When Carol Seppilu first started running in 2014, it was a way to get off the couch and outside with her dog. Over the years that followed, the sport became a lifeline. Seppilu, Yup’ik from Nome, now looks to running as a test of endurance and a platform for her ongoing mental health advocacy. After her first attempt at jogging, it took Seppilu almost a year to run two miles without stopping to walk. Ten years later, she was the first woman to cross the finish line during the 2025 notoriously challenging 150-mile Iditarod Trail Invitational.
Seppilu has battled depression throughout her life, and was deeply struggling in 2014. One beautiful day, despite her lack of motivation to get out of bed, she felt a desire to change. “I told myself to get up and do something. Run — how hard can it be?” she says. She took off with her dog and began jogging down the street. A neighbor shouted, ‘Hi, jogger!’, which added to her motivation.
“It was a lot harder than I thought it would be — I was severely obese, about 233 pounds,” she continues. She thought to herself, “Well, if I can’t run, I can walk.” Seppilu walked the rest of the two-mile loop. A year later, she was able to run the complete two miles continuously.
“I noticed I was a lot happier outside,” she says. “So I wanted to see how much farther I could go after that.” After completing an 8-mile race in 2015 (“I finished it in last place, and I loved it,” she says), Seppilu signed up for a half marathon. Next, she ran a 20-miler. Then a 50.
Seppilu became obsessed with testing her body’s endurance and seeing how far she could run. Her inspiration came, in part, from a friend who had set out to run marathons in all 50 states. She tagged along to a Louisiana race in 2016 and was struck by the runners tackling 100 miles. “They looked so happy, cheering each other on. I thought, if I could get joy doing something that hard and miserable, I wanted that too.”
She attempted the 100-mile distance four times before finally completing the goal at Resurrection Pass in 2020. “I thought that would be it,” she says. “But when I finished a 100-miler, I wanted to see how much further I could go.”
Seppilu has turned this obsession with distance into a tool for her own mental health, as well as public advocacy. As a teenager, she survived a suicide attempt that left her with a tracheostomy and a permanent breathing tube that makes every inhale feel like sucking air through a straw. “I still go through really dark days,” she says. “But when I run, it helps me get through it. If I can go far in running, I can go far in my own life.”
Seppilu’s advocacy began long before she became a runner. After surviving her attempt, she wrote a letter to the Nome Nugget about life and resilience. Soon she was being invited to speak to kids around the region as suicide rates rose and she lost friends of her own. At 18, she was appointed to Alaska’s State Suicide Prevention Council and began sharing her story with young people in the region. Today, she ties that work to her races. She posts to social media about the perseverance it takes to finish long races, hoping it will inspire others. “Running a marathon is very difficult,” she says. “You have to be mentally tough to get through it. I hope people can see that in what I do.”
These days, Seppilu trains on the tundra and beaches around Nome, often with borrowed dogs after her longtime companion passed away. Encounters with muskox, bears, and even wolves sometimes punctuate her miles. Looking ahead, she wants to continue pushing distance — she hopes to crack 350 winter miles in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, and eventually she’d like to complete the entire race — nearly 1,000 miles to Nome. “I found that anything under 18 hours is too short, she says with a laugh.“I want to be outside for a very long time,” she says.
And Seppilu would like to continue to travel and building community through racing. “I don’t know if there’s a correlation, but I think people who go through a lot find something in ultrarunning,” says Seppilu. “It just works really well.”
Emily Sullivan is a photographer and writer focused on outdoor recreation, environmental wellness, and community empowerment. She is based on Dena’ina lands, where she can usually be found skiing, packrafting, or berry picking.
