Scaling Community Without Breaking It

The messy middle of trail running, brands, and storytelling with Angie Lake

Jan 06, 2026

Summary:
Running a race with 500 participants in a town of 800 creates a very specific kind of challenge: you’re building something deeply meaningful and community-led… while trying to translate that value to brands that think “small event” means 5,000 people. Angie Lake lives in that tension. She co-directs Wild Woman Trail Runs, consults on storytelling for outdoor brands, and just launched the First 50K Sisterhood Scholarship. Her work is a masterclass in building multiple revenue streams without losing the thing that made the work worth doing in the first place.

🎧 Tune in here: Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or tune in and watch the full video on YouTube!

The moment everything clicked: “I want to do something I’m not sure I can finish.”

Two years ago, Angie thought she’d try a 100-miler.

Now she’s a 100-mile finisher, women’s race director, outdoor podcast host, menstrual health educator, and storytelling consultant.

Her reason for the 100 was simple: she wanted a goal that didn’t come with certainty.

50Ks had become “hard, but known.” The hundred was different. And while the physical effort was less brutal than expected, the mental challenge delivered exactly what she was chasing. The recovery, though, was its own adventure (including the kind of swelling you can only describe as “elephant shins”).

That theme, choosing the scary thing on purpose, runs through everything else she’s building.

“Entrepreneurship is the biggest catalyst for growth in the rest of your life… what you do in your business reflects on every other aspect of your life.”

Wild Woman Trail Runs: the economics (and complexity) of co-directing a race

Angie didn’t “decide to become a race director” in some tidy, linear way. It happened the way a lot of good work happens:

She met the right people locally
She volunteered, or offered to
The opportunity evolved into ownership

She joined Wild Woman alongside co-director Susan Elliot, partnering with founder Stephanie Irving to form a three-person leadership team.

Their split of strengths is clean:

Stephanie: vision, spirit, and mission
Susan: data, surveys, long-term partnerships
Angie: marketing, outreach, content, “get the word out and get people there”

The hard part: three people also means three schedules, three opinions, and profits split three ways. If it’s going to be stable income long-term, the event has to grow.

And growth gets tricky when your race happens at the base of Mount Adams… in a town with 800 people.

So they’re scaling in ways that preserve the feel:

Moving the half marathon to Sunday to fit more runners per day
Adding year-round “wild runs” (adventure experiences, not just races)
Keeping the “this is more than a race” vibe intact (camping, potluck, intimate weekend energy)

How Angie sells “small” to brands that think small means 5,000

One of the most interesting parts of Angie’s work is the translation layer: helping brands understand that depth of connection can beat raw attendance.

A perfect example: Arc’teryx partnered with Wild Woman in 2025 for reasons that had nothing to do with blasting a booth at a conference.

The partnership worked because:

People were already excited (race energy beats forced exposure)
Arc’teryx was moving store locations in Portland
Many runners live in Portland
The event offered an authentic reason to visit, connect, and build relationship

Angie’s core point to brands: most runners aren’t “catalog athletes.” They’re moms, nurses, tech workers, and busy people who want community and a third space. That’s the demographic that drives volume.

If your pitch is only “front of pack prestige,” you miss where the bulk of purchases actually come from.

The First 50K Sisterhood Scholarship: turning 15 products into months of storytelling

Angie partnered with The Cairn Project to create a scholarship program designed for women who are “ultra curious,” but haven’t run an ultra before.

The plan:

Select 15 women
Cover race entry
Provide gear and support (for example: LOWA trail shoes, plus additional product donations and support in progress)
Share the women’s training journeys publicly over months

The business model is the part that should make every brand marketer pause:

15 units of product is tiny inventory cost.
But it generates months of real transformation content from people who are micro-influencers in their own communities.

Instead of paying for a single polished influencer post, brands get embedded in a narrative arc:

doubt → training → obstacles → breakthroughs → finish line
and the messy realities along the way (including things women actually deal with, like menstrual cycles during training)

It’s a better return because it’s human, lived, and durable.

“Radical honesty” is Angie’s storytelling framework

Angie’s best definition of storytelling was also the simplest:

An anecdote is what happened
A story is what happened and why it changed you

Transformation has emotion built in. Before-and-after is inherently compelling. It’s why the most memorable brand stories aren’t about specs, but about the identity shift the product supports.

Her 2026 prediction: we’re going to see more brands pull back the curtain.

Less glossy perfection. More behind-the-scenes. More “this is what it’s actually like to use this,” especially from smaller brands and community-led companies that can move fast and be honest.

People don’t want cookie-cutter anymore. They want the journey.

Brand partnerships: how Angie vets value-alignment (without getting fooled by “women’s marketing”)

Angie doesn’t pick partners by looking only at survey results. She does coffee chats. She reads language closely. She looks for signals of what a brand truly values.

A few of her green flags:

brands that talk about fueling, menstrual health, bone health with accuracy
brands that focus on how women feel, not how they look
brands willing to speak plainly about topics that used to be “too taboo” for outdoor marketing

She also uses existing frameworks like Trail Sisters’ race-approval criteria, which include basics like:

pregnancy/postpartum deferral policies
menstrual products on site
and other inclusion standards that make a race feel genuinely welcoming

Angie’s deeper point: inclusion is not vibes. It’s policies, logistics, messaging, and education that help women stay healthy and keep showing up.

Entrepreneurship: the messy middle is where the real shift happens

Angie didn’t have a big safety net.

In her nonprofit years, she made $30–40K and had side income that topped out around $10K/year. She also carried a bunch of limiting beliefs about what was “realistic.”

Then a lot happened quickly: after her first 50K, she got divorced, moved, quit her job, wrote a book, and started a podcast in a year.

Her income trajectory once she went all-in:

Year 1: replaced her nonprofit salary
Year 2: doubled it
Year 3: approached $100K

Not from one perfect business model, but from a portfolio:

race direction
storytelling consulting
community management
podcast hosting
menstrual health education

It’s the definition of “multiple revenue streams, one coherent mission.”

And yes, she’s candid that the hard parts stay hard: health insurance, taxes, retirement planning, and doing the boring work when you’d rather create.

But the autonomy, growth, and confidence compound.

Why “authenticity over scale” is not a slogan, it’s a strategy

Wild Woman’s biggest advantage is also its hardest thing to “sell”:

camping in the woods
potluck on Friday night
intimate weekend energy
a community that returns year after year

That’s not flash. That’s depth.

And Angie’s work is essentially about learning how to articulate that depth to brands in a language they understand, without turning the event into something it isn’t.

Because the goal isn’t to become UTMB. The goal is to stay Wild Woman, while building enough stability for the team behind it.

“True storytelling is talking about why something changed you. Not just what happened.”

Top takeaways

Scholarships are a storytelling flywheel. A small amount of product can create months of authentic transformation content that outperforms one-off influencer posts.
Radical honesty wins. People connect to the messy middle, not the polished highlight reel.
Small-event economics require a different pitch. Sell depth of engagement and the everyday-runner demographic that actually drives volume.
Partnership vetting is relational, not transactional. Coffee chats and language signals reveal values faster than a spreadsheet. Check out the last substack essay on Why Fit Compounds for more on this!
Multiple revenue streams create stability. Angie built a portfolio business that grew fast without relying on a single fragile channel.