For Ali Feller, running started between four lamp posts in New York City.
She had just moved from New Hampshire to Manhattan after college, chasing a dream of working in magazine publishing. She wasn’t a runner yet. In fact, growing up in Hopkinton, New Hampshire as a dancer, she actively avoided running.
Then she met her roommate.
“She had her half marathon medals hanging on her bedroom wall, and I was intrigued about why an adult would have medals and why they would display them,” Feller said.
At the time, Feller was living on a magazine publishing salary that barely covered rent and meals. Dance classes and gym memberships weren’t realistic. Running, though, was free.
So she started small.
“I sprinted out my front door and ran the length of four lamp posts along the FDR Drive,” she said.
The next day, she tried to make it one lamp post farther.
That tiny challenge became the foundation of a career and community that now reaches runners around the world.
Today, Feller is the creator and host of the wildly popular “Ali on the Run Show,” a podcast featuring elite athletes, celebrity runners, Olympians, and everyday runners alike. She’s also become a familiar face at some of the biggest races in the country, announcing and working broadcasts for the Boston Marathon, New York City Marathon, and Chicago Marathon.
But over the past three years, her life has become defined not only by running, but by cancer.
A New Hampshire kid with New York dreams
Long before the podcast and marathon broadcasts, Feller had another dream entirely.
“My goal from when I was a teenager was to move to New York City to work in the magazine industry,” she said.
After graduating from Quinnipiac University with a degree in print journalism, she landed exactly where she wanted to be: working for Dance Spirit magazine.
“I blame Andy Anderson, The Devil Wears Prada, all the things that made working in magazines look very, very fun,” she joked.
At the same time, she was slowly becoming immersed in New York’s running culture — logging miles through Central Park, along the East River and through neighborhoods she was still learning to navigate.
“It was such a good way for me to learn New York City,” she said. “I would just explore the city by foot.”
Eventually, she signed up for her first race: a four-mile run in Central Park.
“I was hooked,” she said.
Building a podcast one email at a time
Feller initially launched her podcast in 2017 as a way to stay connected to the running community after moving from Manhattan to New Jersey.
At the time, she had already been blogging for years through her site “Ali on the Run.” The podcast, though, was different.
“The blog was about my personal running,” she said. “Whereas the podcast … I wanted to tell other people’s stories, and I didn’t want it to be about me.”
What started as a hobby quickly snowballed.
Feller began emailing professional runners and asking them to come on the show. One interview led to another. Eventually, she built relationships across the sport.
“It’s always just been asking,” she said. “If you don’t ask, you can’t get a yes.”
Those yeses led to opportunities far beyond podcasting.
In 2019, while still living near New York City, Feller reached out to New York Road Runners about race announcements for the group.
They gave her a shot at a small 5K.
Later that year, she announced at the finish line of the New York City Marathon.
“Once you have New York City Marathon on your resume, sort of in any capacity, it’s a good thing,” she said.
After moving back to New Hampshire during the pandemic, she started announcing races for Millennium Running before eventually joining the Boston Marathon broadcast team.
Her first live television role happened almost by accident.
“One of the people from the world feed broadcast who does the finish line interviews was no longer able to do it,” she said. “And they were like, ‘Well, Ali is going to be here, and she talks for a living.’”
She had never done live TV before.
“They kind of gave me a shot,” she said. “And from there, that expanded into getting to do it in Boston every year.”
‘It changed everything’
In April 2023, Feller traveled to Eugene to run the Eugene Marathon.
She had trained intensely for the race — waking up at 4 a.m. for runs while preparing for her first marathon in seven years after becoming a mother.
While there, she discovered two lumps in her left breast.
“I ran the marathon,” she said. “I ran a personal best, and then I came home and started making doctor’s appointments.”
Soon after, she was diagnosed with stage 1 invasive ductal carcinoma breast cancer. She underwent a double mastectomy, reconstruction surgery, and chemotherapy.
Then, in May 2025, came another devastating diagnosis: stage 4 cancer that had spread to her bones.
“It’s been a shit show,” she said candidly.
Feller said the hardest part initially wasn’t even the treatment, it was the shock and the bureaucracy.
“You don’t really get time to think about or process the early diagnosis,” she said. “Because it’s immediately, ‘Okay, I have to learn what to do about this.’”
She made calls to insurance companies, scheduled appointments, researched doctors, and tried to navigate the healthcare system while barely sleeping.
“I would just be up at 2 a.m. crying, hoping it was a bad dream,” she said.
The second diagnosis felt even more terrifying.
“When I heard stage four, my first thought is, ‘I’m about to leave my daughter without a mother,’” she said.
Running differently now
Today, Feller is on maintenance therapy after completing 11 rounds of chemotherapy. She receives infusions every three weeks at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, injections every four weeks, and she undergoes regular scans and ongoing treatment. She also plans to undergo preventative surgery this summer because she carries the BRCA2 gene mutation, which increases her risk for ovarian cancer.
Cancer has fundamentally changed her relationship with running.
“Running used to be something that I really obsessed over,” she said. “And now it’s something where it’s like, I’m lucky if I get to get out for a run.”
That perspective has reshaped how she talks about the sport.
“I hate when runners are like, ‘I have to go for a run,’” she said. “I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, you’re so lucky that you even get to.’”
Even through chemotherapy, the running community remained constant.
“The beautiful thing about the running piece is that it’s always been there for me to come back to,” she said. “The community has been there for me to come back to.”
She often thinks about a quote she sees repeated online:
“Healthy people want lots of things, but sick people just want one thing.”
Sharing it all publicly
Feller has documented much of her cancer journey online through Instagram, newsletters, and podcast conversations, often with striking honesty.
“That comes very naturally,” she said. “I’m an oversharer.”
She said openness has actually made the experience easier.
“The more people in my life and beyond who knew what I was going through, the easier time I would have,” she said.
That transparency has created a deeply loyal community around her work, one that has rallied around her during treatments, surgeries, and difficult days.
She also says documenting everything has helped preserve moments she otherwise might have forgotten.
“There’s so much when you’re in the thick of some of this that feels like a blur,” she said. “Because I’ve documented so much of this, I actually think it’s kind of nice to be able to look back on it.”
Sometimes, she said, revisiting old posts reminds her just how much she has survived.
“For someone who doesn’t really give myself any credit, sometimes I will look back, and I’m like, ‘Dang, I actually have been through it,’” she said.
