Jane Maus answered the siren call of Longs Peak after an injury derailed her racing season.
Jane Maus has made a habit this year of turning what could be career setbacks into something closer to momentum.
After a summer slowed by injury, the Boulder-based professional mountain runner and endurance sports dietician went looking for a project that would let her get back on rock and trail without the pressure of a start line and she found it in her own backyard, on one of the most iconic peaks in Colorado.
On September 9, Maus set a new women’s unsupported fastest known time (FKT) on Longs Peak via the Cables Route, running, and scrambling the 10-mile roundtrip up and down the 14,255-foot peak with 5,500 feet of elevation gain in 2 hours, 39 minutes and 1 second.
Maus reached the summit in 1:43 and returned to the trailhead in 56 minutes. The route is a combination of steep singletrack trail, boulder fields, rocky tundra, and a technical 5.4 climb/scramble to the summit.
Maus surpassed Kate Hale’s 2020 FKT of 2 hours, 42 minutes and 33 seconds. It’s the latest entry in a résumé that already includes an unsupported FKT on Wyoming’s Grand Teton and a top American finish at last year’s world mountain running championships. But this one, she says, came from a different place entirely.
Maus said Kyle Richardson, a friend and teammate in Boulder who holds the men’s FKT on Longs Peak, was a big inspiration for her to put up a faster women’s time on this mountain.
“Unfortunately, I spent most of this summer injured, so I wasn’t able to spend as much time on the trails as I would’ve liked. That makes this effort feel extra special—getting to accomplish it before the snow falls,” she said. “In all honesty, I wasn’t ready to run a fast time on the mountain—I still have a lot to learn about the route-finding to dial in the perfect line, and my fitness isn’t where I’d like it given how much time I had to take off this summer. But when you’re given a perfect weather day, you take it.
A Short Season, A Short List of Attempts
A fastest known time (FKT) is the quickest recorded time in which someone has completed a specific route, such as a trail, peak, or long-distance path, usually done in self-supported or supported mode. Unlike formal races, FKTs are typically self-reported with evidence like GPS data and are tracked on community sites like FastestKnownTime.com, with the route’s records categorized by support style (unsupported, supported, or self-supported).
Unlike some of her bigger objectives, Maus didn’t come to Longs with years of familiarity. She’s climbed the mountain just five times total, and only by two of its most traveled lines—the Keyhole Route and the Cables Route.
Her first summit came in August 2024 via the Keyhole, a 15-mile roundtrip that is the mountain’s standard and most popular approach. She didn’t attempt the more direct Cables Route, a steep, technical line up the peak’s north face that requires Class 4 scrambling, until this August—barely a month before she’d use it to set the FKT.
“Each time I did the peak I only did the course in full,” Maus said, rather than breaking the route into segments to drill specific sections. “I tried to specifically dial in the line each time I ran it, but definitely still don’t know the mountain very well and want to keep learning it and run it faster in the future.”
That’s part of what makes the effort notable: she ran the Cables Route for her record attempt precisely because it’s the most direct way up the mountain, not because it was the version of the route she knew best.
A Peak That Demands Everything
For the 31-year-old Maus, who has called Boulder home for two years, Longs occupies a different category than the running and scrambling terrain she logs regularly in the nearby Flatirons. It’s less a training ground than a proving ground—runnable in stretches, technical and exposed in others, and entirely at the mercy of Colorado’s mountain weather.
“My skills as a mountain runner combine runnable trails but also scrambly sections and some technicality, so this is an ideal little project that fits into what I love about mountain running,” she said.
Part of the appeal, she added, is how little margin the mountain gives you: the climbing season is short, and within that window, only a handful of days are actually clean of the afternoon thunderstorms that routinely chase climbers off the upper mountain. “That adds satisfaction to every time I get a summit.”
The Cables Route on Longs Peak is a steep, exposed climb on the mountain’s East Face where climbers previously pulled themselves up using fixed steel cables. The cables were removed long ago, so trail runners and climbers now reach the summit via Class 4 scrambling.
Inspiration Training Through an Injury
Maus wasn’t coming into the Longs Peak effort at full fitness. She’d spent most of the summer working back from an injury, and by September her training had only recently started to round back into form. There was no structured buildup aimed specifically at the FKT—just time spent running the mountain itself, mixed with easy runs and scrambling sessions in the Flatirons as she rebuilt her base.
“I didn’t follow any specific training for it but mainly viewed it as a nice backyard adventure as I am getting back into training again,” she said.
The approach stands in contrast to the buildup Maus described heading into last year’s bigger objectives—a Grand Teton FKT attempt she and her coach specifically used to help prepare for the short trail race at the 2025 World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in Canfranc, Spain, where she finished seventh and was the top American woman in the 46K.
After a summer disrupted by injury and a shift away from her original race calendar, Longs became something different: an objective chosen purely because it excited her, with none of the pressure that comes with lining up against a field.
“I felt no pressure around this, and was just so excited that I was able to get some alpine running in after a rough summer,” said Maus, who ran in a prototype of a yet-to-be-released Arc’teryx shoe. “It definitely boosted a low mindset and gave me confidence for next year. I like chasing FKTs as a lower-pressure way to perform and choose things that really excite me.”
It’s a pattern that defined much of her last year. Maus broke onto the national mountain running scene in June 2025 after finishing fourth at the Broken Arrow 46K and earning a spot on the U.S. World Mountain Running Team, then spent that August chasing—and twice breaking—the women’s unsupported FKT on the Grand Teton, a roundtrip to the 13,775-foot summit that demands technical, Class 4 and Class 5 scrambling alongside high-speed running. Longs Peak, by comparison, was lower stakes and entirely self-directed, and that might be be exactly why it worked.
The Spirit of Chasing an FKT
Maus is careful to note that not everyone can or should go chase an FKT—the format assumes a level of preparation, risk assessment and mountain judgment that takes real time to build. But she thinks the underlying spirit of it applies far beyond the format itself.
“This speaks to setting your mind to something that you might not be able to do, but trying it and going for it anyway because you might just surprise yourself,” she said.
With the major races of the year behind her and winter closing in, she figured she might not have another real achievement left in the season. Instead, Longs gave her one.
“FKTs excite me, and this one excited me, because you can just pick something that sounds fun and challenging and work out all the parts and treat it like a project, and then when you accomplish it, whether that be in a few weeks or a few years, it feels really special,” Maus said. “And there is room to improve this time a lot, so it is something I will continue working toward.”
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