An Elite Running Team Grows in the Triangle

Alistair and Amy Cragg have lived and trained in nearly every running hub in the country over their professional careers: Flagstaff, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; Mammoth Lakes, California; Park City, Utah.

Still, they were impressed by the American Tobacco Trail. “It’s the busiest running trail I’ve ever seen,” said Alistair, 44, of the 22-mile footpath spanning from downtown Durham south to Apex. “It’s like the Charles River on Boston Marathon weekend, every day.”

The Triangle doesn’t have the credentials of a traditional running hub—it’s not at altitude, like Boulder, Colorado, nor does it have a long running history, like Boston. But it’s where the Craggs chose to start their Puma Elite Running Team in 2021, with just one athlete and a hunch that North Carolina might be the next great running destination. 

So far, their gamble has paid off. The Craggs’ team now boasts 18 athletes representing five countries, including four Olympians. And after several years of quiet successes and slow growth, 2024 has seen Puma Elite runners make headlines and break records from the mile to the marathon.

The idea that North Carolina could be the home for a professional running team first came to Alistair in 2019, when he was visiting the area. “Just in Chapel Hill, there were more trails than we had in Portland,” he said.

The couple was living in Oregon at the time, where Amy (formerly Hastings) was running with Nike’s prestigious Bowerman Track Club and Alistair was working as the team’s assistant coach. Bowerman was a team of top recruits and champions, and Amy, now 40, was a two-time Olympian considered one of the greatest American marathoners of her generation. 

“But it felt like we were turning down really good athletes,” said Alistair, himself a three-time Olympian representing Ireland, who had ambitions of starting a team of his own. “I was more excited about looking for the needle in the haystack.”

When Puma tapped Alistair to lead a professional training group, the Craggs drove across the country scouting possible locations. “We had a list of criteria from our experience as athletes of what would make the ideal training group,” said Amy, who became a coach when she retired in 2021. 

“We had been at altitude before, which was great, but it was so isolated that people’s spouses were going crazy,” she said. “And sometimes you were battling the elements so much that the benefit of the altitude was negligible.” 

Plus, the Craggs figured that if they were located somewhere else, they could strategically pick and choose which location might serve them best for seasonal altitude training camps. “We didn’t want to be stuck with one all year,” said Amy. 

The Triangle began to emerge as a place that checked a lot of boxes. Though summers are hot and humid, you can generally run outside year-round. Plus, training in those conditions gives athletes toughness and prepares them for racing in a warming world, said Alistair. 

As team member Amon Kemboi, 28, put it, “You race somewhere with less humidity, and you feel like you’re breathing easy compared to everyone else.”

There was also the reasonable cost of living, a convenient international airport, the potential for a social life beyond running, and an East Coast location that makes travel to races easier.

The American Tobacco Trail was a bonus, with its variety of surfaces (asphalt, dirt, gravel) to choose from, and markers every quarter mile. So was having the resources—such as top-tier medical care—of three major universities, each with its own strong running program, nearby. 

Perhaps the biggest bonus, though, was that the team could have its pick of local tracks. “Track access is extremely difficult around the country—you have pro athletes jumping over fences to get to tracks,” said Alistair. “Whereas here, we feel spoiled.” 

The team typically does track workouts at either the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or Duke University, but high schools have also offered up their tracks. “It’s so rare,” said Amy. “I’ve been kicked off so many tracks everywhere else I’ve lived.” 

A Team of Underdogs

The team’s first year was slow. Puma Elite began with just one athlete, middle-distance runner Taylor Werner, now 26, from the University of Arkansas, after losing many of its recruiting prospects to other brands. (Werner has since left the team.) They soon added Stanford alum and distance runner Fiona O’Keeffe, now 26.

O’Keeffe had never visited the Triangle before accepting the Craggs’ offer to join the team, though she’d heard good things from her college coach, Chris Miltenberg, who is now the director of track & field and cross country at UNC-Chapel Hill. “Going pro was a goal of mine, but I didn’t know how realistic that was,” she said. “So when an opportunity came up, I was like, I should go for it.”

Many of the Puma Elite athletes who’ve filled out the team since then have similar stories: The Craggs offered them a chance coming off solid-but-perhaps-not-exceptional college careers or unrenewed contracts with other brands. “There’s such a small window that people’s careers are judged on,” said Alistair. “We’re looking for people who may not have hit that window,” which can be due to injury or simply not reaching their peak yet.

It turns out, the Craggs are good at spotting potential. Take Dorcus Ewoi, 27, a Kenyan 800 meter runner who moved to Chapel Hill after graduating from Campbell University in 2023 without a professional running career on her radar. Alistair spotted her running in Carolina North Forest one day and invited her to train with the team.

At first, she struggled to keep up during workouts. But in less than a year, something clicked. Ewoi beat arguably the greatest American 800 runner of all time, Athing Mu, at the Holloway Pro Classic in Gainesville, Florida, in July. Then in August, she set a state record at the Sir Walter Miler in Raleigh. And in September, she placed second at the New Balance 5th Avenue Mile, one of the most prestigious road miles in the country, against a stacked field. 

Then there’s Pat Tiernan, 30, who was a two-time Olympian for Australia when Nike decided not to renew his contract. He had a challenging experience at the Tokyo Games in 2021 when he collapsed on the track during the 10,000 meters and finished last, then subsequently scratched from the 5,000 meters. He joined Puma Elite in 2022 and later that year ran the second-fastest half marathon ever by an Australian in history. This year, he ran the second-fastest marathon by an Australian with a speedy 2:07:45 at the Houston Marathon. At the Paris Games this summer, he finished a respectable 24th. 

But the team’s biggest success story is O’Keeffe, who shocked the world with a definitive win at the Olympic Marathon Trials in February, running the fastest-ever debut marathon by an American woman and the fastest Olympic Trials marathon in history. Her status as a household name in the running world was cemented for a less fortunate reason a few months later at the Olympics when she dropped out  less than five kilometers into the marathon due to an injury and became the subject of a social media firestorm for not ceding her spot to the alternate. 

(O’Keeffe later clarified that by the time she had any information about her injury, it was too late to swap in the alternate anyway, so she decided to go ahead on the off chance she’d feel better.)

The Craggs maintain that, had O’Keeffe been healthy, she would have been a medal contender in Paris. They admit that their sky-high expectations for their athletes can sometimes feel delusional. 

“There’s so many moments where we’re like, ‘We think this athlete can do this,’” Amy said. “Are we being crazy? Is that absolutely insane? But it started happening that the things we saw in training were translating over to races.”

Rooted in Community 

Still, the move has been an adjustment for the Craggs. “We were coming from going to the Olympics every cycle [with Bowerman] to working with kids right out of college,” said Alistair. “We had to adjust what we thought were successes.” 

That attitude has resulted in a team culture where both Olympic qualifications and wins at local races are celebrated equally. Like when middle distance runner Jess McGorty, 25, was coming back from a grueling series of injuries earlier this summer and the Craggs decided to enter her in Raleigh’s Sir Walter Running Pop Up Miles series, weekly races open to all that culminate in a qualifying race for the Sir Walter Miler. After over a year away from the track, she won three of the four weekly races. 

 “It was a low-stakes environment, but there were people of all ages racing and pushing themselves and cheering,” said McGorty, who is from Addison, New York. “It opened my eyes to the community of runners here.”

She also qualified for the Sir Walter Miler, a professional race that since 2013 has attracted the best middle distance runners in the country, from U.S. Olympic 1500 meters bronze medalist Yared Nuguse to American mile record holder Nikki Hiltz. “That was as big as going to the Olympics,” said Alistair. 

“There were a lot of people who were really excited to see Jess win that qualifying race to run in Sir Walter,” said Tiernan. “Jess’ story looks very different from Fiona’s story, but it had the same meaning to the team, which was really exciting.” 

That McGorty was able to successfully return to the track on her home turf, among the greater Triangle running community, made it even more special. The athletes don’t take this for granted. 

“One of the first weeks I was living here, I went to volunteer at a pop-up road mile,” said Mick Stanovsek, 27, a middle distance runner who joined Puma Elite after Nike’s Eugene-based Oregon Track Club Elite folded in 2022. “I was telling all my friends back west that the running scene is so good here—there were like 400 people around our age just out there doing a road mile on a Thursday night. That wouldn’t happen in Eugene.”

“Sometimes you can get a little bit jaded with doing this day in and day out and it being your job,” said O’Keeffe. “Seeing people doing it just for the love of it helps me get back in touch with the core reason that that’s why I do it, too.”

The solid track and cross country programs of the region’s three major universities also bolster the local running scene. N.C. State has historically been one of the best women’s cross country programs in the nation. UNC-Chapel Hill is increasingly seen as a contender in both track and cross country, and it is the alma mater of U.S. marathon legend Shalane Flanagan. Duke’s teams are often strong as well. Plus, Fleet Feet, one of the largest running stores in the country, is headquartered in Carrboro, offering a litany of community programming through seven local stores. 

“In the beginning it was like, ‘Why North Carolina?’” said Alistair. “You could go anywhere in the world, so why North Carolina? Now, it’s become one of the stops—runners leave college, and they go to either Boston, Oregon, North Carolina or altitude.”

Running may never be central to the Triangle’s identity in the way that it is to places like Boulder or Flagstaff. But O’Keeffe sees that as a good thing. “North Carolina has a lot to offer at this stage of your life when you’re trying to figure out what your options are,” she said. “You can be all-in on running, but at the same time, there’s easy access to other avenues if you want or need to go in any other direction.”

It’s a particularly salient point for O’Keeffe, who continues to recover from the injury she sustained in Paris. “I’ve been fairly narrowly focused on running for the last couple years, which I don’t regret,” she said, “but I think it would be healthy to figure out ways to feel at home here outside of just running.”

Under the Radar No More

This summer, Puma Elite gained a recruiting class of young talent that included Alex Maier, an Oklahoma State University standout. In early October he made his marathon debut in Chicago, a highly unusual move for a 23-year-old who’d never raced farther than a 10K. It was a success: Going in with a goal of 2:11, Maier ran a 2:11:24 and held his own in a field of far more experienced marathoners.  

“This is the most talented the team has ever been,” said Alistair. “And the group is jelling better than we have ever seen.”

Now, the team is preparing for the winter indoor season. A new assistant coach and exciting new recruits are on the radar, as is a Puma Elite house where team members can hang out, get massages and physical therapy, and run on treadmills, and where visiting runners and team members based elsewhere can stay. 

Also on the radar, they hope: getting athletes qualified for the World Indoor Championships in March and the outdoor World Championships next September. “I’m confident about it,” said Kemboi, who has even bigger aspirations: “I think we’ll make that team and go get our medals.”

“After all their success, they’re still a bit underrated,” said Chris Chavez, founder of track and field publication Citius Mag. “That’s what’s really cool about the team—they’re sitting on a secret before the rest of the world finds out. There’s plenty of great running ahead for them—I think that they’ll be making teams and winning titles. It’ll be fun to follow along.”

Even as the team grows in size and renown, you’ll still find them most days logging miles on the American Tobacco Trail or in Umstead State Park. “We have a little hidden gem here,” said Alistair. “Every year I think, ‘How do we make it better? Do we go to altitude? Do we move the group there?’ But then we come back here after camps, and we’re like, ‘No, this is great. I wouldn’t change this.’”

Lauren Wingenroth is a Carrboro, North Carolina-based writer reporting on arts and culture, health and fitness, sports, lifestyle and more. She is a former editor of Dance Magazine, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Outside Magazine, ESPN, Playbill, American Theatre, Well + Good, and CND Magazine, among others.