Bigfoot 200 F20-29: Strate surges through the Cascades to claim the age group crown

• Kiersten Strate, 70:09:20 — won the F20-29 field and climbed as high as 2nd among all women before finishing 6th in the women's race overall.
• Rachel Millman, 76:32:04 — completed the 200.1-mile course in 2nd in F20-29, posting the 6th-fastest women's split on the Coldwater→Norway Pass segment.
• Strate's fastest women's split on Norway Pass→Elk was the signature move of her race — the decisive stretch that defined her day through the Cascades.
• 6:22:44 separated the two F20-29 finishers across 200-plus miles of volcanic terrain, lava fields, and mountain ridgelines.

Kiersten Strate, 26, from Salt Lake City, didn't just finish the Bigfoot 200 — she raced it. Her move chart tells the story of an athlete who refused to settle: she entered the women's field at 11th, climbed all the way to 2nd by the middle stages, and while the back half of the course pulled her back to 6th among all women, she crossed in 70:09:20 at a 21:02/mi average — a genuinely strong result over 200.1 miles and 44,082 feet of gain through the Cascades. The Norway Pass→Elk segment was her statement: the fastest women's split on that stretch, a stretch that separates the bold from the careful.

Rachel Millman, 28, out of Phoenix, showed her own moment of brilliance on the Coldwater→Norway Pass leg, where she posted the 6th-fastest women's split in the field — a sign she was moving well through that middle section of the course. She held a steady position in the women's race from roughly mid-field onward, finishing in 76:32:04 at a 22:57/mi average to claim 2nd in F20-29. The gap to Strate — over six and a half hours — reflects just how aggressively Strate pushed through the back half of this brutal point-to-point.

Two starters, two finishers, two women who saw the Bigfoot 200 through to its end across National Forest lands that have humbled far larger fields. In a race with five sleep stations and 12 aid stations built into its DNA, simply completing the course is a feat. Strate and Millman did that — and raced while doing it.