Running for her life
There’s a stereotype about runners, from the amateur to the elite, that you never have to guess whether someone’s a runner because if they are, they won’t let you forget it. Running, in other words, can easily become a person’s entire personality.
So you might think that Elle Purrier St. Pierre’s Instagram handle — @ElleRuns_4_her_life — is a reference to this mentality: She runs for her life. Her life is running. But the more you get to know St. Pierre ’18, the more it seems her handle actually suggests something else: She runs for her life. Her life is not running — or rather, there’s a whole lot more to her life than running, even though she’s a pro runner with New Balance Boston, a two-time Olympian, an American record holder for the indoor mile and the reigning global indoor champion in the 3,000-meter race.
Running for her life
Two-time Olympian and two-time mom is proud to balance a dairy farm, diapers and going the distance
Maggie Mertens
There’s a stereotype about runners, from the amateur to the elite, that you never have to guess whether someone’s a runner because if they are, they won’t let you forget it. Running, in other words, can easily become a person’s entire personality.
So you might think that Elle Purrier St. Pierre’s Instagram handle — @ElleRuns_4_her_life — is a reference to this mentality: She runs for her life. Her life is running. But the more you get to know St. Pierre ’18, the more it seems her handle actually suggests something else: She runs for her life. Her life is not running — or rather, there’s a whole lot more to her life than running, even though she’s a pro runner with New Balance Boston, a two-time Olympian, an American record holder for the indoor mile and the reigning global indoor champion in the 3,000-meter race.
She was thrilled, not only to have broken the national indoor mile record but to have broken it just after returning from maternity leave — 11 months after giving birth to her son Ivan. “This is for all the moms out there,” she said after the race. The result didn’t just prove that she could still be competitive as an elite athlete after becoming a mom, but that she could actually be better. Less than a month later, she proved herself once again, this time to the whole world. Two days before Ivan turned 1, St. Pierre became the first American to win the 3,000-meter race at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland. “It was just really fulfilling,” St. Pierre remembers.
Fulfilling, because St. Pierre has always known she needed to run her life and her career her way, with her own set of priorities. She never wanted to have to give up her deep love of family, dairy farming or wanting to be a mom in order to be a professional athlete. She credits her time at the University of New Hampshire for helping her figure out how to focus on more than just running. “Coach Hop [Robert Hoppler], he didn’t just recruit me; he recruited my parents and talked about how the most important thing was to make my college decision based on who I was as a person, not just as a runner,” she says. “And that stayed true the whole time I was [at UNH]; I was a person first, then a student and then an athlete, and that was his priority system.”
Vermont Farm Girl
St. Pierre, who turned 31 this year, logs most of her weekly miles near the Vermont dairy farm that her husband’s family owns and has run for generations. In 2020, she married Jamie St. Pierre, essentially the boy next door — both Elle’s and Jamie’s families ran dairy farms in Montgomery Center, Vermont. Today, she helps out on the St. Pierre family farm whenever she can because the cows are what make her happy — and because she wants her children to grow up with the same kind of pastoral childhood that shaped her.
Before coming to the University of New Hampshire, St. Pierre knew she was strong, athletic and fast, but she hadn’t trained much beyond the farm chores she and her two older siblings were expected to do every day: feeding the cows, scraping manure and doing the hay baling every summer. “I did that as early as I could lift a square bale,” she says. “Ultimately that probably helped my career as a runner, because it gave me this overall body strength, and I was trying to keep up with my brother and sister, so I had a lot to prove.”
In middle school, she played soccer, basketball and volleyball. But in her first year of high school, she traded volleyball for track. “I didn’t love it at first, to be honest, but I knew I was good at it.” Before long, she was one of the best runners in the state, and that gave her some options when it came to college. But even though many more distinguished running programs had their eye on her, she couldn’t imagine being too far from home or from her then-boyfriend, Jamie, who had decided to attend Cornell’s dairy farming program. So she set her sights squarely 0n the Northeast.
For his part, former UNH track-and-field head coach Rob Hoppler knew St. Pierre had something special the very first time he saw her run — in the New England regional championships cross-country race. “It was a really muddy, rainy, wet day, and there was a sharp 90-degree downhill corner turn,” Hoppler remembers. He watched the boys’ race first, and nearly half the field fell on the turn, while the other half slowed way down, basically walking around the turn. As the girls’ race began, Elle was out front. “She comes tearing down this hill, didn’t touch the brakes at all, rips around that corner like it’s totally dry and off she goes,” he recalls. “So that was the first time I actually saw her run, and I was like, not only is she fast, but she’s a great athlete. This kid is different. She’s special.”
Family and School First
Hoppler, a father of three, coached the way he would want someone to coach his own children. “If you go to a meet, you want to see your daughter run well, because that’s fun and exciting, and they’re happy. But what’s more important is that your daughter is healthy and happy and getting a good education and [that she’s] thoughtful and kind and considerate. That’s way more important. Winning the race doesn’t really matter much at all. Those other things matter a lot.”
So, for instance, when St. Pierre had a breakout winter indoor track season — she was one of only two freshmen in the country to go to the NCAA championship in the mile, the other being Olympian and world champion Nikki Hiltz — he didn’t keep the pressure on for the spring. In fact, together they decided she’d take the spring season off entirely; her sister was getting married and St. Pierre was the maid of honor, and she wanted to be able to drive home often. Hoppler told her to not worry about running, to spend the typical outdoor track-and-field season focusing on her family and school.
That summer, Hoppler suggested she try the steeplechase, the 3,000-meter run-cum-cross-country event competed on a track. She’d never trained for the event, but at the U.S. Junior Championships in Eugene, Oregon, she won. Going on to the World Junior Championships, she made the final, where she placed ninth. “She had just trained a little that summer and was doing less than 30 miles a week, and she got ninth in the world,” Hoppler says. At that point, he remembers trying to give St. Pierre some insight into her vast potential. “You’re one of them,” he told her. When she asked what he meant, he explained: “Your peers in the NCAA are competing to do well in America, in the Northeast or to be the best in their school. If you want, you could barely train and be the best runner at this school, or you could develop, do the work and live up to this kind of global potential.” She didn’t quite believe him. Not yet.
Keeping the pressure low also helped St. Pierre lock into a course of study she was fascinated by and that she continues to use every day of her life: nutrition. She was interested in nutrition and public health, how access to healthy food happens on a community scale and how nutrition works on the individual level. And the UNH classes she took were both challenging and engaging. “I took one sports nutrition class, and it was one of the hardest classes I took at UNH; I learned so much. There’s just so much quackery in professional sports, and it’s so great to feel confident about what I’m fueling my body with,” St. Pierre says.
Building Her Dream Life
After graduation in 2018, she signed with the professional New Balance Boston team and got an apartment in Boston, traveling home to Vermont nearly every weekend to spend time with her family and Jamie. By the time COVID lockdowns hit in 2020, she and Jamie were engaged and she wanted to be based in Vermont, close to Jamie and the dairy farm she loved. It was the last summer her dad would be milking the cows she’d grown up with, as the family would be selling them that winter, and she was grateful to be able to spend as much time as possible helping her dad with the farm chores. After the family sold their cows, St. Pierre joined her now husband on his family’s farm full time, commuting to Boston for workouts instead of the other way around. The following summer, St. Pierre won first place at the U.S. Olympic trials and went on to compete at the Tokyo Olympics, where she made the final and placed 10th.
Unlike former generations of women runners, St. Pierre didn’t put off her dream of having a family and a full life outside of running until retirement. She actually found out she was pregnant with her first son, Ivan, in between qualifying for the 2022 National Championships, where she placed third in the 1,500, and competing at the 2022 World Championships (where she made the semifinal heat but missed the final). Her pregnancy, though not exactly planned, felt meant to be. “I was so happy,” she recalls. “Yes, I was nervous, because as a female athlete your body is your job, but I was really thankful that other athletes had already paved that path.” It wasn’t unheard of in 2023 to take a season off to have a baby and continue on as a professional athlete, which hadn’t been the case just a decade earlier.
Better Than Ever
In summer 2024, St. Pierre had what some athletes might have called a comeback: She completed a double at the U.S. trials, qualifying for the Paris Olympics in both the 5,000 and the 1,500. She and her coach decided she would compete only in the 1,500 at the Olympics. St. Pierre put in an incredible race in the final; she went out hard with the lead pack and ultimately came in eighth. But even though that finish was a disappointment on one level, she reached way back to those lessons she learned from Hop to put it in perspective. “Reflecting and thinking about how seeing Ivan and my family in the stadium after my race was EVERYTHING,” she wrote on Instagram. In the accompanying photos, she and Ivan are beaming at each other, Jamie is wrapping her in a huge hug and Ivan is perched on her hip while she walks the purple Parisian track in her Team USA uniform.
“Watching her make the Olympics and be happy in her life is one of the things that makes me happiest about Elle,” says Hoppler. “She could not be an Olympian and she’d be just as happy as she is being an Olympian, because she has her family and her community and her farm and her friends, and her life would be complete and that’s great.”
And she’s not done yet — with racing or building the rest of her dream life. She and Jamie welcomed their second son, Harvey, in May 2025, and she got back to training shortly after. Coach Mark Coogan at New Balance Boston says he’s incredibly happy with how her workouts are going so far, “even though she’s still sleep deprived because of the baby.” He even thinks that come this spring, she’ll be ready for a repeat at the World Athletics Indoor Championships, being held in March in Poland — this time as a two-time mom.
“To be honest, I feel like she has some unfinished business at the World Championships and Olympics,” Coogan says. “She knows she’s one of the best in the world if she gets to the starting line healthy.
The fact that she retains that confidence, coming back from having her second baby — she just won the 3,000 meter at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in January — is proof that the nurturing-the-whole-person model St. Pierre learned as a college athlete has paid off exponentially. Coogan says Coach Hoppler and the athletics department at UNH have a lot to be proud of in nurturing Elle as a person who developed a lifelong love for running during her time in college, instead of burning her out. “[Running] is a huge priority for her, but she’s not going to sleep worrying about a 10-miler the next day or a big race coming up,” he notes. “She’s going to bed pretty content, because she has great kids, a great husband, a great family and a whole Montgomery community in Vermont that is super supportive.”
St. Pierre talked about that feeling of contentment in a media interview after finishing the 2025 NYC Marathon 5K race last November.
“I’m really proud of that race, and proud to represent all the moms out there … I got a little emotional before the race, just proud of what I’ve done and where I am in my life, having these two kids. I’m so happy in my life, and happy I can be back here and show them how strong their mom is.”