At mile one, Katherine Coble understood that the evening had been falsely advertised by her own optimism. The Utah trail started just below 11,000 feet, reached by chairlift, and promptly tilted uphill. Her lungs had trained in the Midwest, a region not celebrated for its alpine preparation. She ran the first hundred yards. Then the race became a walk, the walk became a gasp, and the sunset took its time being beautiful.
Coble had chosen a 7:30 p.m. start so she could catch the Perseid meteor shower. Darkness arrived. The meteors did not cooperate. The trail grew rougher, runners spread out, and the occasional headlamp ahead would vanish around a stand of trees. She wondered if she was still going the right way. She wondered why an idea that had behaved so well four months earlier had become so badly mannered in person.
She took out her trekking poles, accepted that the half marathon would be a 13.1-mile hike, and continued. One thought kept returning: “You can do this, even if it takes all night.”
The useful unit of progress was no longer speed. It was the next piece of visible trail.A night race becomes an operating manual
Four years later, Coble became CEO and partner of Borshoff, the Indianapolis advertising and public relations agency she first joined in 2002. The mountain story fits almost too neatly, but Coble got there first: she published her own leadership lessons from the trail. Run your race. Notice small moments. Ask for help. Keep a clear goal while adapting the plan. Familiar lines, perhaps, until a person is alone at altitude, moving by headlamp, and required to mean them.
A career delivered by post
The beginning in Indianapolis involved another kind of route-finding. Coble had worked in communications roles connected to Greyhound and SBC Communications, then at a global agency in St. Louis. In 2002 she moved to Indianapolis for love. The man she was dating lived there and had children, so she packed up and arrived without a job.
Her search technology was a book. She opened the Indianapolis Business Journal’s Book of Lists, found the five leading public relations agencies, and sent each a resume. Three invited her to interview. At Borshoff, she met Karen Alter and Jennifer Dzwonar and saw colleagues she could enjoy as people, not merely tolerate as calendar invitations.
Coble was drawn to large corporate clients. The scale suited her: complicated institutions, competing audiences, and messages that must travel through more than one layer of management without losing their nouns. She described herself as someone who could “wear my clients’ emotions on my sleeve.” That level of identification can exhaust a consultant. It can also make her notice when the approved message and the lived experience have stopped speaking.
In 2008, curiosity pulled her to the client side. She took a communications role at a large Indianapolis insurer. The move did something valuable: it showed her what she had left. A former client heard about the buyer’s remorse and played matchmaker. Borshoff called. Coble returned in less than two years, saying her heart was still there. This time she had a further ambition. She wanted to become an owner.
The return was the decision
Careers are usually edited into forward motion. The return to Borshoff is more revealing because it contains a correction. Coble tested another context, learned from the discomfort, and came back with a more exact commitment. By 2015, she had become a principal with an ownership stake. Her brief included account services and talent development, a pairing that hints at her operating philosophy: client work and people work belong in the same sentence.
That philosophy also traveled outside the agency. From 2012 through 2021, she served on the board of Beyond Monumental, the nonprofit behind major Indianapolis running events and youth programs, eventually becoming board president. A recommendation from the organization’s former executive director credits her with media training, strategic planning, governance guidance, a rebrand, an event merger, and an expansion of community work. Running supplied the metaphor; board service supplied the minutes, budgets, coalitions, and consequences.
The civic thread mattered from Coble’s first Borshoff interviews. In St. Louis, intense work and travel had left her knowing little beyond where she lived and bought groceries. She was struck by an Indianapolis agency that expected employees to serve on boards, volunteer, and take pro bono work seriously. The difference was geographical and moral. A city stopped being the scenery behind a career and became part of the work.
A city stopped being the scenery behind a career and became part of the work.The Indianapolis bargain
Send is not the same as received
Coble began professionally as a journalist and later earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Texas and an MBA from Amberton University. Those disciplines meet in her current preoccupation: leaders routinely believe they have communicated while employees are still guessing.
She kept studying after the diplomas. Coble earned the Public Relations Society of America’s APR credential, became a certified John Maxwell speaker, trainer and coach in 2019, and joined the ICology community for internal communicators in 2021. The collection is less a trophy shelf than a record of recurring interests. Journalism asks what is true and who needs to know. Business asks what an organization can sustain. Coaching asks what another person can become. Internal communication asks whether the people doing the work understand the choice. Coble’s career has gradually folded those questions into one job.
Her podcast, In the Loop, treats communication as a leadership practice rather than an announcement service. The show began as a special series within Gut + Science in 2024 and became a standalone monthly podcast in 2026. Its territory is stubbornly practical: listen first, choose plain language, reinforce the message, read the signals in digital behavior, and create enough continuity that people do not have to build a theory from silence.
The advice sounds simple because good operational advice often does. Its difficulty arrives in practice. Listening may produce an inconvenient answer. Plain language leaves fewer places for a weak decision to hide. Repetition tests the patience of executives who are bored with a message their employees have barely encountered. Coble’s reporter’s ear helps here. A message is not complete when it leaves the executive’s mouth. It becomes useful when another person can understand it, question it, and act.
Taking the baton without pretending she invented it
When Coble became CEO in 2026, she inherited a women-founded agency with more than four decades of history. Myra Borshoff created the firm in 1984, when women owned only a small fraction of American businesses. Later leaders broadened its public relations base into an integrated mix of advertising, brand strategy, digital work, employee communications, media, crisis counsel, and video.
Succession at a company like that rewards stewardship over theater. Coble has described the shift from account leader to owner to CEO as a widening responsibility for relationships. The company’s rituals are cheerfully particular. Employees call themselves Shoffers. A rooftop anniversary party is Shofftoberfest. Internal recognition arrives through the Shoffies. The names flirt with silliness, which may be the point. Culture becomes credible in repeated, ordinary behaviors long before it becomes a framed value statement.
Borshoff reported 100 percent employee retention in 2025 and received the Indiana Chamber’s 2026 Small Business of the Year recognition. Coble also notes how the work has grown more specialized. Clients arrive with firmer opinions and narrower needs; the agency responds with deeper expertise. Yet the strategic center remains broad and human: trust, clarity, and a story that can survive contact with real life.
That is where the runner returns. Coble began the sport in her forties and devised a methodical way to keep moving while seeing the country: one half marathon in every state. She has completed 44. She says she is there for travel and experience, not records. The distinction makes the project more interesting. A finish time expires quickly. A practice can reorganize a life.
On the Utah trail, Coble occasionally stopped looking at the rocks and raised her eyes. At Brian Head Peak she caught a sunset she would remember. Then she looked down again, found the path, and continued into the dark. Leadership rarely offers a cleaner rhythm: attend to the ground, remember the horizon, help people see both. Six states remain. The next mile will be sufficient.
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