After running 133.34 miles in 32 consecutive hours, Keely Miyamoto `26.5 placed second in the Broken Anvil Backyard Ultramarathon in West Point, Iowa.
“When I’m running, I don’t want to be doing anything else,” said Miyamoto, who has been running since they joined the cross country team in their freshman year of high school. “I’ve fallen in love with it over a lot of years, and even when it’s been hard, it’s something that I think has always loved me back in its own way.”
The ultramarathon, held on Sept. 20 and 21, featured a 4.167 mile loop. Participants had to complete one lap per hour, and were eliminated if they were not in the starting corral by the start of the next hour. The last participant to complete a lap wins.
Miyamoto described their mindset going into their first ever ultramarathon as “flying by the seat of my pants.”
“Mentally there was never a point where I wanted to stop,” they said. “It was comforting to know that even when things were really painful, it was still what I wanted to be doing.”
Preparing for the ultramarathon, according to Miyamoto, was “definitely different than having a set practice time every day, like you do for cross country or track.” After running two years on the women’s cross country and track teams at Grinnell, they took a gap semester in fall 2024 to medically transition. Upon their return in spring 2025, they ran on the men’s track team for one semester.
“It was very different — it was definitely challenging to reframe what competing looked like,” they said of their experience on the men’s track team. “I think that that sort of led to me thinking about my relationship with running.”
This is Miyamoto’s first semester not competing on either the cross country or track team at Grinnell, due to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules surrounding transgender athletes. Their decision to run an ultramarathon this fall was motivated by their inability to compete. “Ultra running was gonna be my post-collegiate thing, and it is just an adventure I’m taking on a little bit sooner,” Miyamoto said.
It proved to be a valuable experience for them. “After I transitioned and was trying to adjust to not being as competitive or successful anymore, it became harder to cross finish lines and see those results and have that internal comparison going all the time,” said Miyamoto. They said that it was a cool experience to run a race where “my only goal is to run across the start line and run across the finish line as many times as I can, and be like ‘oh, I just want to keep doing this.’”
Miyamoto named their support system as something they were grateful for. They expected to run the ultramarathon on their own — however, their friends Morgan Karow `26, Hannah Roark `26, Tyler Ching `26 and Ryan Hill `27 decided to drive down as a surprise.
“They were the best support crew ever,” Miyamoto said. “It was so much more fun to have awesome people there.” They also learned later that other friends from Grinnell, including some from the cross country and track teams, had followed along virtually.
“The first twelve hours after the race were pretty tough … I was really lucky to have people who could drive me home and get me up the four flights of stairs in Gates Tower,” Miyamoto said. They took two days off from running after the race.
“After that, I was like, ‘eh, I feel like I could go for a run,’ so I’ve been running a little more every day since then,” they said.
Miyamoto, who is a triple major in mathematics, philosophy and computer science, does not plan to race again until winter break. “It was a little challenging logistically to fit it all in with classes and stuff,” said Miyamoto, who intends to get a PhD and go into teaching after graduating from Grinnell. They said that they think about training like a puzzle — “if I have classes here and meetings here and work at this time, what are the little pockets of time that I can fill with running?”
“I think that if you like to run, and you like to meet some weird people — this event in particular is a really cool event,” said Miyamoto. “I’m excited to generally just run more races, have more long adventures.”
