- Former Olympian Kara Goucher nearly collided with a mountain lion during a morning training run last Monday in Boulder, Colorado.
- After an injury forced her to drop out of Houston Marathon in January, the 2:24:52 marathoner decided to try her hand at trail running.
Even Kara Goucher, 2:24:52 marathoner and mainstay of U.S. women’s distance running for over a decade, gets spooked sometimes. But when it’s a dangerous wild predator just inches away from you, that’s understandable.
Since the return of an old hamstring injury forced Goucher to drop out of January’s Houston Marathon after 16 miles—her first marathon attempt since her heartbreaking fourth-place finish at the 2016 Olympic Trials—Goucher has taken her running in a new direction: the trails.
[Build your personalized and adaptive training plan for FREE with Runcoach.]
After so much success on the road and track, the 2007 IAAF World Championships silver medalist in the 10,000 meters and three time top 10 Olympic finisher, now 40, is training to run the Leadville Trail Marathon on June 15.
Though she wants more time to acclimate to the new discipline, Goucher told Runner’s World, training in her home of Boulder, Colorado has been going well. That is, until she nearly collided with a mountain lion.
Goucher set out around 8:45 a.m. local time on Monday, May 6, toward the trail systems west of Boulder. As she passed alongside a parked truck outside a residential construction site on Sunshine Canyon Drive—still a Boulder road, not a trail—a mountain lion sprinted across the front of the vehicle. The two were inches away when they saw each other, Goucher told Runner’s World.
“It happened so fast,” Goucher said. “In my mind I was like, ‘That’s not a dog, that’s not a cat. Holy sh--.’”
Goucher immediately turned and sprinted hard toward the construction site. The mountain lion, which Goucher thinks was just as startled as she was, disappeared into the surrounding woods.
Goucher knew she was too freaked out to run on any trails that day, but couldn’t bring herself to pass by the spot of the near collision. She called her husband with her smartwatch and waited with an understanding construction worker and nearby resident for him to pick her up.
Mountain lions are a part of life in Boulder, where Goucher has been living for the past three years. (In February, 31-year-old environmental consultant Travis Kauffman fought and killed a juvenile mountain lion at Horsetooth Mountain Park near Fort Collins, Colorado.) Neighbors regularly share security camera footage of mountain lions slinking across their yards at night, and wildlife predator education is an automatic part of her son’s school curriculum, she said.
Watch: Travis Kauffman describes the mountain lion encounter that captured national headlines.
But the circumstances—along a developed, populated road in broad daylight—caught her off guard.
“The more I’ve talked to people, the more I’ve thought about it, the fact I ran into it was such a fluke incident,” she said.
Goucher hasn’t braved the trails alone since the incident. (She has run with her male training partner on the trails and alone on the road.) She’s not sure if the unease will wear off in time, but doesn’t plan to venture into the wilderness alone in the near future.
Her biggest takeaway is the need to be more actively prepared for similar encounters, Goucher said. In theory, she knew the standard advice—stay calm, stand your ground, appear intimidating—but that knowledge went out the window in the moment.
“I don’t normally worry about it, because I think I make smart choices,” she said. “But people should practice making yourself big and backing away. I want to make sure if I’m in the situation again, I make the right decisions.”
Jacob joined Runner’s World and Bicycling as an editorial fellow after graduating from Northwestern University in 2018, where he studied journalism. His work focuses mainly on news and service pieces for both audiences, with the occasional foray into longer feature work and product reviews. He especially loves to highlight the journeys of unique runners and riders doing amazing things in their communities.
