YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING … YET

Editor's note: Montana Farrah-Seaton has crossed the Sahara Desert for MDS Legendary, run more than  500 kilometres in six days for lululemon’s ambitious FURTHER project, and raced from LA to Las Vegas for The Speed Project. Later this year, she'll celebrate her 30th birthday by running the Kosci Miler. We sat down with the lululemon ambassador to talk about her wildest races, what she’s learnt from them and what’s driving a stacked 2026 season, as she fronts the campaign for lululemon’s new 2026 running collection.

In late 2022, Montana Farrah-Seaton decided she was going to run from Melbourne to her hometown of Albury, roughly 330km away, for Christmas. A friend was going through treatment for breast cancer and Montana wanted to raise money for her. Farrah-Seaton came up with the idea only about two weeks before she started. It would be her first ultramarathon.

“I came to it as a way of helping someone, by doing something that I’d always wanted to try and do,” she says. In the three and a half years since that Christmas run, she’s crossed the Sahara Desert in one of the world’s toughest ultras, run over 500km on a 4km loop across six days in a Californian desert, raced with HYROX’s elite from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and fought her way to become the last woman standing in a backyard ultra in Queensland. She’s 29 years old.

But ask Montana what she’s most excited about and it’s not what she’s done – it’s what she hasn’t done yet. That word matters. “Yet” is the concept behind lululemon’s 2026 running collection campaign, and Montana, the brand’s ambassador for Australia and New Zealand, is its face. Her personal take on the theme: “I’m yet to achieve my full potential.”

The collection itself marks a bold new direction for the brand. Preppy-inspired design details mix with bold animal prints and are applied to performance fabrics in a range that moves easily from a track session to a coffee run. Montana, who comes from a modelling and fashion background, is a natural fit. “I always have this look good, feel good, do good kind of vibe,” she says. “You know how it is – you buy a new kit and you’re like, ‘Well, now I’m going to run faster.’ ”

But Montana’s glamour as a model is belied by her absolute grit as an athlete. Growing up on the NSW border, she played basketball semi-professionally. Running, for a basketball player, means brutal stop-start drills: "sweet 16s, beep tests and all the rest”, Montana explains. “I was good at it, but I never looked at it from a point of enjoyment.” 

Her relationship with the sport shifted when she found a coach and began to understand its structure: the difference between easy runs and hard sessions, the value of a plan. Her first half marathon was the Carman’s Fun Run in 2018, another event that raises money to fight breast cancer. A few marathons followed. Then came that Christmas dash to Albury and everything changed.

Of everything Montana has done, lululemon’s FURTHER event stands out as the most ambitious. Staged near Palm Springs, California, in March 2024, it was a bespoke six-day ultramarathon for 10 women from wildly different backgrounds. The preparation alone took nearly a year. Montana and the other athletes travelled for training camps at the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific in Vancouver, where they underwent VO2 testing, sweat testing, blood work and cognitive assessments. The product innovation team designed a 36-piece apparel collection and customised each piece to each athlete’s body using 3D scans and motion analysis.

Then came the event itself: six days of running 4km laps around a desert lake, from the elite end of the field to one participant, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu specialist who had never run further than 5 km before the project began. Camille Herron broke multiple world records in the same race, including setting a new women’s six-day distance record. Montana’s goal was 600 km, 100 km a day. She was broadly on track until the end of day four, but niggles that had surfaced from 40 km into day one took their toll. She finished with 508 km, still her longest run to date.

“It’s easy to get caught up in not remembering how big of a distance that is,” Montana says. She didn’t reach her statistical goal, but she’s clear-eyed about what she did achieve. “The growth that we had individually and as a collective – I couldn’t have ever said my goal is to come out of this a better person. But without even trying, that happened. I achieved more than I possibly could have thought, and that had nothing to do with the amount of kilometres that I ran.”

Several pieces of innovation developed for FURTHER have since come to market, including the Go Further bra, a sports bra featuring “Support Code technology” and designed by female athletes for female athletes. Montana was part of the product feedback process and later fronted the campaign that launched it. “We got to give our feedback on what we like in a sports bra,” she says. “A few of us put gels or our phones in our bra, so they created a little pocket in the front. They looked at where our hot spots are and created more ventilation. There are so many aspects to a sports bra that half the time you wouldn’t even think of.” Another item in the Go Further range to come from out of FURTHER is a tank top designed with three ice pack pouches on the front and back.

There’s a pattern that emerges when Montana talks about her races. The distances are extraordinary, but they’re not the main point. What she keeps coming back to is what she discovers about herself along the way.

“Ultra running builds a lot of resilience, mentally and physically,” she says. “Showing up for myself in those races has started to steamroll and disperse into other areas of my life: professionally, personal relationships, all of that. I’ve grown as an individual, and that’s probably the best part.”

During FURTHER, some of the women fell into a quiet ritual. In the early hours of the morning, when motivation was still building, they’d walk and jog a lap together with their coffees – what they called “yard laps” – and talk about how they wanted to leave the race, not just physically but as people. Those conversations, Montana says, were just as important as the gruelling miles that followed. 

That belief in the power of shared effort has carried over into Montana’s life off the race course. Last August, she and her partner Dean founded Hard Yards Run Club, a weekly track session in Melbourne built around progressive running and putting in the work together.

“One of the most rewarding parts about running is the community and people you meet along the way," Montana says. “I’ve always found that when we do hard things with like-minded people, it creates a deeper bond. My partner Dean and I found what was missing within the running community: a progressive track-based run club that looked at doing the work together.”

Hard Yards offers three tiers to cater for experienced runners and those who might feel nervous or unsure where to start. The response has been strong; some sessions attract over 100 runners, and a recent one hosted with lululemon drew more than 120 people.

If FURTHER represented the high-tech end of ultra running – bespoke apparel, private chefs, scientific monitoring – the Marathon des Sables offered its stark opposite. Montana ran MDS Legendary in Morocco in 2025 and calls it her favourite ultra to date: 250 km through the Sahara in six stages over seven days, entirely self-supported. Everything she needed from day one to day six – food, sleeping bag, the lot – had to be in her backpack at the start. That meant carrying roughly 10kg of extra weight on her body from the first step.

“You couldn’t be like, ‘Oh, I’m still hungry. I want to go get more food,’ ” Montana explains. “You were trying to pack light but pack enough.” (Race officials check that each athlete carries a prescribed number of calories per day as well as emergency equipment.) The conditions were more forgiving than expected – high 20s rather than brutal heat – but the sand was relentless, and windstorms rattled the camp at night. Montana learned to read the dunes, identifying where the firmer footing was to maintain something closer to a road-running stride.

A thousand runners from around the world shared the experience, including fellow lululemon ambassador Jeremiah Maestre. Montana found herself gravitating towards the same group each day, matched by fitness and pace. “You looked around at the end of every day and you were like, there are a thousand of us that have decided this is how we want to spend our week,” she says. “You're running through the Sahara Desert in these remote areas, and you see a little village and some people and then camels.  You take a step back and realise how vast the world is, and that you’re just a little blip on it.”

At the finish, she gave a few people a hug and then got straight to the point: “All right, let’s get out of this desert. I need a shower.” Three days later, she wanted to go back. “It’s this juxtaposition,” she says. “You’re out there so disconnected from the world, but at the same time you can’t wait to get back to civilisation. And then you’re like, ‘Can we go back to the desert again where everything’s simpler?’ ”

Montana’s race calendar reads like someone who can’t sit still. Last year alone, she ran three ultras in the space of nine weeks. Just a fortnight before MDS, she had jumped onboard for The Speed Project, the infamous unsanctioned relay from LA to Las Vegas. She had just two weeks’ notice when Jake Dearden, the HYROX doubles world champion with a huge social media following, told her he needed a teammate for his crew. The mostly UK-based team, named On a Mission, were sitting in the top three before hitting the powerline section, where two flat tyres on two separate support vehicles derailed their momentum. Still, they covered 540km in just under 39 hours to place 11th. “Like every team, we had a plan until we didn’t,” Montana wryly notes. 

Montana was barely back Down Under following her Moroccan expedition when she completed the Ultra-Trail Australia (UTA) 100. Most recently, she won the inaugural Gold Coast Backyard Ultra in March, running 6.71km loops known as “yards” every hour on the hour for 24 hours straight to finish as last woman standing. That’s 161km or 100 miles, in case you’re wondering. 

It’s against this backdrop that lululemon’s 2026 running collection makes sense. Montana isn’t a runner who treats kit as an afterthought. Her modelling career gave her an eye for how clothes work and feel, and she’s genuinely excited about the brand pushing into bolder territory.

“Everyone that’s seen the campaign has been like, ‘Oh, this is so different for lululemon – it’s very bold, very out there for them,’ ” she says. “I love that they’re stepping outside the comfort zone and redefining what lululemon looks like to the community.”

The new collection spans the Fast and Free and Swiftly Tech lines, with engineered fabrics designed for breathability and streamlined silhouettes built for performance, in a palette that runs from Oxford Red and Clubhouse Blue to softer tones like Foam Cloud and Walnut Crunch.

The associated campaign was shot in downtown Los Angeles with filmmaker Zack McTee riding alongside on a skateboard while Montana ran through busy streets in 30-degree heat. “It didn’t feel like work,” she says. “It just felt like an absolute pleasure and a privilege to be there.” From the collection, she singles out the leopard Swiftly Mid-Rise Shorts as a personal favourite – “not something that I ever would have thought I would run in, but I love them” – and the way the pieces transition easily from a session to a café. 

Looking ahead, Montana’s 2026 race calendar is already stacked. A second backyard ultra in Melbourne on 2 May is next, followed by Red Bull Race the Sun at the end of the month and then the Gold Coast Marathon in early July. But the year’s centrepiece is UTMB CCC. The starter’s gun on 28 August precedes 100 km through the Alps from Courmayeur to Chamonix.

“I really wanted to have an intention behind my race and my training this year,” Montana says. “With other years, races have just come out of the blue. I think what’s allowed me to do that is my desire to always want to say yes and then figure it out later. But this year I wanted to see what I’m truly capable of on a world stage.”

She manages the mental load by treating the smaller events as stepping stones. “If I was to look at August and be like, I’m starting training for that now, it would be too much,” she explains. “Having these smaller races kind of feels like, ‘Oh, I’m just training for this one.’ And then all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve done all of this running and now my big race is in four weeks.’ ”

And beyond CCC? Montana plans to celebrate turning 30 by running the UTMB Kosci Miler later in the year – her first 100-miler.

It started with a Christmas run home to Albury for a friend. Three and a half years later, Montana Farrah-Seaton is planning a 100km race through the Alps, a 100-mile race through the Aussie mountains for her 30th birthday, and a year built around finding the things she’s most motivated to say yes to.

Most importantly, she reckons she hasn’t found her ceiling. Yet.

The lululemon 2026 running collection is available now in lululemon stores and online.