Megan Mackenzie: Championing women on the trails

Words by Rachel Hewitt. Photography by Mountains Legacy.

Elite ultrarunner Meg Mackenzie’s experiences of running in South Africa are shaped by the country’s unique, breathtaking landscapes – high, flat rolling grasslands, mountains, tree-dotted plains and pristine coastlines. Equally, they are also shaped by being a woman, with the threat of violence posed by running alone in these landscapes.

Growing-up, this meant Mackenzie had to schedule her life and training to align with what the men were doing: “I had to fit in with where [male runners] were going, because it wasn’t safe for me to run by myself.”

Attending a girls’ school on a large estate granted Mackenzie a safe taste of liberty, and she realized her talent for cross-country running. Her mother and aunt were both distance runners with “energy and drive” – her aunt won the Comrades Marathon in 1979 – and they were crucial role-models, proving that trail-running was both possible and beneficial for women, despite any challenges they faced.

After coming first in her age category at the Three Cranes Challenge stage race – an endurance trail run through the rocky terrain, wetlands and indigenous forest of Karkloof Valley in KwaZulu-Natal, SA – aged 25, Mackenzie began to take trail-running more seriously in terms of a professional career. But her true turning point came in 2017. About to turn 30, she was at “a now or never moment.” 

Recently married, Mackenzie and her then-husband were thinking about settling down and having a family. But Mackenzie wanted a last gasp of freedom, “so we decided to quit our jobs and do van life.” They traveled the Alps and Mackenzie’s focus paid off: 2017 was “a breakout year” in performances and sponsorship. 

She placed first female in the African Otter Trail Run – 40km with 2,600 meter elevation gain and four river crossings – and over the ensuing six years achieved first-place and podium finishes in world-class middle-distance races (up to around 50 km), including the USA’s Pikes Peak marathon, the Ultra-Trail Cape Town and the Transvulcania ultramarathon. Mackenzie’s proudest achievement is the “magical” 2022 UTMB CCC – 100 km from Courmayeur to Chamonix, with more than 6000 meters of ascent, in which she ranked eighth in a field of nearly 250 women. 

Mackenzie’s career to date is arguably a bellwether for the progress of women’s rights since the 1980s. Her ability to compete in trail races around the world, to live full-time as a professional female athlete, is testimony to how the opportunities available to women – in sport and more widely – have radically expanded over the last forty years. 

It’s worth remembering that, as recently as the late-1970s, the International Olympic Committee banned female runners from events longer than 1500m and that women’s boxing only became an Olympic sport in 2012. Mackenzie expresses “gratitude” for her relative liberty to run free as a woman in the 2020s in the Alps, but major obstacles still hinder this trajectory for many women.

Freedom to run trails

“There are many factors constraining female runners,” Mackenzie says. A recent UK survey shows that 60% of women have been harassed while running. Mackenzie explains that fear deters women from outdoor sport in complex ways. On the one hand, women’s fear reflects the actual prevalence of male violence. But fear is also generated by social conditioning, and the intensity of women’s fear may outweigh the probability of being attacked. Often a generalized feeling of anxiety is formed.

Athletes are being held back further by the running world’s slow recognition of physiological nuances. Over the last few years, Mackenzie has been working on a documentary (currently withheld from release by the funders), which explores how the menstrual cycle shapes athletes’ experiences of mountain sport. 

She wanted to discover “what’s good for women in terms of training and nutrition” at different times in the hormonal cycle, and the risks to female athletes of “losing your period, getting injured, getting very thin and suffering energy deficiency,” also known as relative energy deficiency syndrome or RED-S. This is at the vanguard of current sports science, and it has only been in the last five years or so that researchers, physios, coaches and runners have recognized the detriment of imposing training plans designed for male physiology onto female athletes.  

The trail-running world is slowly accommodating female runners’ physiological requirements. In 2022, UTMB began allowing pregnant athletes to defer their hard-won race entries [alongside athletes with a partner who is pregnant, and athletes who are adopting or birthing via surrogacy], approaching the latitude that has been historically granted to injured runners. 

Mackenzie believes that it’s “kinda wild that women are always expected to do the same distances as men, with packs of the same size, and identical compulsory gear, and the same cut-offs,” despite the fact that women are built very differently from men – lighter, on average, with very different levels of muscle and body fat. Prize money and coverage rarely reflect the work that female competitors put in relative to men.

Personally, Mackenzie thrives off competition, but she also recognizes that there are more untold stories in trail running; “stories of other people, who have different qualities, and are taking part in the race for different reasons other than winning.”

This is particularly the case for women, where many may experience that linear progression is complicated by downturns in energy, strength and performance that are linked to female hormonal fluctuation. “I think men can maintain linear progression for longer than women,” she says; but “women’s lives are so cyclical that I imagine our development as more like a spiral: we keep growing outwards, not necessarily getting better in the linear sense, but being different.”

Positive change

Constraints on female runners are so endemic that, to become truly women-friendly, the trail-running world will need to “almost start again,” Mackenzie says. 

Necessary interventions range from relatively simple changes – clothing to allow women to urinate discreetly and reduce chafing, and adjusted cut-offs in races – to more costly ones, such as better research into female physiology. Ultimately, to improve the quality and quantity of women’s trail running, widespread cultural change is needed. 

Mackenzie would like to see a greater understanding of the many, varied reasons why people run, and a less narrow idea of what constitutes “sport.” Media coverage doesn’t always need to solely focus on winners, she points out. Intergenerational conversations between older and younger female runners might be instructive in this vein. As women approach menopause, it becomes much harder to maintain performance times, let alone to improve, and older female runners have often had to find a different motivation to run, beyond competitiveness. Their stories could be beneficial for younger women, many of whom “hit it out of the park once or twice, and then get a stress fracture, and are never seen again.” 

To foster these discussions, Mackenzie organizes all-female trail-running camps with Run The Alps. She’s passionate about how women-only camps can generate the connections and conversations that are essential to improving women’s experiences outdoors, and to ultimately bring the trail-running world “to a point where we don’t need them [all-female camps] anymore.” 

Mackenzie’s personal training plans for the future revolve around “going all in on my performance”– in her late 30s, she senses that this is “another of those moments like in the camper van,” meaning another watershed moment is on the horizon before she approaches peri-menopause and starts to slow down. 

Her activist goals are to develop these camps and devise a mentorship program to give women “concrete tools and skills that they can take away from the camp to solve issues in their own communities and lives.”

In a world in which women’s desires, needs and wellbeing are often challenged, Mackenzie taps into her first-hand experience that running teaches women “to voice and acknowledge what we need and what our bodies need.” 

Ultimately, it’s this belief in trail-running’s transformative potential for women – and for society on a broader level – that impels her to share her journey and support other women on running journeys of their own. 

Read more about UTMB and mountain adventures with Katazyna Solinska and Kirra Balmanno.