Running the Cocodona 250 and hiking the Trans Bhutan Trail: This Penn Vet clinician thinks big
Rose Nolen-Walston, a Penn Vet associate professor of large animal internal medicine, has a history of doing hard things. ‘I didn’t take the conventional path to vet school. I didn’t take the conventional path to running the Cocodona 250.’
2 min. read
The Cocodona 250 has been called The Race that Breaks You. An ultramarathon of 250 grueling miles that begins in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, it dares some of the best runners in the world to endure nearly 39,000 feet of elevation gain through unforgiving terrain, desert heat, and freezing mountain heights.
Penn Vet’s Rose Nolen-Walston makes her way through the Cocodona 250 in May 2026.
(Image: Courtesy of Rose Nolen-Walston)
“I wasn’t nervous. I was super excited!” says Nolen-Walston, a Penn Vet associate professor of large animal internal medicine. “You start at 5 a.m., and it’s the most exciting, wonderful feeling. It’s absolutely jet black. Here we go!”
And in 121 hours this past May, the veterinarian was one of those determined runners who did finish this year’s Cocodona. Back home, her family in England, her wife of 32 years Alice, daughter Ali, and her many Penn Vet students here were cheering her on. They knew better than to worry. It was the kind of experience Nolen-Walston has embraced much of her life.
“I think people don’t think big enough,” she says. “Think big, man! Think big and do hard things.”
Nolen-Walston would probably be one of the first people to say there’s no one path to living a big life. She’s never taken the predictable road in hers. She didn’t plan to become a veterinarian, either, or, for that matter, a teacher. “I wanted to be an Olympic dressage rider,” she says. There was a problem: “I was hampered by a complete lack of talent.”
That didn’t stop her. At 15, she dropped out of high school to chase her dream. She worked in exchange for lessons on farms in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, her Olympic aspirations no closer to reach. But at one point in her journey, she found herself doing equine therapy for residents of a home for severely emotionally disabled children in Georgia. A lot about it just clicked.
Her boss, who had been a childhood friend of her mother, told her she should be a horse veterinarian. “I only did a year and a half of undergraduate, but I got all of my requirements for UGA vet school,” Nolen-Walston says. “So, I haven’t graduated undergrad, either. The only thing I’ve ever graduated from my entire life is vet school. No high school diploma, no undergrad. Just vet school.”
The path less taken has worked quite well for Nolen-Walston. Having joined Penn Vet’s faculty in 2006, she is a beloved educator. In 2014, she won a University of Pennsylvania Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2017, she received the Zoetis Distinguished Teacher Award.
This story is by Rita Giordano. Read more at Penn Vet News.
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