Stephanie Case arrives on the screen for this digital interview with her daughter, Pepper in tow. The three-month-old gurgles and smiles at the camera, completely unaware of Case’s nearly three-year struggle with pregnancy that eventually brought her into the world. Pepper, while most likely realizing on some primal level that her mom is amazing, doesn’t yet know of the scope of the work Case has done around the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia, to champion women’s rights.
Case is currently living in Chamonix, France, and hoping to extend her parental leave from her work as a United Nations human rights lawyer into the summer, noting that she’d likely be somewhere in the Middle East if she weren’t on leave. Case is probably best known in the ultrarunning world for founding the non-profit Free to Run. With the program, which uses running and leadership programs to support young women and girls in conflict areas, Case has done what many people dream of: she’s turned her love for the sport into something that benefits others.
Stephanie Case with partner John and daughter Pepper. All photos courtesy of Stephanie Case, unless otherwise noted.
Using the very unique intersection of skills of being a human rights lawyer, working in war zones, being an ultrarunner, and existing as someone who doesn’t believe in the word impossible, she’s provided opportunities for countless women in six countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq — countries where women are traditionally incredibly restricted in their activities — to get out and run. The formation and operation of Free to Run was documented in a film that toured film festivals after it was released online by The North Face. The film, made by Dream Lens Media, won several awards.
Case has stepped away from the day-to-day operations of Free to Run but remains on the board and is very involved on a governance and strategic level. Now, she’s turned her efforts to bringing light to the struggles of women — and especially runners — dealing with infertility issues. After two miscarriages and realizing how little information there was available on fertility in endurance sports, she’s undertaken this newest film project documenting her journey, along with those of other women, to becoming a mom.
Looking for Limits
Born in Ontario, Canada, Case didn’t consider herself “sporty” growing up. She quips, “I was very much a nerd.” Driven from the start, Case started running while in law school and signed up for a marathon. From the get-go, the goal of running was to find her limits. “I thought the marathon was this epic, hard thing that you could do, a ticking-the-box life event,” she says, “ I thought it would change my life.” She’d watch videos of women stumbling across marathon finish lines, completely spent, and wanted to know what it would be like to “hit the wall and push through.”
After training and crossing the finish line at the marathon, Case found she still had energy in the tank and says she didn’t have any “big, epic, challenging moments.” She admits, almost sheepishly, “I didn’t find it that hard.” Adding distance to her racing was the next logical step.
She found the 250-kilometer Racing the Planet: Vietnam, tried to recruit friends to race with her, but decided to go alone when she couldn’t find any takers. She admits there might have been a few glasses of wine involved in the decision to sign up. She says, “I wanted to find something that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish.” She went on to win the women’s race and finish third overall, a result that made her realize, “maybe I wasn’t a great athlete in any sport before that, but ultrarunning was my thing.”
She says, “I found that I got so much confidence and purpose out of ultrarunning that I hadn’t been able to get through anything else.”
Stephanie Case at home in the Alps.
In the meantime, she found herself working for a law firm in New York City in mergers and acquisitions, but she knew that it wasn’t a long-term career. Even while in law school, she’d been interested in human rights. “I started doing some work for Lawyers Without Borders on trial observations and ended up kind of working for them in the field during my summers throughout law school. Liberia, Rwanda, that kind of thing.” While she was working for the New York law firm, she continued to do pro bono work, building up her human rights portfolio. When Lehman Brothers crashed and mergers and acquisitions died, her law firm offered a generous incentive for people to take a year off. In Case’s words, “I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ I took that and went and did human rights work in the U.K.”
In 2012, armed with a new Master of Laws in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Case landed a volunteer position with the United Nations in Afghanistan. When asked what drew her to working in war zones, she says, “I had grown up through the 1990s when the Taliban was in power, and you saw these stark images of women in burkas. It was one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. Something just drew me to that. It was so far outside of my realm of understanding and my own cultural context, and it was such an injustice.” She goes on to say, “I didn’t know how I could help but I knew that I wanted to go to places where things were arguably at their worst because that’s when there’s the most potential for positive change.”
She moved into an armed compound where the longest stretch of road was 800 meters. People told her she wouldn’t be able to pursue her ultrarunning anymore. But those people didn’t realize that telling Case that she couldn’t do something was the best way to ensure that she would.
Redefining a Relationship with Running
Running in Afghanistan was a far cry from what most ultrarunners consider ideal training grounds. Instead of running in beautiful landscapes, Case was limited to running laps in her armed compound. Oftentimes, the air pollution was so bad she could feel grit in her teeth after her run, her eyes would go red, and she would start coughing after only 30 minutes of running outside. Gone were using the best nutrition and gear, replaced instead with barbed wire fences and pieces of wood and trash littering the ground.
Instead of lamenting what she no longer had, Case looked at her situation as an opportunity. She says, “I had to find a way to develop my mental capacities to turn it into something beautiful.” She goes on to say, “I was using the garbage as obstacles, pretending that they were tree roots rather than pieces of wood or plastic.” She even found the positive in the air quality. She says, “The pollution would give us really beautiful sunsets. I would run at sunset so that a couple of loops around the compound would be at dusk, and the next few in the dark. It would make the compound seem bigger because the scene would change.”
As part of her time in Afghanistan, Case visited a shelter that housed women fleeing unsafe situations in their homes, many of them with children. Case says of the women in the shelter, “They had a tiny yard and a house and they could not [leave that area.] I know that they would have given their right arm to be able to run in the compound that I was running in.” It gave perspective to Case’s compound laps.
“For me to complain or to use my lack of an ideal training ground as an excuse not to keep up my running just seemed ludicrous.”
Case in Afghanistan in 2017.
Free to Run
Case wanted her running to be more than a selfish pursuit. Her initial thought was to use her racing to raise money for that Afghan women’s shelter, so that year, she signed up for three ultramarathons and raised $10,000 for it. And Case’s reaction to her fundraising effort? “I realized that I was thinking way too small about the power of running.”
Case realized that the women she was directly working with were appreciative but not necessarily that interested in the amount of money she could bring to the shelter. She says, “What they were super interested in hearing about was the running and the races and the landscapes.” She goes on to say, “Some of these women had grown up before the Taliban had come into power, and so they had done sports before and some of the younger women had never gotten the chance to run outside. They wanted to be able to do the running as well.”
Case admits that she’d arrived in Afghanistan with the preconceived notions that running wasn’t something people living in a war zone would be particularly interested in, but she says she came to learn, “They’ve been living through war for so long that, they want a full and complete life like everyone else. Yes, there are bombs going off. Yes, safety was a concern, but there were generations growing up in Afghanistan through conflict. And they wanted to be able to experience all of the normal joys of and freedoms in life that we do.”
Stephanie Case giving starter’s orders at a race in Afghanistan, circa 2016. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Case.
In 2014, with seed money provided by the founders of the first ultramarathon she’d done in Vietnam, Case launched Free to Run, a non-profit dedicated to creating opportunities for women in Afghanistan to run and develop their life and leadership skills so that they could be part of driving social change in their country. Unlike indoor sports, Case explains, “Running involves this physical act of reclaiming public space. When you see someone running through the streets, when you see someone running through the mountains, owning that public space, in places like Afghanistan, it can be an act of real rebellion. It can be an act of protest. It can be an act of activism.” She continues, “Having women reclaim that public space through running can change the ideas that society has about the roles that women and girls can play in broader society.”
The program was a success, spreading to six different countries and helping thousands of women enjoy the sport of running safely. In 2021, when the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, the program staff had to evacuate the country, burn all of their records, and shut their offices. Since the majority of Free to Run funding came through the Afghanistan leg of the program, the entire organization was in jeopardy. But Case was determined not only to keep Free to Run alive, but to keep a toehold in Afghanistan, however impossible the task seemed. In the years since, she says she’s found that, “There are cracks in this oppressive regime where a little bit of light can come through. There are opportunities where we can help women and girls access certain types of sports, in a safe way.”
The program’s base has since migrated to Iraq, and the organization continues to provide opportunities for women in locations where they wouldn’t otherwise exist.
Members of Free to Run. Photo: Free to Run
Running and Motherhood
Case left her job in Afghanistan in 2013 and launched Free to Run while working in South Sudan on the humanitarian response to the recent conflict there. At the time, she was residing in a tent in a camp for internally displaced people. Afterward, she took a job in Gaza for a couple of years before moving to Geneva, Switzerland, and then returning back to Afghanistan with the United Nations in 2018. Her rest and recuperation weeks from Gaza were spent in Afghanistan working on Free to Run. For Case, it was an intense period of work and volunteerism, and the international movement among conflict zones required by it.
Case in South Sudan in 2014.
Throughout all this, Case continued her own running. In 2015, she placed sixth in the 330-kilometer Tor des Géants in the Italian Alps. She went on to earn a second- and two fourth-place finishes in the event in 2016, 2017, and 2018. In 2021, she won the notoriously difficult 450-kilometer Tor des Glaciers, a self-navigated upgrade on the 330-kilometer version.
In 2022, she finished second at the Hardrock 100. She laughs when she says, “I was seven hours behind Courtney [Dauwalter]. Right on her heels. But I was really happy with how it went.”
Case on her way to winning the 2021 Tor des Glaciers.
It wasn’t until she’d flown back to the Middle East after the 2022 Hardrock 100 and bought a bottle of bubbles to celebrate her run — she’d had to leave before the awards ceremony had finished — that something told her to take a pregnancy test. It came back positive, and while Case had never been one to desperately want a family, she says, “It was in that instant where I knew that it was just something I suddenly wanted, and wanted really, really badly.”
When she miscarried, Case was devastated. Then people started asking her if she thought it might have been because of her running. After all, she’d raced the Hardrock 100 while in the very early stages of pregnancy. She says that while there’s no science to show that running can cause a miscarriage, “Having people kind of plant that seed in my head started to affect my relationship with running.” She explains, “Suddenly, the thing that gave me joy and that took away my stress was becoming in my head something that had just caused one of the most horrible and biggest moments of grief.”
When she got pregnant a second time, Case cut back on her running, but miscarried again. This time people suggested that her job was too stressful for a successful pregnancy. She says, “I thought, I can’t win!” If she ran too much, she was doing it wrong. If she didn’t run as an outlet for work stress, she was also doing it wrong. Case goes on to say, “I found it incredibly difficult. I felt like I just lost my identity.”
Not wanting to give up on starting a family, Case turned to in vitro fertilization (IVF), planning her work schedule then centered around Jerusalem, Israel, and Gaza around her cycle and flying back to Europe for embryo transfers. Surrounded by conflict, Case remembers saying, “When you’re surrounded by death every day in your work, it’s very hard to ask your body to make a life.” But Case believed in what she was doing, and eventually an embryo transfer resulted in the birth of her daughter, Pepper, in November of 2024.
Case welcomed her daughter, Pepper, in November 2024.
Returning to the Hardrock 100
Case acutely understood the emotional toll exacted by fertility struggles, especially amongst endurance athletes, and came to realize that it was something that needed to be talked about. She says, “I think these fertility struggles affect female runners in a heightened way because we have all of the questions around the relationship that running has with fertility and no good answers. And then we have the guilt.” Wanting to highlight, “how little information there is, how lonely it can be, and there are a lot of women that are suffering, in runners and non-runners alike,” Case set out to make a second film following her own struggles with fertility as well as those of other women.
Case enjoying the mountains during her pregnancy. Photo: Nathanaël Sapey-Triomphe for Dream Lens Media
She says, “I think that there’s a lot more discussion, as there should be in trail running and ultrarunning, about the need to support moms and pregnancy, and the need for pregnancy deferrals and clauses in athlete contracts for postpartum.” However, she noted the shame and silence that still exists around how difficult it is for many to even get to the stage of becoming pregnant in the first place.
Taking advantage of a pregnancy deferral from last year, Case will line up for the 2025 Hardrock 100 again, three years after the start of her pregnancy journey, and says the event will be the culmination of the new film. She says that while she originally thought a fitting end of the story would be to have her completely bomb the race, a nod to the reality that pregnancy and motherhood is hard and can derail training and the best of intentions, Case says that she’s found new motivation to give it her all, “As a new mom, and seeing how society treats women postpartum, I’ve got a real fire to come back and actually do really well in the race.”
Pepper will be waiting for her at the finish line, regardless of what storyline her race follows.
Looking to the Future
After this year’s Hardrock 100, Case is hoping to plan some adventures closer to home in the Alps, including a multi-day trip with Pepper. She’ll also return to work in places in the world where she can make the biggest difference.
When asked what her hopes are for her daughter, she says, “I don’t want her to feel like she’s in a world that’s static and kind of presented to her. I want it to be malleable. I want it to be a space that she doesn’t just move through, but that she influences.”
Call for Comments
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- What stories about Stephanie can you add in the comments?
Stephanie Case trying to enjoy a slice of pizza on her way to finishing second at the 2022 Hardrock 100. Photo: iRunFar/Bryon Powell
