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Colleen Quigley
June 09, 2025
Building Meridia, a new kind of professional track team
I’m super excited to announce a huge project I’ve been working on since last fall. It’s really something I’ve been dreaming about doing for 4 years. Last week we announced the launch of Meridia, a professional track team for athletes by athletes, rooted in empowerment, inclusivity, and performance. The founding group of athletes includes: Annie Rodenfels, Katie Camarena, Madie Boreman, Molly Sughroue, and Skylyn Webb. How this came together is a bit of a winding story that I’d love to share with you. It involves a lot of lessons from my own experience as a pro these last 10 years as well as feedback I got from dozens of athletes that I spoke to at the beginning of the process of forming what became Meridia. To skip to the end real quick, Meridia is a professional team of runners who come together in community with one another to support each other as well as tell our stories to a broader audience who we invite to go on this ride with us. We are not owned by or affiliated with a shoe/apparel company like most teams in our sport. Each athlete is free to do a shoe/apparel deal with whatever company she wants. We are also not all coached by the same coach. Right now 5 of the 6 athletes (myself included) are coached by Juli Benson. Katie Camarena is coached by Josh Seitz, one of her college coaches. I will get into why it makes the most sense for an athlete to be free to choose a brand and a coach, but know that this is what the athletes want and we know what is best for us. Without having someone at a brand tell us how our team works, we get to decide the rules for ourselves.
Some FAQs about Meridia
Q: Where did the name come from?
The naming process was actually way harder than I expected! I naively thought that while we talked to athletes, ideated on what the team would look like, nailed down our values, and talked about our team culture, the name would just sort of come to us… not the case. So we hired a creative company to help. They came up with a whole list of names… we hated each and every one of them. Womp. So I hired someone else who came recommended. He came up with a bunch more names. Some were okay, but nothing struck us as “that’s it!” So we went through at least 3 more rounds of ideas before the word “Meridia” came up.
Meridia is a made up word. It comes from the word “meridian” which has a definition of a “high point, peak, or apex”. It also can mean “a channel in the body through which energy flows”, which I really love too. We dropped the “n” off the end to form Meridia so that it sounds more feminine since we are a female-founded team. Meridia also sounds like it could be the plural form of meridian, signifying how an athlete has multiple high points throughout her career.
Q: Where is the team based?
Most of our athletes live and train in the Boulder/Denver area. However, we won’t limit ourselves to one location. Again, this team is built by athletes and we make the rules. If an athlete is a great fit for our team but needs to be based elsewhere, we can accommodate for that and expect the athlete to join us for high altitude training camps in Colorado when they can. I’ll still be based in LA, for example, but will spend a lot of time in Boulder going forward. We will also host a team retreat in the offseason to spend quality time together as a team.
Q: How will the team make money?
For my business-minded folks, Meridia has 3 ways we will make money to fund the team’s operating expenses and pay the athletes. 1. Events like our first virtual event, the Meridia Mile. For $20 you can sign up to join our community and run a virtual mile with us on Aug 9th. We have a ton of brand giveaways for those who enter, so make sure you sign up right away as the drawings will happen every week! 2. Sponsorships with non-endemic brands. There are so many brands who have never even gotten the chance to invest in a pro running team because of the way most teams are owned by shoe companies. If we do a good job of telling our athletes’ stories and building community around the team, we can market ourselves to brands in categories like travel, wellness, tech, finance, beauty… the options are endless! 3. Merchandise sales. I cannot wait to get our merch store live! We will be selling premium merch on our website later this summer. Drop us a note to let us know what kind of merch you would be most excited to see/use to rep Meridia!
This is just the beginning!
There’s a lot more to the WHY and HOW behind Meridia. For those who want to do a deep dive, I wrote a longer piece and put it on my website so that this newsletter doesn’t get tooooo long.
My goals and dreams for Meridia
My dream for Meridia long-term is to provide a holistic support system for athletes. Not just training partners and brand-building, but a whole ecosystem. Plenty of pro athletes don’t even know who to turn to with questions about starting an LLC or how to file their taxes. Mental healthcare is another one. Athletes are at the forefront of the mental health conversation to help normalize these topics, yet we largely still don’t have access to the resources we need to handle things like injury, the transition from college to pro, the depression that often follows an Olympic games, etc. There are so many ways we as a team can fill these gaps for athletes. And since Meridia is made by athletes, we know exactly where those gaps are and create the change we want to see.
We don’t know exactly where Meridia will take us. This has truly never been done quite this way before. The athletes are making the rules. The athletes have asked me: How do we decide on new team members if there is no coach making that decision? Can someone get kicked off the team? Does every athlete have to promote every brand Meridia partners with? What does the revenue share look like?
My answer to the athletes: What do you think? How do you want it to work? We make the rules, we get to decide how it “should” work, not executive working in an office building who we only speak to a few times a year.
I’m so excited to finally be able to share this team with the world and invite people to join us in the movement. We hope you want to be on our team and be along for the ride. If you do, we’d love to have you.
We are Meridia.
We were never meant to wait for a lane.
We make our own.
The Meridia Mile
If you’re now asking yourself “how can I support this initiative?”… Run with us! The Meridia Mile is a virtual mile event and it is our way to invite you to join us and run a mile from wherever you are in the world on Aug, 9th. Once you sign up, you will be entered in all the weekly brand giveaways hosted between now and Aug 9th. The giveaway winners will be picked randomly from the entries and announced over IG live every Sunday (you’ll also be notified over email if you miss the live).
Once you sign up, you will also receive regular emails from the athletes of Meridia guiding you through your training for the Meridia Mile. We will give you sample workouts you could try as well as recovery tips and tricks so that you can crush it on race day.
Entry is $20, and you can add on a shirt as well as 1:1 coaching with my coach, Juli Benson, or another member of the Meridia team if you want extra support! We are here for you!
