Stephanie Bruce could tell that Aliphine Tuliamuk’s energy was dipping. With a little more than a month to go before the New York City Marathon, the two professional racers were on a long run on an autumn day in Flagstaff, Ariz., where they both live and train with HOKA NAZ Elite. Their plan for the day had been to push into a fast kick for a stretch of 1,000 meters after a high-mileage day. Both of the women were feeling it in their legs and lungs when they hit the kick, and they were running into the wind, side by side. So Bruce offered Tuliamuk a little protection against the wind.
“I think Stephanie sensed that I was really, really struggling, and she’s like ‘You can tuck in behind me; you’re good,” Tuliamuk remembers.
But Bruce saw the offer as mutually beneficial—when it comes to the kind of grueling training required by the marathon, the better your training partner, the better you’ll be. “No reason for both of us to suffer in the headwind,” Bruce laughs when explaining her offer to Tuliamuk to tuck in.
It’s all part of a training partnership, she says. “On those days when one person is feeling O.K., they can pull the person who’s maybe feeling like ‘Oh, this is a really hard day for me.’ And that’s only going to help us come race day.”
That mutual desire to help each other be the best is the beauty of a friendship that has grown along thousands of miles of training runs and years of competing in many of the same races. “I know if I’m feeling slack-ish, I have to keep up with Stephanie because I know that she’s going to be my rival in New York, and if I wanna beat her, then I have to be able to stay with her more and get the most out of myself,” Tuliamuk says.
Bruce and Tuliamuk have been running with the same team since 2018, but they first caught each other’s eyes as rivals. Tuliamuk first remembers running against Bruce in ’16 at the Stanford Invitational 10K. Bruce was just six months removed from having a child, her second in just 15 months. Tuliamuk, who was 27 at the time, thought returning to racing so soon postpartum was “crazy.” Tuliamuk earned second place that day, while the still-recovering Bruce took eighth.
Bruce says she and Tuliamuk really got to know each other for the first time when they ran a 10K for Team USA in Uganda at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships the following year. Tuliamuk, the top American finisher, came in 15th; Bruce earned 22nd. A few months later, they both ran the 2017 New York Marathon, but this time Bruce came out on top. She took 10th place while Tuliamuk got 13th. “She kicked my butt, and obviously you remember that one,” Tuliamuk laughs. But instead of getting jealous, Tuliamuk came for a visit to Flagstaff to check out HOKA NAZ Elite. “I joined her team, and now we’re here.”
Here—when I spoke with Tuliamuk and Bruce in October—was training for New York, Bruce’s 17th and final career marathon and Tuliamuk’s return to the marathon after more than a year away.
Bruce, 38, announced in January that after being diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, she was retiring from professional running at the end of the year. The famously transparent athlete, who often speaks and writes candidly about everything from her healing postpartum abs, to her two children’s busy schedules, to her mother’s death from cancer last year, wanted to announce her retirement before it happened.
“I would like to go out with a bang,” she wrote.
And so far, she has.
Though Bruce has never qualified for an Olympics, she’s carved her own path over the years, and this year, which she’s dubbed “The Grit Finale,” is no different. This spring she took 10th at the United Airlines NYC half-marathon, then 12th in the Boston Marathon the following month. Heading into her final stretch of a packed race year, she won the NACAC 10,000-meter title in August in the Bahamas, and in September earned first place at USATF 10K Championships hosted by the Great Cow Harbor 10K.
Meanwhile, Tuliamuk, 33, won the U.S. trials for the 2020 Olympic Marathon, but when the games were delayed due to COVID-19, she took the downtime as an opportunity to have a child. She gave birth to her daughter, Zoe, in January ’21. After racing against a newly postpartum Bruce back in ’17, Tuliamuk ended up competing in the Olympic Marathon just seven months after Zoe’s birth. Unfortunately, Tuliamuk was injured during the race and didn’t finish.
New York will be her first marathon since the disappointing result. She and Bruce started their buildup to the marathon in August, and soon after, Tuliamuk was faced with another possible injury. But after two and a half weeks off, not knowing whether she’d be able to compete at all, she was able to return to training. “I was just so grateful. Nothing puts you in a good place mentally more than an injury scare,” she says.
Tuliamuk (center) celebrated with Kellyn Taylor (left) and Bruce after winning the U.S. Olympic Team Trials marathon in 2020.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
She’s also grateful to have another race to train for with Bruce. “Seeing the kind of athlete that Stephanie is now … compared to when I first joined the team, she just keeps getting better every year, and honestly I keep asking her, ‘You sure you’re ready to retire?’”
Bruce’s longevity as a runner is inspiring to Tuliamuk, who has learned that as she gets older she needs to take better care of her body if she’s going to keep racing. But prioritizing yourself, even as a professional athlete, is especially difficult as a new mom, Tuliamuk says, so she’s taken some pointers for balancing parenthood and treating herself right from her training partner. Tuliamuk’s tendency is to push through something that feels bad, she says, but Bruce often practices caution if something isn’t right, and she focuses on the basics. “If you don’t build your foundation properly, it’s gonna crack and everything is going to fall apart,” Tuliamuk says she’s learned. “[Bruce] always avoids injury that way. I could definitely learn to do more strength on my own at home and treat myself better.”
For her part, Bruce says Tuliamuk’s joyful attitude inspires her. “Every day is just fun with her because she always brings some quirkiness. … She’ll find a way to make a workout seem easier or different,” she says. For instance, when a training day calls for 4x5K (that’s four different 5K distances in one training day) and Bruce is overwhelmed by the prospect, Tuliamuk will put it another way. “She’ll be like, it’s just four intervals! … and try to make it seem like no big deal.”
But it’s the other side of Tuliamuk and Bruce’s relationship, the way they fill up the many miles they spend side by side, that has created a unique bond between “co-workers” in a career that’s anything but ordinary. Tuliamuk says that—along with their fellow teammate and mom Kellyn Taylor (who is currently pregnant)—the three moms probably confuse the younger members of their team because they’re often not talking about running at all. “We talk a lot about when is the right time to have another kid … things normal friends talk about in life, you know? The things Stephanie’s boys say, so I can get prepared. And so I think that we learn a lot of things from each other that’s not running related.”
As teammates, competitors and friends, Bruce and Tuliamuk have developed a unique bond.
Courtesy of HOKA NAZ Elite
Those conversations can go deeper, too. Last year, when Bruce’s mother, Joan Rothstein, was dying, Tuliamuk was one of the only people who wouldn’t shy away from the topic with Bruce. Usually, once they got going on a training run, she’d ask: “Now how are you really doing?” says Bruce. “I love that she was never afraid to just say what she is thinking and she just leans in real hard to what she’s feeling.”
When things have been tough outside of running they’ve been there for each other, too. Before Bruce’s mother died, Tuliamuk and her family drove to Phoenix to say goodbye, bring food and support Bruce. In February, when Aliphine fell on an icy run and suffered a concussion, Bruce was there to pick up Zoe from daycare.
So in some ways, the two are coming to New York in different places—a comeback and a retirement—but in other ways, they’re coming from a lot of the same places, too: the same roads and trails and miles and workout programs over the past five years. And their goals for the race are similar, too.
“Deep down we both want to be on the podium,” says Bruce.
And that’s part of the beauty of what they have, as partners, friends, moms and rivals. After all, the New York City Marathon is special for them: In a way it’s the race that started their relationship back in 2017. And, Bruce says, this marathon being her last is a good reminder of what running is all about.
“The first time I ran the marathon in New York I just remember the hair standing up on my arms and neck,” she says. “I was like there’s no crowds like this, it’s insane, the energy, the yelling, the cheers. And then also the silence. You run through parts of the Bronx and you’re like, ‘Oh there’s no one here; no one’s on this bridge right now. And it’s all me.’ I love that part of the marathon where there’s a lot of people cheering you on, and then sometimes it’s just hard moments by yourself.”
When Tuliamuk and Bruce line up for the last time as marathon competitors in New York on Sunday, they will run their own races, yes. But they’ll also have years of memories, of miles, conversations, laughs and all the times one pushed the other—or offered an assist—to push them on.
