Why women trail runners are crushing it right now

There have been great women trail runners for years, but here are some reasons this summer has been so extraordinary.

First, this isn’t new. Women have been setting extraordinary FKTs and winning ultras outright for years. Tara Dower, Heather Anderson and many others were already proving that women could set the bar or outright redefine it on the longest and hardest routes. What feels different now is how quickly those performances are being recognized and shared.

1. The community is deeper and more encouraging.

There are simply more women doing these things now, which creates a powerful feedback loop. More women see other women taking on big objectives, more are willing to believe those objectives are possible, and more experienced athletes are willing to help the next generation. That depth matters.

2. Long distances may actually shrink some of the traditional barriers.

The longer and more technical the challenge becomes, the less it’s simply about raw speed, and that’s why women are closing the gap. Patience, resilience, efficiency, pacing, problem-solving and the ability to keep moving when things go sideways become enormous advantages. Women have always had those tools, and we’re seeing more opportunities to apply them at the highest level.

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3. Social media has changed who gets seen.

Sophie Grant’s Via Alpina effort is a great example. The accomplishment was incredible on its own, but it didn’t really blow up until Stephanie Case shared it. Rachel Entrekin’s Cocodona 250 performance is another example of how quickly a remarkable women’s performance can move from the trail to a massive mainstream audience including Good Morning America and ESPN. The achievement isn’t necessarily new; the amplification is.

4. The ceiling is getting higher because the opportunities are getting bigger.

There is more sponsorship, more professional support, more media attention and more visibility for women in endurance sports. And visibility creates opportunity, which creates more participation, which creates more extraordinary performances.

So are women actually crushing more, or are we just celebrating it more?

I suspect it’s both. The participation and depth are clearly growing, but we’re also finally getting better at recognizing performances that might once have lived quietly on a trail page or in a race results database.

And maybe that’s the most exciting part: we’re getting to watch women not just compete within the existing definition of excellence, but set the definition themselves.

RELATED: 13 Great Women’s Trail Running Events to Put on Your Calendar

Summer of Speedy Women Trail Runners

Here’s a sampling of just some of the most recent extraordinary efforts from women around the U.S. and the world.

Kaylee Frederick, 21, Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Frederick, who started running ultras at 14, was the overall winner of the Eastern States 100 on August 9, breaking the women’s course record by more than an hour and finishing in 23 hours and 9 minutes while outrunning the entire field of 262 runners. She also finished second overall in the World’s End 100K on May 30, and was the outright winner of the Pine Creek Challenge 100K last year. She’s also a three-time Badwater finisher and that race’s youngest finisher.

Ginny Robbins, 40, Victor, Idaho
Ginny Robbins has quietly built a dominant record in endurance running, and her runner-up finish at the Wyoming Range 100 on August 7 is just the latest data point. An ultrarunner and endurance cyclist from Victor, Idaho, she crossed the line in 28:37:45, marking her fourth overall podium finish in the event since 2022—third in 2022, first in 2023 (in a women’s course-record 27:47:37), and second in 2025 before this year’s runner-up result behind Cody Poskin’s overall course-record win of 25:38:02.

Caroline Himbert, 33, Salt Lake City
After breaking the women’s John Muir Trail via Whitney Portal FKT by 8 minutes last year, she went back to the 223-mile route—which climbs through Mt. Whitney and Yosemite Valley over 10 High Sierra passes—and delivered a far more dominant performance on August 4, finishing in 3 days, 16 hours, and 35 minutes and slicing more than 12 hours off her own mark, pushing through serious sleep deprivation and hallucinations over three largely sleepless nights.

Sophie Woods, 42, Andorra
Sophie Woods, a New Zealand-born trail runner who lives in Andorra, became the fastest person, male or female, to cross the entire Via Alpina on August 1, running and hiking the roughly 1,253-mile route from Trieste, Italy, to Monaco in 28 days, 17 hours, and 59 minutes. The route spans eight countries and climbs the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest from sea level about 12 times. Along the way she passed through Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, back into Italy, and France before finishing at Place du Palais in Monaco, averaging just over 43 miles and more than 13,000 feet of climbing every day.

Her effort lowered the previous overall record of 35 days and 21 hours, set by British runner Jake Catterall in 2024, and beat the previous women’s record of 38 days and 2 hours, set by Dutch ultrarunner Tessa Caspers in 2025.

The effort came with real hardship: Woods contended with two European heatwaves, thunderstorms, horseflies, and wildfires, at one point having to reroute around a large wildfire that added distance and climbing to her day. She leaned heavily on her support crew, led by her husband George, saying she was often too exhausted to make her own decisions and had to trust her team completely. The attempt grew out of a difficult personal chapter that included a fertility journey involving IVF, and once she committed to the route, the record was her target from the start.

Brier Youngfleish, 28, Grand Junction, Colorado
Youngfleish won the Aspen Backcountry Marathon in Colorado on August 1 without even realizing she was in the lead—she finished the 26.2-mile course (with 5,500 feet of combined climbing and descending) in 4 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds, beating all 55 other entrants—the 39 men and 26 women in the field. The overall win was made even more notable by what happened behind her: the entire podium of the marathon was composed of women. Jessica Parry took second place 13 minutes later in 4:21:41, while Mckendree Hickory finished third overall in 4:32:06—ahead of Gil Allgood, who was the top male finisher in fourth at 4:35:56.

Jenn Lichter, 30, Missoula, Montana
Lichter has been on fire this year: winning the Black Canyon 100K in a course-record 7:57:05 on February 14 in Arizona, then winning the Gorge Waterfalls 50K on April 12 and, of course, winning the Western States 100 on June 27 in a new women’s course record of 15:28:05. What has she done since then? On August 1, she won the HURL Elkhorn 50K in Missoula, Montana, but it was a virtual three-way tie with friends and training partners Makena Morley and Erin Clark, all finishing in 5:32:30—more than 30 minutes ahead of top men’s finisher Charlie Rockow.

Anna Troup, 55, Cumbria, England
Troup won the Montane Summer Spine Race outright in June, covering the notoriously brutal 268-mile Pennine Way course in 84 hours, 56 minutes, and 37 seconds, and was followed in second place by Dutch runner Irene Kinnegim, giving women the top two overall spots at the race for the first time in its history. Taken together with prior overall wins by British runners Jasmin Paris (Winter Spine Race) and Sabrina Verjee (Summer Spine) in 2019, it underscores that this isn’t a one-off phenomenon isolated to a single race or country, but a pattern building across the sport’s toughest, longest events.

Rachel Entrekin, 35, Salida, Colorado
Entrekin’s overall winning performance in the epic, 253-mile Cocodona 250 across central Arizona on May 6 wasn’t just a race victory—it was a shift in what we believe is possible. She didn’t just take the women’s title, as she did in 2024 and 2025. She won outright, breaking the course record by nearly 3 hours, and did it against one of the most competitive fields the race has ever seen.

And yet, what makes her 56-hour, 9-minute, 48-second performance so powerful, especially for new runners, is how human it all was. She didn’t expect to win, but she seized the lead near the halfway point and never gave it up, staying just ahead of men’s runner-up Kilian Korth for over a day before opening a larger gap in the closing stretch.

RELATED: Rachel Entrekin Asks ‘Why Not You?’ and Answers with a Next-Gen Win at the Cocodona 250

Courtney Dauwalter, 41, Buena Vista, Colorado
Dauwalter has proved this year that her 2025 setbacks—dropping out of the Cocodona 250 and fading in last year’s Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc—were not a sign of decline. Returning to Cocodona in May, she battled back from a costly wrong turn to finish sixth overall and runner-up among the women in 61:58:35, breaking the existing women’s course record even as Entrekin took the overall win as the race’s first-ever outright female champion.

Two months later, at the Hardrock 100, Dauwalter delivered an even bigger statement, winning for the fourth time in five career starts (and placing fifth overall) in 26:03:10, the fastest women’s clockwise time in event history and the second-fastest women’s time overall in either direction.

Tara Dower, 32, Durango, Colorado
Last August, Colorado trail runner Tara Dower ran Vermont’s 272-mile Long Trail, supported, in 3 days, 18 hours, and 29 minutes, taking down the overall record, men included, by close to 3 hours. This year she placed sixth among women at the Western States 100 on June 27, and 13 days later finished third among women and 14th overall at the Hardrock 100, setting a new overall combined-time record of 49 hours, 15 minutes, and 11 seconds.

Becca Bramley, 30, Durango, Colorado
Bramley broke the women’s course record at the High Lonesome 100 on July 18, winning in 21:55:49—27 seconds ahead of Entrekin’s previous course record.

Erin Ton, 28, Breckenridge, Colorado
An athlete who has combined trail running, scrambling, and mountaineering, Ton has set 221 FKTs since 2021, including 42 this year in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Switzerland. That includes ascent records on popular mountains such as Aconcagua, Cotopaxi, Mount Hood, Mount Shasta, and Mount Rainier. Most recently she set a new women’s FKT on The Hardergrat—a 24-mile, 10,000-foot ascent in Switzerland — as she prepares for a possible FKT attempt on Mount Kilimanjaro later this year.

Elise Lagerstrom, 34, Wood Village, Oregon
In June, Lagerstrom, an engineer for an aerospace company, became the first woman to win the Gobi March 250K stage race outright in its 20-year history. She competed the multi-day, 155-mile race in 28 hours, 52 minutes and 37 seconds—nearly an hour ahead of the second-place finisher Rob Robinson. Over seven days, competitors crossed largely untracked terrain while carrying everything they need for the week—everything except tents and water. It was the first time in more than 80 RacingThePlanet Ultramarathons since 2002 that a woman has won a race outright.

Addie Bracy, 40, Twin Lakes, Colorado
Less than two weeks after pacing Entrekin at Cocodona, Bracy took the overall win at the Ram Party 55-mile race on May 16 in Colorado Springs by more than an hour. 

Katarina Hartmuth, 31, Zurich, Switzerland
The German ultrarunner set a new women’s record on England’s iconic 42-fell Lake District round on July 24, finishing in 14 hours, 11 minutes, and 58 seconds and shaving more than 22 minutes off Beth Pascall’s previous mark from 2020.

Kumi Redpath, 50, New York City
The 50-year-old ultrarunner set the overall supported FKT on the 358-mile Long Path in New York on May 10, finishing in 7 days, 7 hours, and 59 minutes and beating the previous overall record by more than four hours while running largely on minimal sleep.

Deanna Doane, 28, Jacksonville, Florida
Doane set a new women’s unsupported FKT on the 70-mile Smokies Challenge Adventure Run (SCAR) route through Great Smoky Mountains National Park on May 18, finishing in 17:44:34 and improving on the previous women’s mark by about 97 minutes. She also won the Waucheesi Challenge in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, in mid-July, a 24-mile out-and-back race with roughly 5,000 feet of elevation gain and loss.

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