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📧 A NOTE TO OUR FEISTY READERS: Starting next week, we'll be sending The Feist out Wednesday mornings instead of Tuesday afternoons. Consider it something to get you through the middle of the week and to look forward to on hump day.

Congrats to Nikki Boon, the new women's decathlon world champion!

— Nikki, the DIII national champ in the heptathlon, took the title at the second-ever decathlon world championship. Listen to more about why women still don't get to do the decathlon in the Olympics on last week's Feist podcast episode.

Three big stories to know this week in women's sports

1. Another Leadville record goes down 😮

There must be something in the Colorado water right now. A week after Kate Courtney broke the 10-year-old Leadville 100 mountain bike record, Anne Flower breaks a 31-year-old record in the 100-mile trail running race, which is run entirely above 9,000ft elevation.

The emergency room doctor, 35, also took second overall — behind only the men's winner, David Roche, who broke his own course record. 

It was Flower's first 100-mile ever and she didn't realize she was close to the iconic course record, set by trail running legend Ann Trason in 1994, until the final miles. 

🏃‍♀️ ALSO: Maude Farrell won the Leadville Challenge, completing all five run and mountain bike events in the race series: the trail marathon, the 50-miler, the 100-mile mountain bike, the 10K, and the 100-mile run.

2. Canada welcomes the WNBA 🏀

(Photo: Feisty)

Ahead of the WNBA's expansion into Canada next year with the Toronto Tempo, the league played its first-ever regular season game in Canada on Friday night.

Feisty was courtside for the sold-out crowd of nearly 16,000 fans in Vancouver as the Seattle Storm beat the Atlanta Dream 80-78. While there have been two previous exhibition games played in the Great White North, this was the first actual season game. And the Tempo announced they will play two more games in Vancouver next year, in a bid to grow the fan base across the country.

Following the Toronto and Portland teams next year (2026), the WNBA will launch teams in Cleveland (2028), Detroit (2029), and Philadelphia (2030). The Golden State Valkyries, in San Francisco, were the first new team for the league since 2008 — and now you can't stop the teams from coming! (Rumors also abounded over the weekend that the Connecticut Sun could be sold or relocate to Boston.)

With regular-season play nearly wrapping up, the Valkyries could also be the first expansion team to ever make the playoffs 🤞

💜 ANOTHER FIRST: The Storm unveiled a statue of Sue Bird (a statSue?!) — the first of a WNBA player outside a WNBA arena

🏀 FOR THE NEXT GEN: The league's 'LineEm Up' initiative is painting WNBA three-point lines on playground courts to help bring the game closer to the community and to young players 

3. Women's Rugby World Cup attracting record crowds as games kickoff this week 🏉

Much like its soccer equivalent World Cup, the Rugby World Cup is played every four years, is considered the pinnacle of the sport, and women didn't have an official World Cup tournament until 1991.

This year's Rugby World Cup 

On the back of a booming interest in women's rugby — and, in North America, the thrilling bronze medal win from the U.S. and silver from Canada in the Olympics — the Rugby World Cup, held in England this year, is already setting records. More than 375,000 tickets have been sold, which more expected to sell. And the final (not scheduled until next month!) is already a sellout, with the 82,000 attendees set to be the biggest women's rugby crowd in history.

Who could win? Hosts England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 are ranked #1 and Canada 🇨🇦 is right behind them in the #2 spot. But New Zealand 🇳🇿 are the defending champs and have won the title a record six times.

Rugby World Cup v. Rugby in the Olympics: In the Games, athletes play rugby sevens — seven players, and seven-minutes halves — which makes for a fast-paced game and a tournament that's over in three days. In the World Cup, they play rugby union (also called: fifteens) — 15 players, 80-minute games, and a tough-on-the-body tournament that takes six weeks.

Will Ilona Maher be playing? Yes! And she's already bringing us some of her classic Tiktoks from the ground in England.

📺 WATCH: Pool games start with the U.S. v. England this Friday @ 2:30 p.m. ET on CBS Sports & Paramount+. Check out the full schedule 

🚨 FUN FACT: Players will also wear mouth gaurds that flash a red LED light when a head impact warrants a concussion evaluation, alerting the refs so they can call a timeout

Tip of the week

Are you overtraining? Or underfueling? Or both?

Actual severe overtraining — defined by a cluster of symptoms, like impaired performance and recovery, increased risk for injury and illness, disrupted sleep, higher resting heart rate/lower heart rate variability — is rare and is different from simple overreach or acute fatigue, which you can bounce back from after rest and recovery. But under-recovery and under-fueling are much more common and have a whole lot of overlap — because both are conditions in which you're simply not meeting your body's physiological needs.

When you don’t eat enough as an active woman, you can slip into a state known as low energy availability (LEA), which sets the stage for Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs) — a condition that, according to research, can result in irreversible health and performance impairments including decreases in metabolism, poor hormone function, bone loss, lower immunity, impaired protein synthesis, fatigue, depression, anxiety, impaired digestion, and increased risk for cardiovascular disease.

How do you prevent this from happening? A few tips.

MORE: IOC's consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports

The highlight reel

• 🏈 The World Games wrapped this past weekend (the Olympics for sports not contested in the Olympics) with defending champs Mexico 🇲🇽 beating the U.S. 🇺🇸 for the women's flag football title. With flag football set to make its Olympic debut in LA2028, the sport now has 20 million people playing in 100 countries and countless girls' high school teams across the U.S. One of those players is Izzy Geraci: She might just be the world's best receiver, man or woman.
  
  

• The World Games also crowed a duathlon champion 🚲 🏃‍♀️, Anahi Alvarez (also from Mexico), and debuted a wild four-person speed climbing event. 🧗‍♀️
  
  

• ⚾ Monica Arcuri became just the 11th girl to ever record a hit in the Little League World Series, taking place right now — though there have been 24 girls over the years who have competed on teams in the event.
  
  

• 🛹 Brooke Johnson is the first woman to skateboard all the way across the U.S., from California to Virginia Beach. She did it in 119 days, in honor of her stepdad and to raise money for spinal cord injuries. 
  
  

• Tara Dower, who last year set the fastest ever time (man or woman) for completing the Appalachian Trail, did it again 🥾: Breaking the record for the Fastest Known Time (FKT) overall, man or woman, on the Vermont Long Trail. 🎧 You can listen to her on Feisty's Ironwomen podcast last year.
  
  

• The U.S. Open has started with Fan Week in New York. Aryna Sabalenka will attempt to defend her title — and Venus Williams has received a wildcard at the age of 45. 🎾
  
  

• 3x XTERRA world champ Solenne Billouin won the European XTERRA championships with a last-minute entry. She talked about her move over to road triathlon on the Feisty Triathlon podcast last week.
  
  

• 🏃‍♀️ Faith Kipyegon missed breaking the 32-year-old world record in the 3,000m by less than a second. And in her first race since winning the gold in the 800m in Paris, Keely Hodgkinson ran the fastest time in the world this year.
  
  

• 🚵‍♀️ Red Bull Rampage announced the lineup of women taking on this year's iconic freeride event. (Last year was the first time ever women were allowed into Rampage. And they killed it.) 💥
  
  

• 🚲 A dispute over GPS trackers had the UCI disqualifying five teams from the Tour de Romandie.
  
  

• A Spanish mountain biker was given a one-year ban for sexual harassment of another rider — who has spoken out about the assault.
  
  

• The Women's Football Alliance 🏈 championship game got a record 200,000 viewers on ESPN2.
  
  

• Netflix has now also secured the Canadian rights for the next two women's World Cups. ⚽
  
  

• 🏆 In a first, the L.A. Olympics will also sell the naming rights to a number of venues. Despite calls for California (and the U.S.) to step down from hosting the 2028 Olympics, it's likely too late for a change.
  
  

• The U.S. will no longer issue visas to trans women coming to the country for sports events.
  
  

• As countries began instituting the World Athletics-mandated sex testing for its female athletes ahead of the world championships next month, implementation has been anything but smooth — in Canada athletes gave saliva samples when blood samples were needed; and in France this kind of testing is banned in the country, meaning French athletes will have to get tests done outside of France. More on the return of sex testing on The Feist podcast 🎧
  
  

Your Feisty recommendations

📺 What to watch: Adaptive — on the stories of last summer's Paralympians

🎧 What to listen to: The new Earthmovers trail running podcast has launched

📚 What to read: This multi-part series on the rise of stalking in sports

💜 What we love to see: Pioneer Alysia Montano winning the Wilma Rudolph Courage Award

The Feist is written by Kelly O'Mara. Ads by Ella Hnatyshyn

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