This Hiker Just Set the Speed Record on the Appalachian Trail

One of the most grueling records in American endurance sports fell late Saturday night in northern Georgia. Tara Dower, a 31-year-old ultrarunner and long-distance hiker born in North Carolina and based in Virginia, reached Georgia’s Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, at 11:53 P.M. She completed the arduous southern thru-hike of the iconic trail, crossing 14 states and 2,197 miles, in 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes. It’s the fastest known time for hiking the iconic trail in either direction.

Her finishing time cleaves approximately 13 hours off the 2018 benchmark set by Belgian runner Karel Sabbe, who in 2018 hiked the trail from south to north. It also returns the overall record to a woman for the first time since 2015, when Scott Jurek eclipsed Jennifer Pharr Davis’ then-record by only three hours. What’s even more impressive is that Dower, who goes by the trail name “Candy Mama,” had to come from behind to topple Sabbe’s record after falling off pace during a particularly rainy spell in New England.

“The number of people that have hiked the Appalachian Trail before Tara in less than 50 days is ten, only one of them a woman,” explained Liz Derstine, who set the women’s record for a northbound hike in 2020 at 51 days and joined Dower for a stretch of the trail earlier this week.

“And Tara has done it faster than all of them, including the men,” Derstine added. “This is one of the greatest achievements of all time. It’s huge.”

Statistics aside, what’s most remarkable about Dower’s achievement may be her rapid and unexpected rise through the ranks of distance hikers and runners. Less than a decade ago, when Dower was a student at East Carolina University, she became fascinated by the Appalachian Trail after idly watching a National Geographic documentary. She graduated in 2016, and the next year she set off northward from Springer Mountain, making it only 80 miles before her grandparents picked her up.

“I had really bad, untreated anxiety, a panic attack on trail,” Dower told me Wednesday morning as she pushed through Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “I vowed not to thru-hike again and was pretty bummed.”

Of course, she did not keep to her vow. I met Dower on the Appalachian Trail back in 2019, when we were both 200 miles into our respective first-time thru-hikes. She and her husband Jonathan had gotten married six months earlier; with trail names “Candy Mama” and “Sheriff,” they were still in a sort of honeymoon glow, doing handstands atop Appalachian balds and beaming for her YouTube channel. The couple did not push for speed during that trek, and they reached Maine in a little more than five months, a perfectly average time.

Dower had seen a clip of Karl “Speedgoat” Meltzer’s 2016 record-setting effort and assumed that wasn’t for her. “He was so tall, so athletic, and I thought he had this perfect endurance body,” she told me. “I couldn’t fathom doing anything close to that.”

Dower’s perspective changed during the pandemic. She moved to Hot Springs, North Carolina, an iconic AT trail town, to work for a guiding service owned by Jennifer Pharr Davis, the earlier record holder. Dower began running the mountains around her, and in 2020 she paced Derstine on two nearby sections during her own FKT attempt on the AT’s northern route. Dower then spent that September racing east across North Carolina on the 1,175-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail, establishing a new speed record of just over 29 days.

“That felt plenty hard and plenty long. It was a struggle, and I was unhealthy” she said, laughing as she tried to cough up a bug she’d swallowed while moving down the trail. “It didn’t cross my mind to try something else.”

But she soon began mounting an impressive running resume—four ultra victories in 2021, plus a course record on the Devil Dog 100-miler in 2022. She set a new record for the 300-mile Benton MacKaye Trail, often seen as a miniature AT, that year, and then shattered a long-standing women’s benchmark on the 567-mile Colorado Trail in a cooperative effort with Derstine.

Along the way, Dower also went viral in the ultra-running world when a painful encounter with a cholla cactus—while she wore cat ears, no less— during the Javelina Jundred forced a DNF; you have to stay humble, you know?

Dower pondered and planned her record-breaking AT attempt for more than a year, but in 2023 she chose to lean into extreme endurance training to prepare her body, rather than rest her legs for the attempt. An overall win in North Carolina’s Umstead 100-miler that summer became her preamble for one of running’s most daunting races, Colorado’s Hardrock 100. Dower finished fourth, seven hours behind one of her inspirations, Courtney Dauwalter.

In fact, Dauwalter’s record-breaking wins last year at the Western States Endurance Run and the Hardrock 100 within a three-week window—followed by her subsequent victory at Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc—inspired Dower to start the AT just a month after the 2024 Hardrock 100.

“A lot of people told me what I shouldn’t do, especially doing Hardrock so close to the AT. But no one’s ever tried it, so I wanted to see if it helped,” said Dower, pausing a playlist of Madonna and Ice Spice to talk. “I knew I would have mountain-racing legs and would be acclimated to 10,000 feet, so I’d have an advantage in Maine. And I felt like I was on Cloud Nine.”

Appalachian Trail guru Warren Doyle told me that one of Dower’s secrets to success was her consistent speed on the trail. On most days she hiked slower than Sabbe’s pace, he said, but she traversed more total miles. “She put in longer workdays,” Doyle explained Friday, just as Dower neared the North Carolina-Georgia border. “I hope this puts it to rest: It’s not about speed. It’s about endurance. It’s not the Fastest Known Time. It’s the Shortest Known Time.”

In recent years, as the popularity of FKT attempts have grown, corporate sponsorships and larger support crews on trail have become de rigueur. Dower, however, kept her posse small, with only her mother, Debbie Komlo, and a hiker she befriended on the AT in 2019, Megan “Rascal” Wilmarth, joining her the entire time. (Multiple other hikers others paced her or arrived at assorted trailheads to offer help, but they came and went.)

Dower and Wilmarth slept in a Ford Transit van nicknamed “Burly,” while Komlo trailed them in her Dodge Durango. They worked relentlessly to get her in bed by 10 P.M. and up at 3 A.M., feeding her upwards of 10,000 calories each day. They also replenished Dower’s massive snack box of, as Komlo put it, “not a lot of healthy stuff” with Rice Krispies Treats, Twizzlers, Gushers. Four times a day, Dower downed a 320-calorie protein shake.

“At stops, we just shoveled food into her face,” Wilmarth told me. “We’d always have a sit-down meal, but, of course, she wouldn’t sit down.”

What’s more, rather than emblazoning Burly with a corporate logo, the rear window of the van listed the 14 states of the AT, which Dower systematically crossed out as she reached each border. More prominent on the window, though, was a call for donations to Girls on the Run, a nonprofit that teaches kids through physical education. When Dower reached Springer Mountain, she’d raised $21,000 of her $20,000 goal for the organization.

I spoke with Dower a half-dozen times during her trek. I rarely got the sense she was frustrated, angry, or even in much pain. She laughed a lot, making jokes about the bugs she swallowed or her struggles with the rains of New England and the resulting sores on her feet. She seemed, more or less, like the same lighthearted person I’d met on trail in 2019: Candy Mama, just with a tougher shell. It was inspiring to witness, really, an old friend realizing new potential without forsaking herself in the process..

Endurance athletes often talk about grinding through our favorite activities, the very things we do for fun. I’m as guilty as anyone of these complaints. But as Dower approached Newfound Gap, at the border between Tennessee and North Carolina, it finally struck me that she had instead chosen to glide through this challenge, and toward this astonishing endurance record. She could, however, probably do without swallowing bugs.