About Katie

Katie Arnold is a contributing editor and former managing editor at Outside Magazine, where she worked on staff for 12 years. She created and launched the popular Raising Rippers column, about bringing up adventurous kids, which appears monthly on Outside Online and has grown to become one of the site’s most popular blogs. Her 2014 story "Don't Let Youth Sports Hijack Your Life" was one of the most-read posts on Outside Online. Her 2018 essay in Outside Magazine, “Want a Strong Kid? Encourage Play, Not Competition,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award in service journalism.

In addition to Outside, her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Journal, ESPN the Magazine, Marie Claire, Runner’s World, Elle, and Sunset, among others. Her long-form profiles have been named runner-up in The Best American Sports Writing 2008 and nominated for a Western Publishing Association magazine award, and her essays have been anthologized in Woman’s Best Friend, Another Mother Runner, and P.S. What I Didn’t Tell you. She is co-author of the blog Writing from the Nest., and she edited the photography book, Rio Grande: An Eagle’s View, published by WildEarth Guardians.

Katie has been awarded prestigious literary fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where she was named the Robert and Stephanie Olmsted Fellow in 2016. She has been featured on NPR Weekend Edition Sunday, as well as on Ultrarunner Podcast and the Upaya Zen Center Podcast, among others. She has three times been a guest lecturer at Colorado College’s “Writing Wild: Literary Journalism of the Outdoors” course, and teaches writing workshops exploring the link between movement and creativity.

An elite ultra runner, Katie is the 2018 women's champion of Leadville Trail 100 Run, where she finished 11th overall in field of more than 700 runners. She won the 2018 Jemez Mountains 50 Mile, 2014 TransRockies 3-Day Trail Run, Jemez Mountains 50K, the Mount Taylor 50K. She is two-time overall champion and course record holder at the  Angel Fire 100K. Katie is a sponsored athlete for GU Energy Labs and Balega Socks. As part of her ongoing effort to encourage young athletes, she founded a children’s trail running club, gives motivational talks, and coaches girls’ lacrosse in Santa Fe.

Katie lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Steve Barrett, their two daughters and two dogs. In her spare time, she likes to ride her bike, ski, go on river trips, hike, write fiction, and read. A restless and fledging student of Zen, she is slowly learning to sit still, but she’s happiest outside in motion. As the poet Mary Oliver once said, “I don’t like to be indoors.”

Running Home is her first book.