A couple of months ago, I launched an AHCJ series called “How I Pitched It” to provide freelancers with real-world examples of pitches that became published stories. So far, I’ve featured Asha Dore, who shared how a pitch about solving her daughter’s medical mystery became a Guardian story, and Nick Keppler, who talked about the pitch behind his Slate feature on self-aware narcissists.
This time, I’m sharing one of my pitches that became a digital and print story for Women’s Health magazine and earned an honorable mention in the “Wellness, Fitness & Sports” category of the 2025 American Society of Journalists and Authors Awards. While my path to an editor’s “yes” wasn’t swift or straightforward, I hope my experience will give you some fuel to believe in — and continue to develop — your ideas until they find the right home.
Here’s the pitch, along with my commentary on why I think it worked in the highlighted text.
Hey [editor],
Hope you had a great summer! ‘Twas a bit of a whirlwind for me, but trying to get back into some sort of routine now. Which brings me back to pitching!
Medaris: My tone is quite casual and breezy, in large part because I’ve worked with this specific editor several times before. While I don’t recommend acting so buddy-buddy with a new editor or one who keeps their own tone professional, I do encourage freelancers to let their personalities come through a bit in their outreach emails. Editors don’t just want a great idea and clean, engaging writing, they also want someone who’s pleasant to work with.
I’ve done some initial reporting here, and it seems like such a good fit for Women’s Health (and from what I can tell, you haven’t covered Ozempic in this way, but forgive me if I’ve missed something). Depending on your editorial calendar, I could also see it as aligning well with the NYC Marathon, November 3:
Medaris: I’ve done my research to ensure, to the best of my ability, the magazine hadn’t covered this topic before. And in the next sentence, I offer a timely hook.
Running on Empty
Ozempic has entered the (running) chat.
Medaris: I always suggest a headline and sub-hed and then launch into the pitch as if I already got the assignment. This strategy shows the editor how you write and not just what you want to write about. That’s important because, even if you share clips from reputable outlets, a new editor doesn’t know how much of a story’s final copy came from you versus another editor.
It’s simple runner math: Subtract ten pounds from your body weight, slash ten minutes off your marathon time. At least that was Edmond Jackson’s calculation when he sought a prescription for semaglutide, the generic name for weight-loss medications like Wegovy. While the drug is only approved for people with an obese body mass index or a weight-related health condition like high blood pressure, Jackson found it easy to get his hands on — despite being in shape and disease-free. “As advertised, my appetite vanished literally overnight and the weight started falling off,” Jackson wrote in a letter to the Fuel for the Sole podcast.
But the other side effects were less favorable. Jackson’s resting heart rate — an indicator of heart health and fitness — shot up 10 beats per minute. “That seriously messed with my sleep, recovery, and made my runs so much harder,” he said. He also had “no juice” fueling his workouts, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea. Ultimately, he DNFed his prescription.
“It took awhile, but my running recovered and the weight came back because nothing about how I lived actually changed,” Jackson said.
Medaris: I didn’t need to interview someone to be able to include an anecdote in the pitch for more color and good cadence. In this case, listening to a podcast did the trick.
Jackson, a committed recreational athlete with just a few pesky pounds to lose, may seem like an unusual character to spring for the buzzy $1,000-a-month injections. This is a guy who writes into podcasts about running performance, after all, not a diabetic mom inspired by Oprah or an A-list celebrity eyeing the red carpet.
But he’s not an anomaly. In one running Facebook group with nearly 7,000 members, an anonymous poster training for the Boston marathon polled the group: “I haven’t done a ton of research yet on runners and Ozempic but just curious if anyone has done this? I am not overweight, but have that 10ish lbs that I would love to fall off,” they wrote. Forty-six people weighed in. While most discouraged the drug, some said using it didn’t just make them lighter — it also made them faster.
Medaris: In these next few sentences and the following paragraph, I zoom out and basically try to prove to the editor that this issue is “a thing” people (including health care professionals) are talking about, wondering about, and affected by.
“It’s definitely something that sports dietitians are starting to see,” Kelly Jones, one such professional, told me. “You have people who either want to train because they’re trying to lose weight and then a doctor talks to them about these weight-loss drugs, or you have someone who’s been active their whole life and has just struggled with their weight and wants to incorporate them.”
Medaris: Pro tip: Save time by doing some pre-reporting for pitches while doing interviews for stories that you’re already writing. In this case, I was interviewing Jones for a different piece, and in the last five minutes of our call, said something like, “I have another story idea I’m working on, and I’d love to get a gut check from you on whether there’s really a story there.” She was happy to provide her off-the-cuff thoughts, and I didn’t need to do a full interview before landing the assignment (I did interview Jones again formally for the final piece).
This story will look at how drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are seeping into athletic circles and, in some cases, working. I talked to Kim Scharoff, 48, of Long Island, for instance, who’s run nearly 100 half-marathons in the past 12 years, but was always overweight. Once, she finished a race dead last. “I kind of have PTSD from that experience,” she said. After obtaining a Mounjaro prescription in 2023 (her PCOS qualified her for insurance coverage), the pounds came off and the personal records piled on. “I was in disbelief at my watch,” she said. “I have seen nothing but a positive effect on my running.”
Medaris: Of my four quoted sources in this pitch, Kim was the only one I fully interviewed. I found her by posting my request in a Facebook group for participants of a triathlon I was registered for.
At the same time, sports medicine and nutrition experts worry that the drugs’ impact on muscle mass will be a recipe for injury in athletes or create an epidemic of exercisers with relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S), which I’ve covered (and personally experienced) before.
“These are people who were probably already under-fueling, and now we’re giving them a drug that allows them to underfuel without ever feeling hungry,” sports dietitian Meghann Featherstone said on the Fuel for the Sole podcast. “It’s just petrifying me.”
I see this piece as not just describing the trend and detailing for whom the drugs work when it comes to athletic performance, but also containing a service element: What should you know about exercising on Ozempic?
Medaris: I’ve packed a lot into this pitch: The potential positives of these drugs in the running community (including for amateurs and elites), the risks, and what became a service sidebar. While this editor did go for all of it, another might have wanted me to just focus on elite runners or just look at Ozempic as a pipeline to athletics or just deliver the consumer advice angle. Any that landed an assignment I was proud of would be a win in my book.
Thanks for considering,
Anna
How I came up with this story idea
I was chatting with another writer before a book talk and panel at an AHCJ chapter event in New York when she mentioned training for an upcoming marathon. She said race organizers had warned participants that appetite-suppressing drugs like Ozempic could be dangerous in endurance events, which require proper fueling.
The remark captivated me: At the time, and perhaps still, most Americans probably assumed that marathon runners and people on weight-loss drugs were two different populations. But the email the woman received suggested there was significant overlap. That got me — a triathlete who’d already written three or four trend stories around Ozempic for Business Insider — thinking: What were the risks? Were there performance-enhancing benefits as well? How were these meds affecting body-image issues in the running community? I eventually pitched the story because I wanted to find out.
Why I landed on Women’s Health
First, I pitched an editor at the New York Times’ Well section who’d encouraged me to run even half-baked ideas by him. That original pitch was much shorter:
Can you run a marathon on Ozempic?
Despite popular perception, runners come in all shapes and sizes — including those who’d like to change their size. Enter Ozempic. Do bigger-bodied runners need to choose between the drug and their running goals? Can you properly fuel for marathon training with the severely suppressed appetite GLP-1 inhibitors induce? Are there any scenarios in which Ozempic can actually improve your running by lowering your weight?
I don’t know the answers (yet), but I do recall an acquaintance telling me about a note race directors sent participants ahead of the Boston Marathon warning them about the risks of Ozempic. And, I’m certain I can find the answers and am the person to do it: I’ve covered, um, sensitive running-related issues, and have produced a range of Ozempic features (here, here, and here). I’m also a triathlete in loads of online groups with fellow endurance racers and coaches.
Over the next several weeks, we workshopped the pitch into various iterations for the editor to present to his team. At one point, I focused mostly on whether elite athletes or biohackers were using Ozempic as a performance-enhancing drug to slash just seconds off their times. Another version of the pitch was more about everyday people becoming runners after losing weight through these medications. And another option was to write a straightforward service piece on how to run on Ozempic.
Ultimately, the Well team wasn’t convinced enough high-level athletes were actually using Ozempic to pursue the angle they were most interested in, so I took my pitch to Women’s Health. I’d had positive experiences writing features for the publication before, and knew they covered both running and Ozempic, but not at the same time. Plus, at least one of the editors was a marathoner, and it didn’t take them long to give me the green light.
The takeaway for freelancers
This topic illustrates something I’m often advising other writers to do: Find the intersection of your interests (running) and something timely or buzzy or both (Ozempic).
My winding road to publication — my first pitch to the Times was in July; the story was published online in Women’s Health in November and in print the following spring — is a lesson in persistence. To other freelancers, I’d say: If you really believe in a story idea, keep finessing the pitch and exploring various outlets until it finds a match.
While most of my pitches aren’t so long or deeply researched — that, of course, takes uncompensated time — I knew I had something worth publishing, and that work ended up paying off. When it came time to actually write the story, I was already halfway there.
