After Breast Cancer Spread to Her Bones, Ali Feller Is Doing ‘Anything I Can to Be Here for My Daughter’

Alison “Ali” Feller was ready to put her breast cancer worries behind her. Which is why, following a diagnosis of stage 1 cancer in 2023 and 14 months of chemo and immunotherapy treatments, she’d decided to celebrate her 40th birthday this past May with a jubilant party at her New Hampshire home.

“I was like, ‘Life is good,’ ” recalls Feller, creator and host of the popular running blog and podcast Ali on the Run, which has been downloaded 23 million times. Along with friends and family, she’d also invited her breast surgeon and other medical staff who had been part of her treatment team.

At one point she remembers pulling her doctor aside to look at a small lump on her chest. “I thought I had pain in my sternum because I’d gone back to yoga for the first time in a few years,” she says. “Cancer never crossed my mind.”

The following Monday, Feller, who’s recently divorced and lives with her daughter Annie, 6, and their 10-year-old dog Ellie, got a call from her surgeon’s office asking her to come in for further tests. Six days later—after an ultrasound, a CT scan, PET scans, a brain MRI and a biopsy—Feller learned that her cancer was back.

“It was stage 4 metastatic breast cancer that had spread to my bones,” says Feller, who had previously tested positive for the BRCA2 gene. “Everyone was very shocked that it came back so quickly and aggressively.”

Since June she has been undergoing chemotherapy treatments every three weeks—and taking life one day at a time.

“My oncologist wants me to stay on this regimen for several years,” she says. “It’s infinitely harder than it was in 2023. But I need to do anything I can to be here for my daughter.”

Feller and her older brother Ryan grew up in Hopkinton, N.H., where her dad, David Feller, 67, is an operations efficiency specialist, and her mom, Lori, 67, is a paraprofessional. “I had a lovely childhood,” says Feller. She did have one major health challenge: a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel condition, at age 7. “It was hard when you’re running to the bathroom, and you’re in pain.” 

A competitive dancer in high school, she attended Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., and majored in journalism. She graduated in 2007 and moved to New York City for a job at Dance Spirit, a teen dance magazine, eventually working her way up to editor in chief. “It was a dream job,” says Feller, who was forced to resign in 2014 because her Crohn’s disease had become too severe for her to work full-time. She married the following year and had Annie in 2018.  

By that time she had also started freelancing and, at a friend’s suggestion, had taken up running in Central Park—chronicling her daily runs on her blog and launching her podcast in 2017. “I found this community of running bloggers,” says Feller, who now hosts the podcast full-time. “I’ve somehow made a whole career out of talking about a sport that I’m very average at.”

In April 2023, just days before running her seventh marathon, Feller was “in the best shape of my life” when she noticed a hard pea-size lump in her left breast. “I thought, ‘That feels weird,’ ” says Feller, who found a second lump—then a third, after a mammogram and ultrasound. She was diagnosed with stage 1 invasive ductal carcinoma and underwent a double mastectomy on July 3, followed by reconstructive surgery, four rounds of chemotherapy and a year of immunotherapy treatment through September 2024.

“We had every reason to believe that all the cancer was out,” says Feller. She discussed removing her reproductive organs with her surgeon (a common practice for those with the BRCA2 gene) but decided to wait, to give her a bit of time to “be me again and to have my body back to feel like I have some kind of control, to try to enjoy life.”

She stopped taking a preventative cancer medication in early 2025, because it it triggered severe flare-ups in her Crohn’s disease, but resumed taking it in May. And though she was going through a divorce at that time, she was also having tons of personal and professional success, selling out a live show at Carnegie Hall and traveling to Boston and London during marathon weekends.

“Holy cow. I got to do some big cool stuff,” she says. “And I was really proud and I was like, Okay, we’re coming back to life. I was starting to feel like maybe I’m ready to start dating or at least flirting with boys and having fun.”

That’s why she wanted to have the big 40th birthday party: “My house was filled with love, and I was like, look at all these people who I have. I had lost so much over the past two years, lost all trust in my body, had a cancer diagnosis, lost my marriage, lost the family unit. That was all I ever wanted. But then I was like, okay, I have so much look at all of these people who are here with me. So I was just like, life is good. It was the first time I felt truly happy.”

Unfortunately, she says, “I got the stage 4 diagnosis a week later.”

Since then she’s been adjusting to her chemo treatments (“I’m usually out of commission for a week or so”) and prioritizing time with Annie. “She’s been through a lot the past two years,” says Feller, who schedules her chemo sessions on Tuesdays, when Annie is with her dad. “I have not used the word ‘cancer’ with her.” 

They recently took a trip to Ocean City, N.J., with Feller’s family, where Annie went on rides and explored the boardwalk with her cousins.

“I was so sick,” recalls Feller, who’d suffered a severe reaction to one of her nausea medications. “It was one of the worst weeks of my life. But Annie had an awesome time. I did everything I could with her. She didn’t know I was crying in the bathroom every night because I thought I was failing her. She’s still so little—and I don’t know if I’m doing it right—but I don’t want to put worry in her life. So for now, for her, it’s business as usual.”

And for Feller herself, she tries to focus on “better and brighter days ahead,” as well as the joy in her life currently. “It’s hard not to let it be all consuming,” she says, but “other than the cancer piece, I have a really great life, and I think it’s important not to forget about that. I have to stay grounded in what’s actually happening while not losing sight of the things that are in my life that are really wonderful.