram @StevieLynLyn, or connect with her through the Lane 9 Directory here.

Follow @Lane9project on Instgram, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here. 

Connect with a clinician near you, and find your full team of women's health and sport providers, by going to Lane9Project.org/Directory. If you don't see what you're looking for, fill out our Athlete Match Form, and we'll find someone for you!