On September 21, 2024, Tara Dower set a new overall supported fastest known time (FKT) on the 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail, breaking not only the former women’s record but also the men’s. Her time of 40 days, 18 hours, and 6 minutes had her averaging just under 54 miles a day on the East Coast trail known for its mud, rocks, and roots.
No stranger to long trail FKTs, with several to her name, Dower is also an accomplished ultrarunner, having won the Run Rabbit Run 100 Mile in 2023 and placed fourth at Hardrock 100 earlier this summer. She’s one of the few ultrarunners who has successfully integrated long trail FKTs and shorter race efforts into a single summer.
In an in-depth phone interview six days after her finish, Dower talks extensively about how her effort unfolded, how valuable her crew was to her success, the women who’ve acted as her role models, and how she wants to inspire other women to set big goals. The transcript of this interview has been gently edited for readability.
Tara started this effort with the goal of raising $20,000 for the nonprofit Girls on the Run. As this article is published, she’s nearly doubled that. You can still donate to her fundraiser.
Learn more about Tara’s run in our news article about her FKT and check out our interview with Megan Wilmarth aka Rascal, Tara’s crew chief for this adventure.
Tara Dower smiling with a pacer while on the Appalachian Trail. All photos courtesy of Tara Dower unless noted otherwise.
iRunFar: Hi. Tara, how are you?
Dower: Good. I feel tired. I miss the trail. Especially with being back here in Virginia and definitely missing everything.
iRunFar: You became entirely normalized for trail life; your body and mind adapted to it.
Dower: And being around the crew the entire time, having somebody around the whole time. A lot of people in the thru-hiking community talk about a post-trail depression. I definitely feel that, “I wish I was back there.” Not doing as many miles, though. [laughs]
Tara Dower, after setting an overall supported fastest known time on the Appalachian Trail. Photo: Pete Schreiner/@schreinertrailphotography
iRunFar: That’s a great place to start this interview; you set the goal beforehand of setting an overall supported FKT. This required you to hike and run an average of about 54 miles every day, until it’s done. You had a great role model in Jennifer Pharr Davis being a women’s leader in the thru-hiking community and a prior overall supported Appalachian Trail FKT holder. I’d love to learn how you decided to go for the overall FKT.
Dower: I was empowered to set such a lofty goal because of the women role models I’ve had. I’ve been so lucky to have women who’ve come before me. I mean, even going back to Ann Trason, and even further. The ones that I take the most inspiration from have been Jen Pharr Davis, Courtney Dauwalter, and Heather Anderson. They trail blazed, and that’s given me — and I know a lot of other women — confidence to go for these tough goals and to even consider them possible.
I think wrapping my head around that, it’s just this blind confidence. I know, obviously, I have an understanding of the Appalachian Trail, and I have a lot of experience on the trail, as well as endurance races and endurance feats. But I think it takes a little more than that, especially with such a long record, anything could happen.
I wasn’t 100% confident. I’m not going out there, “I will set the record.” I know Karel Sabbe [the men’s supported Appalachian Trail FKT holder and prior holder of the overall supported FKT] went out there like, “I’m gonna set the record no matter what.” I did not have that confidence.
It was thanks to my crew that I made it through and made it in that time. I ran it, but I didn’t do a lot besides running. They did everything. They did all the logistics — my mom and Rascal [Megan Wilmarth, whose trail name is Rascal]. Rascal is the Manager of Chaos, as she likes to say. They were the ones with the master plan to get me to the end, and for a lot of it, I kind of lost autonomy. I didn’t make any choices for myself. I didn’t choose what I was going to eat or how many miles I was going to do. I would beg Rascal for one or two fewer miles in a day, and sometimes she would entertain that, but nothing was up to me. I did not make any decisions.
iRunFar: iRunFar readers are more familiar with the crewing aspect at an ultramarathon where it’s over in six hours, 12 hours, or 30 hours, as opposed to 40 days. Would you call it truly a multi-pronged effort where both prongs carry the same amount of weight to make a record happen? Crew in ultrarunning provides vital assistance but not as strongly as I think you’re inferring here.
Dower: I would call it a team effort all around. Without them, none of this would have been possible. I can see myself in a 100-mile race; if something happened to where the crew couldn’t meet me, I could probably survive off the aid station foods and maybe just grit it to the end. That wouldn’t be enjoyable. I need the crew, and I need the pacers during a 100-mile race, and I appreciate all their help because they help me get there way more efficiently. But, for this type of long, supported record, it is only possible to do it with a crew, especially the overall record.
I mean, I didn’t have complete confidence that I could do it. I just knew I should go out there and try my best. When it got tough and when we were behind, if it was up to me, I’d probably be like, “All right, we tried.” We were 100-something miles behind at one point, and Rascal did not bat an eye. She was like, “It’s okay. We’ll get back there. We’ll make a plan.”
And that’s exactly what she did. She put miles on my schedule that I was very intimidated by, and she told me, “I know you can do it, but I need you to know that you can do it,” and I didn’t believe it for the longest time. But day after day, I was doing 58s and 60s and 57s [miles per day], and I was like, “This is possible.”
Tara Dower is taken care of by her crew at a road crossing.
iRunFar: I love how you’re touching on both the physical assistance that a crew gives and that psychological assistance with your self-belief system.
Dower: Yeah. They conjured the right words to get me to the end. They kept me fed well, which helped my mood and also helped me physically. They just kept the mood light and easy, which made it simple to enjoy it more. It’s a team effort, 100%. I know that sounds silly when I say, “I just ran,” but they did everything else.
iRunFar: That’s amazing. To backtrack, the people who follow you on iRunFar know you most through your ultra exploits, but you have a lot of thru-hiking experience. Can you position this experience for iRunFar readers? I think it’s probably both ultra skills and your experience with long trails that came together.
Dower: Honestly, my entire trail career started with the Appalachian Trail. When I was a freshman in college, I watched a documentary called “The Appalachian Trail” by “National Geographic,” and I made a goal to thru-hike it after I graduated. I had run the mile and cross country in high school, and I was good, but I didn’t want to go off and do anything great with it. It was just an enjoyable experience. I love running long distances.
So in 2017, I started my thru-hike, and I made about 80 miles. I had an anxiety attack at Bly Gap and got off the trail. It was kind of a traumatic experience, having a panic attack in the woods by myself. I had a migraine, and I couldn’t get my breath under control. After two years of working on my anxiety and getting to a place where I felt healthy again, I went back out and thru-hiked the trail in five months and 10 days, and it was the best experience. I made so many friends. That’s where I met Rascal in Pennsylvania, and that started our entire friendship, and my friendship with so many other people.
I was entrenched in this community, too, and so that’s another aspect of this. I’ve met them during all my exploits on the Appalachian Trail. They all just came together for this record, so I’m thankful for them.
I wanted to do another thru-hike and thought about the Mountains to Sea Trail, which is 1,175 miles across North Carolina. Then COVID-19 happened in 2020, and I decided I wanted to do it in a less impactful way. I was working for Jen Pharr Davis as a backpacking guide and hostel caretaker, and she inspired me to go for the FKT.
So I did it with a little quarantine crew, and we just traveled down the trail. I set the FKT on that, and that began everything. I knew that Diane Van Deren was a 100-mile athlete and a The North Face athlete. She set the record before me, and I was like, “Okay, if she can do 100-mile races, maybe I could do 100-mile races.” And that’s where the ultramarathon obsession started.
iRunFar: We can blame/thank Diane Van Deren?
Dower: She started all of it. I just felt like maybe this could be my next challenge. A year later, I did my first 100 miler, and I went from there. I really loved the 100-mile distance and never looked back. I would say the Appalachian Trail started all of it.
Autumn starts to show its colors on the Appalachian Trail with 400 miles to go.
iRunFar: You successfully cross back and forth between running ultras and doing these longer FKT efforts. This is unlike a few ultrarunners who’ve come before you, where they take up long trail hiking after ultrarunning to try something different. You’re integrating them.
Dower: For sure. It’s a goal of mine to do a longer trail every year. I would say a 20o-plus-mile trail every year. It can be an FKT or a thru-hike. I want to see how many trails I can get.
iRunFar: I guess, that’s a check mark for this year. [laughs]
Dower: Yeah, I think we’re good for this year. [laughs]
iRunFar: I’m wondering if we can parse out your effort a little bit. I know 40 days is a long time to summarize in one interview, but the trail itself has segments. If you can break it into segments, how does your mind digest it all?
Dower: Yeah, I would say southern Maine and New Hampshire were the most challenging parts of the trail. It’s just really difficult. The entire Appalachian Trail, they don’t believe in switchbacks, but there, it’s even worse. It’s just relentless rocks. I struggled through there, fell behind on record pace, and was completely exhausted. I would say the best word to describe that section was just demoralized.
Also, the weather wasn’t good, making going faster on those trails even harder. Even just three miles per hour is difficult; two miles an hour was pretty much what I was sitting at. I would say the Northeast was really difficult.
Then you get into Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and it’s flowy. But then in Pennsylvania and New York, you get these rocky portions that break up the flow and make it hard to keep a solid pace. It might not be crazy mountains, but it’s rocky and hard to keep a solid pace. I was able to make up some time in this section.
We realized in that area that I would have to put down some big-mile days to catch up to Karel Sabbe’s record pace. And that’s the realization, and I wasn’t quite confident in my abilities then. So I would say I was just discovering, “What is possible? What can I do?”
Then you get into Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, which gets really flowy. And some sections are difficult, some pretty gnarly mountains like the Priest and Three Ridges, but it’s pretty flowy, and we can make up a lot of time in that area. Virginia is one of my favorite states, too.
Then we got into Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. And that’s where we were pushing pretty hard, and you could smell the barn. But, for me, I never allowed myself to even get to the point of thinking I would get the record or even come close to the record.
It wasn’t until three miles out that I said, “Oh, this is a possibility.” That’s why when I finished and saw the response, I wasn’t, like, preparing myself. When I saw a response. I was like, “Gosh, this is intense.” I didn’t even prepare myself for the record.
1,293.6 miles to go to the finish.
iRunFar: You talked about the Northeast having the mental challenges and then getting into the physical challenges of putting in a few extra miles daily to get back on record pace. And then, what is it in ultras, you smell the barn after mile 90 or mile 95 in a 100-mile race? But was it a week of starting to smell the barn if it’s a 40-day effort?
Dower: Yeah. I just knew the end was coming, no matter what. I knew it was going to end. I don’t think I knew, “I’m gonna be the fastest time,” because I could have gotten injured or sick. But I knew, “It’s coming to an end no matter what.”
iRunFar: Speaking of injuries, did you feel things coming on at any time?
Dower: I had a tight hamstring through Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah mountains. We had to stretch that out a bunch. I had some Achilles pain in southern New Hampshire and Vermont. It’s very common for people who are doing the Appalachian Trail FKT to get shin splints, and I think I convinced myself a couple of times I was getting shin splints, but it would go away.
Other than that, I just fell a lot, and it was really violent. I’m just clumsy. I had a lot of falls that were terrifying. I was always convinced on these falls, I would break my kneecap or dislocate my shoulder, and it would all be over. My job was so simple. All I had to do was run and eat. My crew is doing all of these other things, and I was worried that I would ruin my part in this by falling once. I just got cut up and bruised but never got seriously injured during a fall.
Falls were terrifying, but bloody knees were the worst that came of them.
iRunFar: To close out your FKT effort, you did a final nonstop push of around 100 miles? What was that like?
Dower: It was 129 miles and 43 hours.
iRunFar: Wow. That has become a pretty standard feature of these long trail speed efforts, is that people set out to run X miles per day, and then finish out with this big, final effort on the order of 100 miles. In your case, almost 130 miles. What’s it like to set out on something that’s on its own an ultra at the end of a month-long ultra?
Dower: Yeah, it’s funny. I thought about that one when I finished 30 miles in that push. I got to the 100 miles to the end, and I looked at my time, and I was like, “Okay, this is Hardrock. It’s a 100-mile race, and I have a 48-hour cutoff,” so I could just look at it like that and just finish.
But it’s completely different because the pace is so much slower, and everything and everyone is focused on you. When in a race, it’s like you can go into the background a bit more and find that inner encouragement. I was encouraged by everyone there, but everyone’s so focused on you. They’re all just saying, “Good job, Tara. You can do it. You got this.”
iRunFar: Ultrarunners, trail runners, and thru-hikers are all pretty humble beings. They’re people who just like to be out on trails or roads for a long time and within their heads or with their friends. What was it like to have so much attention coming to a point, looking at you as you are in that final push, watching your tracker, seeing you on the trail, and following your finish?
Dower: Yeah, I ended up coming out of the Smoky Mountains — I think it’s three or three-and-a-half, four days before the end — and I deleted Instagram, Facebook, and all social media off my phone. So I wasn’t even looking at that. There were a lot of people at Neels Gap recording me. I remember feeling a little overwhelmed with that.
Luckily, my crew, they’re great, and we just have fun together. When the focus was on me, I tended to deflect and try to be like, “But look at Rascal! Look at everything she’s doing. She just paced me for, I don’t even know how many miles she paced me overall, but it was so much in the last 43 hours. And look at JP Giblin, who paced me for the last 30 miles of the entire thing. Or look at Hunter Leininger, who paced me overnight and hand-fed me the entire way.”
I tend to deflect, because I hate to say this is my FKT. I wish I could put on the Fastest Known Time website, that the record was set by Team Chump Change. That was a big focus of mine before. I wanted to lean heavily on the team aspect and make jobs. So my job was, we said, race car or runner. And then Rascal is Crew Chief/Manager of Chaos; pretty much, she’s the boss.
My mom was Camp Mom. She does laundry and this and that. We made very clear jobs and tried to encourage as much as possible, “This is a team effort.” Long story short, I tried to deflect and be, “Look at all these great people over here.”
Tara Dower had a slew of pacers from her Appalachian Trail community accompany her on her run.
iRunFar: You make a really good point, and maybe the folks at the Fastest Known Time website are listening. Maybe in the future, there could be opportunities to identify the crews that are a part of these long, supported FKTs. As you said, there are so many different things that they’re handling. And the difference between unsupported and supported FKTs — they’re two different sports. You’re by yourself in the unsupported effort, and it’s really a team in the supported effort.
Dower: Yeah, it’s in the name. There are some FKTs you could probably get away with, I mean you are supported, but it’s not as important. But I genuinely believe in these long, supported FKTs, the crew is everything.
iRunFar: Your story on iRunFar is the most popular news story in the last two years. I expect that you are getting an enormous amount of attention. You made it clear that you were doing this to raise money for the nonprofit Girls on the Run and to try to spread confidence among women athletes. You have a huge platform to do that right now, with hundreds of thousands of people listening. What do you want to say?
Dower: I’m no scientist, but I believe women have this special gift of endurance that we haven’t fully tapped into yet. I think we’ve made huge strides in that direction. With Ann Trason and back, further than her, these women have been building on top of each other just seeing what is possible, and it’s exciting to think we’re scratching the surface at this point.
I’m encouraged to see, before I did this FKT, all the women pushing the limits and all of these course records going down in ultramarathons. So just with Katie Schide, things are getting crazy for women in endurance, and I am so excited to see what will happen.
But I think, going out here, a big goal of mine was to encourage and inspire. It’s difficult for me to say, “I’m inspiring women.” I don’t know why. I have to get over that, but it was a big goal of mine to show women that we can get these overall records.
I’ve heard that the longer the distance, the more even the playing field for the genders, and that’s just exciting for me. It’s not about beating the men, but it is about finding our true potential. And there is that benchmark with men, what they’ve done in history, and it’s exciting to see us building up to that and seeing what women are capable of.
I hope that more women go out and do that tough goal. It doesn’t have to be in running or endurance efforts, but I am really excited to see more women go after that Appalachian Trail FKT and see how we can lower that bar. So, I’m hoping that I inspire more women to go for that record or go for a run and see how far they can go.
Also, Girls on the Run, I partnered with them for a reason, to have a direct impact on those communities of young girls. I remember being a young girl and almost having this sense of, “I can do anything,” after seeing Mia Hamm. “I want to be a pro soccer player like Mia Hamm.” I’ve benefited greatly from women role models, and I hope to give back in that way and show people that things are possible. It’s a cool time to be in endurance sports as a woman.
Tara Dower stands at the Big Bald highpoint, on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee.
iRunFar: You know the Appalachian Trail better than anybody else at this exact moment. You were just on it, and you just did it in a very condensed period. So you have consumed it all recently. What do you think, down the road five years, 10 years, 15 years, what is possible for a woman on the Appalachian Trail?
Dower: That’s a great question. I have no idea, but let’s see. Let me do a little math here. [laughs, pulls out calculator]
Okay, so I think 37 days is possible. That is very aggressive. But I didn’t know, after New York, New Jersey, where Rascal said to me, “We’re bumping up the mileage.” So, at that point, I’m doing 57s, 58s, 59s, 60s [miles per day], and pretty much back-to-back, over and over again. We were relentless. When I got to that point, I didn’t think that was possible at all, but we did it, and I did it with the encouragement of my crew. But who knows, 59-, 60-mile days, that could be possible, especially 15 or 20 years down the line. But also, I’m no scientist.
iRunFar: I think this stuff is equal parts science and intuition, and you have a lot of intuition for this. Besides, there is no science for half this stuff right now. Congratulations, Tara. I know one day you’re going to feel comfortable saying that you inspire people because that’s already a fact. You inspire me, and you have inspired many.
Dower: Thanks. I appreciate that.
