On September 21, 2024, Tara Dower set a brand new general supported quickest identified time (FKT) on the Appalachian Path, in a time of 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes, to be confirmed.
The Appalachian Path stretches 2,197 miles from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia, and travels by means of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Oftentimes thought of the unique long-trail thru-hike, it’s an unrelenting path by means of the japanese U.S. The path has 465,000 ft of elevation achieve.
Dower’s mark surpasses Karel Sabbe’s earlier general and males’s supported FKT of 41 days, 7 hours, and 39 minutes, which he set in 2018, by round 13.5 hours.
Tara Dower, after setting an general supported quickest identified time on the Appalachian Path. Photograph: Pete Schreiner/@schreinertrailphotography
Whereas Sabbe selected to finish the route touring northbound, Dower went southbound, leaving the summit of Mount Katahdin at 5:47 a.m. on August 12, 2024. She arrived to Springer Mountain, the path’s southern terminus, at 11:52 p.m. on September 21, to a crowd containing her crew, pacers, and different supporters.
Dower made her intentions of going after Sabbe’s file clear earlier than the beginning, and accomplished the rugged Maine part of the path in a mere six days. She was accompanied by crew and pacers that included Megan Wilmarth, in any other case identified by her path title of Rascal, whose official title was Crew Chief/Supervisor of Chaos, her mother, Altra teammate JP Giblin, photographer Pete Schreiner, and others. After greater than 2,000 miles and 39 days on the path, Dower notably accomplished the hassle with a nonstop push of one thing on the order of 100 miles.
After ending at Springer Mountain and changing into the quickest individual to finish the path, Dower referred to as her FKT effort the crew’s FKT, indicating that it took the entire staff to make her supported efficiency occur.
Tara Dower is helped by her crew, on the best way to setting an general supported Appalachian Path quickest identified time. Photograph: Pete Schreiner/@schreinertrailphotography
Dower’s effort additionally surpasses the lads’s southbound supported FKT, set final yr by Kristian Morgan at 45 days, 4 hours, and 27 minutes, in addition to the ladies’s southbound supported FKT, set by Jennifer Pharr Davis in 2011 in 46 days, 11 hours, and 20 minutes.
Dower ran and hiked a mean of just about 54 miles per day over the rugged, rocky, and rooty East Coast path and utilizing the motto, “Each second counts,” to maintain her shifting ahead and southward.
A file picture of Tara Dower on the 2024 Hardrock 100 the place she took fourth place. Photograph: iRunFar/Bryon Powell
A Resume in Lengthy Distance Trails
Dower, whose path title is Sweet Mama, is not any stranger to long-distance trails. She first tried a thru-hike of the Appalachian Path in 2017, however stopped after solely eight days as a consequence of a panic assault. The assault compelled her to confront her anxiousness, and he or she returned to the path in 2019, finishing the thru-hike going northbound in 5 months and 10 days. In a YouTube video, she referred to as the expertise probably the most cherished reminiscence in her life.
The next yr, she labored as a backpacking information for Pharr Davis, the prior girls’s supported FKT holder on the Appalachian Path. Gleaning inspiration from Pharr Davis’s unimaginable path profession, Dower set out in 2020 on the Mountains to Sea Path, a 1,175-mile route from Nice Smoky Mountains Nationwide Park, Tennessee, to Nags Head, North Carolina. She set the ladies’s supported FKT in 29 days, 8 hours, and 48 minutes.
From there, she went on to set a brand new girls’s supported FKT on the 486-mile Colorado Path in eight days, 21 hours, and 59 minutes in 2023, which was subsequently bested by Nina Bridges simply three weeks later. Dower additionally set an general and ladies’s supported FKT on the 288-mile Benton MacKaye Path going from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Large Creek in Nice Smoky Mountains Nationwide Park in Tennessee in 2022.
She can also be no stranger to ultra-racing, having gained the 2023 Run Rabbit Run 100 Mile after putting second in 2022, and he or she completed fourth on the 2024 Hardrock 100.
Taking over the Appalachian Path Quickest Identified Time for Ladies and Girls
In a YouTube video asserting her intention to chase the general FKT earlier this yr, she stated, “I’m all concerning the challenges. I all the time wish to problem myself.” She additionally stated that after having a 10-year relationship with the path that began together with her part mountaineering in 2014, “It felt like I used to be being referred to as to the path once more.”
Dower set out with the aim to make use of the run to lift $20,000 for Ladies on the Run, hoping to “encourage girls and ladies to go for that powerful aim regardless of if it’s with operating or in life.” As of this text’s publishing, Dower’s fundraiser has surpassed that fundraising aim.