Tara Dower Battled Intense Hallucinations, Sleep Deprivation, and 53-Mile Days to Set the Appalachian Trail Speed Record. Here’s How She Did It.

Seven minutes before midnight on September 21, 2024, Tara Dower reached the terminus of the Appalachian Trail on Springer Mountain in Georgia. At 40 days, 18 hours, and 6 minutes, Dower finished AT with the fastest known time (also known as the FKT). Not the fastest southbound time, or the fastest women’s time, but the fastest anyone had ever completed all 2,189 miles of trail and 465,000 feet of vertical gain. 

FKTs on long-distance hiking trails entered the mainstream in 2015 when famed ultrarunner Scott Jurek ran the Appalachian Trail in 46 days, 11 hours, and 20 minutes, breaking the previous record, set by Jennifer Pharr Davis. But that record didn’t last long, with Karl Meltzer taking another 10 hours off the record the following year. By the time Karel Sabbe decisively smashed the record in 2018, taking four days off of Joe “Stringbean” McCounaughy’s incredible self-supported blitz in 2017, people were becoming accustomed to the record falling on a near yearly basis. But Sabbe’s blistering pace — he averaged 53 miles a day — was an intimidating record to go after. By the time Dower started on her own attempt it had been almost a decade since a woman held the AT record. 

I chatted with her recently about what it took to break the record, and how women are able to outrace men at such grueling distances. 

Rest Less, Run More

Something that long-distance backpackers have long observed is that women’s bodies tend to hold up better than men’s over thousands of miles of trail. “At the end of a trail, typically the difference between a man and a woman’s body is that the man’s body is a little more melted,” says Dower. “They’ve lost a lot of muscle mass and fat, and they often look skeleton-like. Women look a little more muscular.” One study that looked at physiological markers for men and women with similar times on the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a 108-mile race, found this to be true for extreme distance races as well. Men showed more fluid accumulation in their lungs, and higher levels of creatine in their blood, among other markers. 

And this trend of women’s bodies responding better than men’s becomes even more pronounced as you continue to increase the distance. After examining the results from over 15,000 ultra events, RunRepeat found that while men are 11.1% faster than women at marathon distances, the difference shrinks to a mere .25% for a 100-mile ultra. And it reverses when you get to distances of 195 miles or more, with women coming in at times that are on average .6% faster than their male counterparts.

When he learned that Dower had broken his record, Karel Sabbe told RUN: “I was happy that it was proven yet again that women are super strong in our sport (something I have always been a firm believer of)… They are as strong, if not stronger, because they can endure pain better and take suffering and sleep deprivation better often, than their male counterparts.” 

Dower decided that her strategy for the Appalachian Trail speed record wouldn’t be to run faster than Sabbe, but to run longer. “I knew that he was a faster trail runner,” says Dower. “But I knew there was a couple of things I could do to optimize my time, like quicker crew transitions, and just hiking for more hours in the day.” 

A typical day for Dower started at 3 a.m. “Rascal, the crew chief, would wake up and start feeding me whatever breakfast she made the night before,” Dower says. Megan “Rascal” Wilmarth, is a fellow AT thru-hiker and ultramarathoner who took the lead on the logistics of Dower’s record-setting run. “And as she’s physically feeding me, I would slap Leuko tape on my feet and get my shoes and socks on. It would be about 30 minutes to get prepared and warm up for a couple minutes.” She was on trail by 3:30 a.m., often with a pacer who would carry her food and water. Dower would meet her crew about six times throughout the day at different road crossings to refuel. “I’d drink a protein shake at each stop,” says Dower. “And I’d keep going.” 

All told, Dower was moving on trail for seventeen and a half hours each day, finishing between 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. After about five hours of sleep, she’d start the whole process again the next morning. The team eschewed hotels, staying right on trail every night — the only exception being when they were kicked out of a trailhead by a ranger in New York. 

Dealing with Sleep Deprivation

Combining 50-mile days with less than 5 hours of sleep over the course of several weeks takes a physical toll on the body. It also takes a toll on the mind. By Pennysvlania, Dower was starting to have hallucinations. 

“I’d see lions or dogs and a white cat,” she says. “I saw a little devil sitting on a log; I saw a person hanging from a tree. They were terrifying hallucinations.” 

Sometimes she would sleep for a minute or two on trail (known in the ultra world as a dirt nap) and that would help to reset her brain. But mostly she just kept going. “I wish there was a fancier trick,” she told me. “But it’s gonna stink, and it did stink, and that’s just how it’s gonna be. You’re just going to be tired and you’ve just got to keep moving safely.” 

Dower has had previous experience with hallucinations when running ultramarathons. “I was getting most of the night hiking done in the early morning hours,” she says, noting that it was typically the combination of overnight hiking without sleep that resulted in the worst hallucinations. At least until the final push, when Dower went 129 miles over two days with only 23 minutes of sleep. “I did have one really bad hallucination in the last 30 miles.”

Discovering What Was Possible

Most of us cannot imagine the difficulty involved in traveling over 50 miles a day across the rugged terrain of the Appalachian Trail on five hours of sleep a night for over a month, and then pushing out 129 miles in a single stretch at the end of that. As it turns out, it was hard for Dower to imagine too. 

“I struggled with belief in my abilities,” she says. “Luckily, I had a great crew behind me who kept encouraging me, kept pushing my limits. They kept throwing big miles on my schedule. And if it wasn’t for them, honestly, I don’t think I would push myself that much, because I just really didn’t know if it was possible.” 

This was especially true after the team crunched the numbers after New Hampshire’s White Mountains and realized they were pacing behind Sabbe’s record. “In my head, I was like this isn’t possible, to do this amount of miles and catch up to the overall record. So I would say the record was heavily influenced by the crew.”

A Team Effort

Dower’s crew had only two permanent members — her mom and crew chief Megan “Rascal” Wilmarth, whom she met during her first thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2019. And while it’s possible to at least plan a 100-mile race (even if it doesn’t end up going exactly how you envisioned), plotting out a 2,000 mile speed hike is a completely different story. 

“There’s no way to plan that out,” says Dower. “Your body could fail you one day, and you couldn’t’ get all your miles, and that would put you behind.” She did plan the first 10 days, to help ease the team (who were also extremely sleep deprived) into their new routines. But after that, Dower put herself entirely in their hands. 

“So much mental energy is put into putting one foot in front of the other,” she says. “I knew I couldn’t make any sound decisions.” She needed a team that could tackle the logistics of planning out each day, including finding their way to each road crossing and maximizing how rested and fueled she was whenever she did stop. And they needed to be competitive. Not only did Dower find that, at times, her team was more focused on the goal than she was, they also provided her with the confidence she needed to push through. “They know my abilities better than I do,” Dower says. “So it wasn’t very hard to relinquish that control, and honestly it was really nice. Because I could just focus on running and eating and that’s all I had to do. That was my only job.” 

Dower became known as the “race car” with the rest of the team being “the pit crew.” “It was definitely easier to think of myself as this mechanical being. I’m being fueled up with gasoline and I’m being maintained with new tires.”

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The Future for the AT, and for Dower

In the weeks and months after her record-breaking trail run, Dower is staying focused on her recovery. “I’m taking a break for the year,” she says. “I’m definitely setting loose goals, but I’m apprehensive to do that too, because you never know how your body’s going to be after this big epic adventure.” 

It’s too soon to say how long Dower’s record will stand for — the Appalachian Trail itself is in a recovery phase, as hikers assess the damage caused by Hurricane Helene in late September. But it’s clear that we should expect to see more women chasing the record in the future, perhaps even from Dower herself. “I definitely miss it,” she says. “I miss the intense experience. It’s so unique and you spend time with these people working toward this concrete goal.” But for now, she’s focused on resting and healing her body before looking ahead to the next goal. “Because it takes so long and is more abstract, recovery has felt like another endurance effort.”