Lauren Kalil’s series with the 2025 Tactical Games National Champions continues with possibly the most decorated athlete in the sport’s history—a woman with so many trophies behind her that the interview started with a tour of the wall.
Andrea Hilderbrand won the first-ever Women’s 50+ division at Tactical Games Nationals this year. But that’s just the latest line on a resume that includes world championships in obstacle course racing, ultra mountain biking victories, 21,000-foot mountain summits, work designing military jet engines, NASCAR television production, and visits to more than 60 countries.
She rode 40 miles on a beach cruiser with a banana seat and a flag at age 12—a St. Jude’s bikeathon that ended with her throwing up her breakfast. Something about that experience connected her to endurance sports in a way that never let go.
Lauren’s conversation covered Andrea’s philosophy of staying open to opportunities (she calls it the “sliding door effect”), the evolution of women’s divisions in Tactical Games from a single category of four competitors to the multiple age groups we have today, the unique sisterhood of Cougarville, and why the StrengthErg stage made her want to buy the machine for daily use.
Also discussed: the importance of handlers at competitions, why she forces her boyfriend to wear costumes at running gun events, and the potential for a Golden Girls-themed walker division when Cougarville eventually ages up.
Before anything else, Lauren needed to address the elephant in the room: all those trophies behind Andrea on camera.
Mountain biking. BMX. Downhill. Cross-country. Ultra mountain biking—100-mile races in a single day, or four and five 100-mile races across a week of stage racing. Trail running. Ultras. The wall tells the story of someone who’s been chasing finish lines for decades.
Most people have a few participation medals in a drawer somewhere. Andrea has a she-shed museum.
The athletic origin story starts simple: a 12-year-old girl in a small North Carolina town who loved bikes.
There was a St. Jude’s bikeathon in her hometown. She wanted to do it. She had a beach cruiser—the kind with the flag sticking up and the banana seat. She rode 40 miles on it and threw up her breakfast somewhere along the way.
Something clicked. She didn’t really find bikes again until after college, when a coworker at Pratt Whitney invited her to join his adventure racing team. Co-ed teams needed women who could run, and Andrea had been a college cross-country runner.
That first adventure race was 30 miles in Florida heat and sugar sand. She rode a Huffy from Walmart. The cranks literally fell off by the end. She was hooked.
When her job moved her to Connecticut, she walked into a local bike shop, bought her first real race mountain bike, saw a flyer for a race series on the desk, put clipless pedals on the bike, and showed up the next week having never ridden trails or clipless before.
Third place.
That was the start of everything.
Andrea’s career path defies simple explanation.
She started as a senior engineer for Pratt Whitney, working on military operational engines in Florida before moving to commercial aviation engines in Connecticut. Six-figure job, stable career, clear trajectory.
Then she got opportunities in front of cameras. Met people behind cameras. Started doing freelance production work. When she moved back to North Carolina in 2004, she fell into NASCAR—working for ESPN, Fox, TNT, and Speed for 10-12 years doing predominantly racing coverage.
She calls it the “sliding door effect.” Most people try to hammer themselves into one thing and don’t allow themselves to look at something else. They don’t think opportunities can come to them, or they don’t realize they can create opportunities for themselves.
Andrea stays open. She lets things unfold. The scariest thing she ever did was leaving that six-figure engineering job to work for herself in television—work that might or might not pan out.
It all worked out. She got to hang out with David Carradine in China. She created DVDs with her childhood idols from Dukes of Hazzard. Opportunities kept appearing because she kept saying yes.
When Lauren asked about her favorite place among the 60-70 countries she’s visited, Andrea didn’t hesitate: Toclaraju in the Cordillera Blanca region of Peru.
It’s a 21,000-foot mountain. Ten straight hours to summit. Three people made it to the top out of their group, with complications along the way.
That climb was a physically and mentally transformative moment. The kind of battle where you push through something so hard it changes how you see yourself afterward.
Here’s the interesting insight she shared about high-altitude climbing: being a highly trained aerobic athlete can actually hurt you. If you’re used to pushing hard and going anaerobic, you’ll try to do that on the mountain—but there’s no oxygen to support it. Your body needs oxygen it can’t get, and the altitude symptoms get worse.
Her approach: slow and steady. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Stay aerobic. Don’t try to run up the mountain. The physical capability matters less than the mental discipline to not push too hard.
The climb up is exhausting. The climb down is more dangerous. People get summit fever, make bad decisions, don’t recognize their decreasing strength level, and then struggle on the descent when they’re already depleted.
Andrea did her first running gun event in 2018 at Clinton House in South Carolina. Running gun is like a summer biathlon—a 5K or 10K where you run to shooting stages, they tell you what to shoot, you shoot it, and you run to the next one. The stages are blind. It’s one day and done.
She’d just started shooting “this kind of stuff” and was really into running at the time. The combination scratched both itches.
Then she heard about this mythical event in Alabama where some CrossFit guy had created CrossFit-style workouts with shooting. She was deep into CrossFit at the time. She started searching the internet.
Somehow she found Tactical Games. There was an event in North Carolina, two hours from her house. The timing didn’t work for that specific one—she’d borrowed gear for running gun and didn’t have her own setup—but she contacted the organizers (probably Tim at the time) and asked if there would be more events.
They said they’d put out a full schedule for 2019.
She stalked them weekly for three to four months until that schedule dropped. The only event she and her boyfriend could do together was GTI—held in a decommissioned nuclear facility. Her boyfriend is a senior reactor operator at a nuclear plant. Walking Dead vibes. Perfect first event.
Between signing up for GTI and actually competing, Andrea qualified for Granite Games (her second qualification in CrossFit’s regional competition structure). During her first event there, she had a full-thickness rotator cuff tear, ruptured her bicep, and broke her foot.
She had Tactical Games coming up in two months. She also had a trip to Norway sandwiched in between.
She wasn’t missing either.
Norway happened. Then she showed up to GTI with a busted shoulder and broken foot because she’d waited a year for this and wasn’t going to skip it.
The surgery came after. During the procedure, the doctor nicked her axillary nerve, shutting down her entire deltoid. At four months post-surgery, she could only lift her arm to about shoulder height using her trap. Physical therapy had to teach her how to lift her arm again from the back forward.
Six months later, she signed up for the next event she could do with a goal of podiuming. She got third in Elite.
That’s who Andrea Hilderbrand is. Catastrophic injury, nerve damage, uncertain whether she’d ever have full arm function again—and she’s planning her podium finish before she can even lift her arm.
Andrea has watched Tactical Games women’s categories grow from nothing to what they are today.
At her first running gun events, there wasn’t even a women’s category. Everyone was lumped into men’s. Unless you were at a major, maybe you’d see a “top lady” acknowledgment. That was it.
The first Tactical Games nationals in 2020 had one women’s category. Andrea was there—got a piece of paper certificate saying she’d qualified. About 26 or 27 women competed. She did an informal poll and realized half of them were masters-age athletes.
The men already had a 45+ category. She suggested adding women’s masters for the following year.
2021: still just one women’s category.
2022: Mid-year, they announced women’s masters (40+) for nationals. If you’d done tactical or elite and were over 40, you’d qualify. That first year, it was one of the largest women’s categories.
The pattern held at regionals too. Women’s masters consistently had strong registration numbers. Build it and they will come—plus everyone ages eventually.
Andrea was already 50 when women’s 40+ started. She joked with the other ladies that they needed a 50+ category so she could compete against people her own age.
This year, it happened. The first Women’s 50+ division at nationals. Andrea won it.
If you’ve been to a Tactical Games regional or nationals, you’ve probably seen the sign: Cougarville.
Andrea thinks Becky Wagner might have started it, though she’s not certain. It emerged a couple years ago when she didn’t attend nationals—suddenly there was this sign, people drinking from shoes, a whole movement happening.
Cougarville is the women’s masters encampment. It’s where Tara, Carla, Becky, Michelle, Marcy, and the rest of the 40+ and 50+ women set up. There’s a literal sign with a logo. It’s an establishment.
The vibe is unique: actual competitors wanting competition against themselves while being genuinely supportive of that competition. They push each other to win while celebrating each other’s success. It should be this way everywhere, but it’s not common.
Example: Tara texted Andrea to convince her to come to nationals this year. Andrea was on the fence, letting life get in the way. Tara reached out, then Carla. “Come and play with us.”
Without that outreach, Andrea might not have competed. Without Andrea competing, Tara might have won. Instead, Tara recruited her own competition because the community matters more than individual victory.
Andrea joked that now that they have 50+, they might need to call it “Golden Village”—a little subset of Cougarville named after the Golden Girls.
By the time she’s 60, there might be a walker division. She’s already planning: use the walker as an implement, mount your rifle to it, white wigs, tactical mumus, drop holsters. The content writes itself.
Andrea’s favorite moment from nationals? The StrengthErg stage.
She’d never used one before. She wants to buy one now for daily use.
That machine tapped into the pain cave she used to access as an endurance athlete. Sixty seconds of absolute suffering that she’d somehow missed in a “really sadistic way.”
She and Tara were on adjacent machines, constantly looking at each other’s screens, trying to get a few more meters. Pure competition. Then immediately after, they’re hugging and tapping each other, saying nice job. Competing and supporting simultaneously.
Andrea knew she’d lose the press portion—her shoulders aren’t what they used to be after the nerve damage. So she had to bring it home on the row and legs.
The StrengthErg stage is the shortest of the weekend but takes souls. People cry. Sixty seconds of wondering what just happened to you.
What changed between 2022 (second place in 40+) and 2025 (first place in 50+)?
Slowing down.
As an athlete, you get into time-panic mode. Rush too much, miss shots, fumble things. The time element becomes an enemy instead of something you’re managing.
Andrea’s mantra: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Stay steady. Pick a rhythm. Make your shots.
She’d gotten sloppy with pistol previously. This year she dialed that in and made sure it didn’t happen. That discipline is what saved her.
The contrast with 2023 nationals is instructive. That year, she signed up the week before—contacted Nick, saw spaces were open, jumped in. It was FOMO. She wanted to shoot out of the helicopter they had that year.
She wasn’t mentally engaged. She was there out of obligation after winning in 2022. First couple days went fine, then Sunday she melted. Phoned it in just to finish the weekend.
This year, she told herself she wouldn’t do that. Set a goal. Stay steady. Do the job. Get it done.
She did. First time in a while that she’d set her mind on something and actually accomplished it. After a couple years of floating through life with a lot going on (including her father passing suddenly last year), seeing a goal through to completion was a boost she needed.
Andrea’s survival strategy for nationals: know who’s in your squad, keep eyes on them, never be late.
Better yet: have a handler. Someone to keep you straight through the chaos of where to go next, when to eat, what’s your loadout, where’s the stage.
Her handler rotation this year: Carla, Tara, Becky, Michelle, Marcy. Tent-hopping through Cougarville with a small group keeping each other in line.
The deer-in-headlights feeling at these events is real. Having people who’ve got your back makes the difference.
Andrea’s story reinforces several principles:
Stay open to opportunities. The sliding door effect works both ways—opportunities can come to you and you can create them. But you have to be willing to step through doors that aren’t on your original plan.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Whether climbing a 21,000-foot mountain or running through a two-gun stage, rushing creates mistakes. Pick a rhythm and stick to it.
Injuries don’t have to end seasons. Torn rotator cuff, ruptured bicep, broken foot, nerve damage—Andrea competed through all of it. Not recommended, but proof that showing up matters.
Community creates accountability. Tara recruiting Andrea to compete even though it meant facing tougher competition shows what healthy sports culture looks like.
Mental engagement matters more than physical capability. Andrea is clearly fit enough to compete at the highest level. Her bad nationals in 2023 wasn’t physical—it was not being mentally locked in.
Keep trying new things. ADHD, as Andrea puts it, medicated through keeping active. Different sports, different challenges, different countries. The variety itself is the point.
Build the divisions and they will come. Women’s categories in Tactical Games grew because organizers created them and athletes showed up. That model works.
Andrea Hilderbrand might be the most decorated athlete in Tactical Games history. The trophy wall suggests she’s certainly in the conversation. But more than the hardware, she represents what’s possible when you keep saying yes to opportunities and showing up even when circumstances make it hard.
Cougarville has a new queen. And she’s already planning the walker division.
Watch the full interview on Lauren Kalil’s YouTube channel, Queen of Hustle. This is part of her series catching up with all the 2025 Tactical Games National Champions. You can follow Lauren on Instagram or visit her website at laurenkalil.com.
