Tara Dower, complete with scabs on the palms of her hands and googly eyes on her hat. All photos: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
8 a.m., Horse Gulch Trailhead, Durango, Colorado
Tara Dower drives into the Durango, Colorado, trailhead a few minutes after 8 a.m. on a sunny spring morning. She gives us a warm wave as she eases her SUV into the small parking lot.
The trailhead bustles with mountain bikers, hikers, and runners. Not long before Tara arrived, we watched two women finish a trail run, one wearing the now-famous “Here for the Women’s Race” t-shirt. The shirt is being sold to help raise funds for a nonprofit committed to uplifting women’s presence in trail running. It’s an appropriate message to receive ahead of meeting up with one of the most ascendant women in trail running.
While the 31-year-old Altra athlete is perhaps best known for setting the overall fastest known time (FKT) on the 2,197-mile Appalachian Trail in 40 days and 18 hours last fall, she has plenty of other accolades to her name in just the past year. These include a win at the 2025 Lake Sonoma 50 Mile, second place at the 2025 Black Canyon 100k where she earned a Western States 100 Golden Ticket, and fourth place at the 2024 Hardrock 100. And if we go a couple of years back, we find other long trail FKTs and plenty more top ultramarathon performances.
It’s the Thursday after the U.S.’s Memorial Day weekend, and Tara’s just returned from the Western States 100 Training Camp, where she spent three days running on the California course in preparation for the big dance in a month. Tara’s expected to contend for the win, and we’re here to shadow a day of her peak training as well as to learn about the person behind all those performances.
First on her agenda for the morning is an eight-mile easy run, finishing with eight 30-second uphill strides. We chat as she loosens up with a series of leg swings, hamstring stretches, knee lifts, and other movements typical of a trailhead warmup.
Tara warming up at the Horse Gulch Trailhead in Durango, Colorado.
She laughs as she recounts a story from the training camp, where she skipped stopping at an iconic spot to hang out with race supporters because she couldn’t resist going into race mode with another participant for the final miles of the final day. And she doesn’t seem particularly sheepish to admit that she ran faster last weekend than her running coach Megan Roche advised, “Everything’s an A race. Ultrarunners don’t have a central governor that stops them from hurting themselves.” As if to punctuate those words, she’s decorated with a big, unmistakable case of trail rash, skin freshly scabbed over on the palms of her hands, elbow, and knee from a couple of run-ins with the ground at training camp.
For all the drive she clearly possesses, an inner levity is also equally evident as she starts her run up the trail. In addition to a fire engine red Altra shirt and a dusty pair of high cushion Altra Olympus 6, which she says are perfect shoes for an easy run, she’s also wearing her well-worn, trademark hat with googly eyes. The googly eyes have been glued on multiple times over the hat’s lifetime, and Tara has previously explained to iRunFar that she wears the hat backward at night when trail running to help ward off mountain lions. Bouncing on her wrists and neck are at least a dozen homemade bracelets and necklaces of many colors and kinds. One spells out Candy Mama, her trail name on the long trails, betraying her love of sweets.
Tara’s trail name is Candy Mama, as seen on one of her bracelets.
She’s back about 75 minutes later, easily jogging into the trailhead among the mountain bikers and dogs in the mid-morning sun. She pauses just long enough to drop her hydration vest on a bench before turning back up the trail for those 30-second hill strides. Driving her knees up and elbows back, she gives each stride a good effort, her face crinkling into the hard work. When she stops, she puts her hands to her head to open her chest and slow her heavy breathing. Her knees buckle gently for the first few steps back downhill, muscles momentarily occupied with recovering from the effort.
A tattoo on her right leg flashes from sun to shade with each stride. It reads “Suffer Well” and has barbed wire forming a heart around her knee. “This is my Hardrock 100 tattoo,” she’ll explain afterward. “A sign in Ouray [a small village through which the event passes] said ‘Suffer Well, Friends,’ and I adapted it.” Lest anyone interpret Tara’s tattoos as only symbolic, she’ll later laugh when pointing to a scab on the same knee and say, “I fall all the time. I’m hoping one day, I’ll have blood dripping right from the barbed wire.” The tattoo is both literally and figuratively piercing, though, so we can’t help but wonder how emblematic it is of her personality.
Tara’s “Suffer Well” tattoo is a prominent representation of her 2024 Hardrock 100 run — and perhaps a message on how to live life.
10:30 a.m., The Vault
We meet Tara at the entrance of The Vault, a local functional fitness gym. She’s changed out of the Altra Olympus 6 and into the Solstice XT 3, the brand’s gym shoe.
The Vault is frequented by several other top runners in the area, including Robyn Lesh, a good friend of Tara’s who’s just finished her own run and arrived for a workout.
Tara and friend Robyn Lesh work through a mobility exercise together at The Vault, a functional fitness gym in Durango, Colorado.
Tara and Robyn good-naturedly debate the merits of each of the workout rooms that we pass while walking down a hallway in the Durango Fitness Club where The Vault is located. One receives bonus points for being darker and thus more atmospheric, another is avoided because they thought it had a weird smell. We’re joined by The Vault owner, Donnis Dolso, in the large, high-ceilinged room with walls covered by mirrors. One side of the room is open, allowing loads of space for athletes to creatively exercise, while the other side’s got several power racks, exercise benches, plyometrics boxes, free weights, and other gym equipment. It maybe gives the vibe of seriousness, but Tara and Robyn bring immediate color to the setting, as does the steady stream of ’90s dance music playing from a large Bluetooth speaker.
The pair begins a series mobility exercises prescribed by Tara’s strength coach, Kameron Harder. Donnis stands by offering form suggestions, clearly invested in the duo. During the exercises, including squats and band work, both Tara and Robyn look focused on the task at hand, but during breaks, they laugh and giggle. Here to do a job, they’ll still have a good time while doing it.
A toughness shines through in all that Tara does.
Soon, Robyn heads off into another room to do her own workout while Tara dives deep into hers. Today, her strength workout includes Bulgarian split squats, planks with leg lifts, lateral band walks, vertical jumps, and speed skater leaps. It takes maybe 30 minutes for her to make her way through the exercise series. She executes everything to a T, watching YouTube video demonstrations of the less familiar exercises. Like during the hill strides a few hours ago, she’s unafraid of occupying her primal side to grunt her way through a few of the tougher final repetitions.
During sets in the gym, Tara has laser focus.
She is just so plainly strong, both in body and in mind, so we ask her how she got that way. “People tell me I’m tough, and it’s just who I am. It’s not like I’m trying to be tough,” she starts. As she rests between exercises, she explains that her toughness origin story may be with her brother, Derek Komlo, a U.S. Army Drill Sergeant, who, according to Tara, “just expected me to be tough.” She also says that strength was a characteristic of her whole family unit. “We loved each other, and we showed care in different ways, but you had to be tough.”
But realistically, one can only take Tara so seriously with the glued-on eyes of her ball cap googling around or when she and Robyn dance their way through lateral band walks to the beat of some ’90s song.
Tara chatting between exercises at The Vault during her strength workout.
Noon, a Sunny Picnic Table
With two workouts done and dusted by high noon, Tara has a few hours of recovery before her final workout of the day, a 30-minute incline treadmill run in a heat suit to prepare for both the hills and high temperatures at the Western States 100. We sit at a picnic table outside the gym for an interview. Half the table lies in the shade of a tree, while the other half is exposed to the now-hot sun. Tara chooses to sit in the sun and quips, “Everything is heat training.”
With a microphone in front of her, she momentarily assumes the persona of a professional athlete sitting down with the media for an interview. But it’s not long until she loosens into open conversation, animating her stories with expressive eyes, frequent laughter, and her hands — always her hands.
It’s thus impossible not to notice a tattoo of the Appalachian Trail logo on the middle finger of her left hand, assuming the position of a ring. She laughs and she says that she’s married to the trail, which isn’t that far from reality, given that her relationship with it stretches back to 2017 when she unsuccessfully tried a thru-hike of it, having to stop after only 80 miles because of a panic attack. She says the attempt was her whole identity at the time, and that the failure became a valuable learning experience in not being afraid to sometimes come up short while trying hard.
Tara’s Appalachian Trail tattoo represents her relationship with the trail.
Of course, we all know what happened later: She not only completed the thru-hike in 2019 but she set the FKT in 2024. That FKT performance, which was better than everyone before her, including all the women and men, produced a stratospheric level of interest by the media. It’s likely that if you are a sports fan of any kind in America, your favorite news source covered Tara’s accomplishment last year. It is probably safe to say that this trail has thus been with Tara through some of her highest highs and lowest lows.
Tara waxes passionate about her gutsy run to take second at the Black Canyon 100k earlier this year, where she secured a golden ticket to run the Western States 100 only six months after her Appalachian Trail FKT, and where some folks wondered if Tara would be able to run fast again following that all-day, every-day, for-40-days effort. When asked about that turnaround, she defends an experimental approach to endurance running, “We’ve just been following the same scripts for years [in sports]. And people, because of their personal experience, put limits on others.” She goes on to say, “My whole ultra career has just been like, you don’t know if you don’t try.”
Tara recovers after a hill stride during her morning run.
We talk about Blind Jerry, a stray dog with no eyesight who wandered his way into Tara’s family’s hearts in 2014, accompanied Tara through most of her twenties, was always curious and playful despite his challenges, and lost a fast battle with cancer in February of 2024. He is now commemorated by another tattoo on Tara’s arm. “Oh, Blind Jerry,” she says, her voice full of emotion while she touches a scabbed hand to the tattoo. “I held him in my arms when he passed. It was right after that year’s Black Canyon 100k,” where Tara finished eighth in what she had previously described as a hard race during a hard period of her life. We can see — and feel — that Tara quite literally wears part of her heart on her sleeve for dear Blind Jerry.
She reflects on her developing interest in the Western States 100, which evolved while attending the race for the first time last year, to pace Careth Arnold. She admits she didn’t understand the hype around the event until she experienced it herself. “There are beautiful places on the trail, obviously, but the course isn’t the most beautiful.” She was drawn instead by the people and the event’s history: “I wanted to go there for the community, and to test out where I stand in this iconic race. So many people have done it before me, Ann Trason and Courtney Dauwalter. I mean, everybody has done it, so it’s like, ‘Let’s see where we level up.’”
We talk about Tara’s relatively recent move to Durango from Virginia, which she is still totally fired up about. Situated at an elevation of 6,500 feet in Southwest Colorado and nestled at the base of the San Juan and La Plata Mountains, Durango has long been a hub for endurance athletes. Of late, however, there’s a particular growth of the trail running community, especially women. Count Tara amongst this new growth, she having settled here in the last year. She chose Durango because a couple of close friends, including her best friend Reese Barkley, live here. And then it wasn’t long until she was training on the trails and at The Vault with more friends like Robyn, Maggie Guterl, Sarah Ostaszewski, and Altra teammate Kyle Curtin. We also hear about the balance of her professional team, which includes her manager, Kelly Newlon, and nutritionist, Vic Johnson, in addition to her previously discussed run and strength coaches.
About her move to Durango, her friends, and the professionals she’s chosen to work with, she says, while making deep, unblinking eye contact, “I am working really hard to surround myself with good people who care about me.” In this moment, more is communicated in feelings than in words — messages about leaving behind heartbreak, about learning to advocate for oneself, and maybe, possibly, about how sometimes it will be the darkest before the dawn.
Tara putting in the work during her morning hill strides.
After half an hour or so, we wrap up the interview. Tara says she’ll head home, cook lunch, do some life admin, and edit videos for her YouTube channel until it’s time for that final workout. She says she’ll do all that without hardly sitting down. “I’m a doer, not a sitter. I can’t sit,” she says.
We are fortunate that she has chosen to sit with us, because with those words, it all starts to make sense. It wasn’t more than two minutes ago that she showed us one of the two matching tattoos she has of wings on the outsides of her feet. Wings attached to feet have long been a symbol of runners, and Tara says that’s why she has these. Her first tattoos, which she got straight out of college, were very simply inspired by seeing wings tattooed on the feet of another runner.
This symbol is thought to connect back to the Greek god Hermes, who was often depicted as a messenger with wings on his sandals and who was also always in motion. In Greek mythology, Hermes moved swiftly among all the worlds — of the gods, mortals, and those who’ve passed — and was able to communicate in special ways with everyone to deliver critical messages. As Tara climbs into her SUV, she gives us a big wave and a parting smile. We wave back, wondering, does Tara offer a message to us all?
Wings on her feet, fitting for a person who doesn’t sit still.
Tara is experiencing a truly meteoric rise in her professional running career. We have learned today that part of this is a result of improving on every aspect of her life. But we also wonder, can her success also be attributed to the way she seemingly embodies traits on opposite sides of the spectrum: seriousness with playfulness, following a training plan while still running hard on unplanned occasions for the sheer joy of it, learning from failure as much as success, a willingness to follow a nutrition plan while still loving sweets, being fiercely independent while still relying on community, and embracing the dark while choosing to live in the light. While so many try to find balance, Tara thrives among the extremes to create a life uniquely her own.
In a world where it’s easier to follow scripts, Tara Dower has tossed her lines in the bin and set off on her own journey, because as she says, “It doesn’t make sense to me why you wouldn’t just try.”
[Editor’s Note: This article is sponsored by Altra. Thank you to Altra for its sponsorship of iRunFar, which helps to make iRunFar happen and free for all to enjoy. Learn more about our sponsored articles.]
Tara Dower running amongst the sun and shadows — the light and dark — in Durango, Colorado.
