Senior Writer
As featured in Running Times MagazineRachel Toor didn’t start running until she was 30 years old; before then, while on vacation with friends she would lounge around in a black bikini reading 19th century novels and eating Oreos while everyone else went for a run. Now she considers anything shorter than a half marathon not worth the bother of lacing up running shoes; you could call it the zeal of the convert or just plain obsessive. She’d rather run a 50K on the trails than a road 5K. In fact, she rarely runs road races, except as a marathon pace team leader. She has won a handful of tiny, boutique trail marathons in beautiful places: North Carolina, California, Montana, and the Himalayas.
Having tried on and doffed a couple of careers (scholarly publishing and college admissions) Rachel is now finishing a graduate degree at the University of Montana, where she currently teaches writing. She is the author of four books her most recent, The Pig and I, has been translated into French and Russian. (It might be better in French.) Rachel writes for Chronicle of Higher Education (a national weekly for academics and other eggheads), still has a running column in her former hometown paper (Durham Herald-Sun), and her work has appeared in other running publications, Glamour, Reader’s Digest, and Happen, the online magazine for match.com. She is now, inevitably, working on a novel.
Rachel grew up in upstate New York and graduated from Yale, where she learned how to talk about books she hadn’t read and only ran when she was late for class. Her mother, a designer, made a website for her: www.racheltoor.com. Rachel is tethered to her internet connection and loves receiving email from RT readers.