Endurance engineer
Kelly Rembold
Feb 5, 2024
CMU alumna, biomedical engineer, and nationally ranked ultramarathon runner Leah Yingling races to success.
When Carnegie Mellon University alumna Leah Yingling approached the starting line at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB) in September, she knew what to expect—a 106-mile race through Italy, Switzerland, and France with more than 33,000 feet of total elevation gain—and how to succeed.
Yingling is one of the top female ultramarathon runners in the U.S., and the UTMB is one of the most prestigious trail races in the world.
“Tackling UTMB was a huge endeavor for me,” says Yingling, a 2013 College of Engineering graduate. “I worked extremely hard to get there, and I invested a lot of myself in the training and the recovery.”
Leah relies on positive self-talk and mantras to get her through the most difficult moments in her races. On UTMB race day, it was Carnegie Mellon’s motto that helped her cross the finish line.
“I kept telling myself that ‘my heart is in the work,’” Yinglingsays. “I hadn’t thought about that in years. When I was walking to the start, it came to me. I leaned on it a lot during the later hours of the race when it got really tough.”
She’d set a goal to place in the top 10: She finished in eighth place with a time of 26:21:24.