Tara Dower may be one of the hardest athletes in trail running to categorize, and that is exactly what makes her so interesting heading into Western States 100.
In 2025 I wrote an article called The Quiet Line Between Ordinary and Elite. I had recently discovered an unknown ultrarunner who lived in my backyard. He worked a 9-to-5. He had no sponsors. He was not making podcast appearances. No one, apart from me perhaps, was predicting him to win Javelina or secure a Golden Ticket.
His name was Clint Anders, and he was confident he could win. His plan was to go big and ride the line out front as long as he could. If he blew up, well, there is always next year.
I watched my daughter’s volleyball tournament with the livestream in one ear. The coverage team had to talk about Clint as he finished loop one with the leaders. The first time they mentioned him, I could not help but hear Verne Lundquist saying, “Who the hell is Happy Gilmore?”
Impressions of Klattermusen,
Rachel Entrekein and the Story Trail Running Needed,
The Curious Case of Emory Atterberry
Then, somewhere around Coyote Camp, someone else caught my attention.
By then, Tara Dower was not unknown. She had the Appalachian Trail FKT. People who pay attention to the weird, long end of the sport knew the name. But Javelina was turning a thru-hiker with a giant engine into an obvious 100-mile racing problem.
She won in 13:31:47, finished seventh overall, set a new women’s course record, and punched her ticket back to Western States.
Officially, Javelina gave her a course record.
But Tara Dower comes from a world that thinks about time a little differently. Start here. Finish there. Stay upright. Solve the line. Be the fastest known person to the other end.
Western States does not call that an FKT. Still, Olympic Valley to Auburn is a line.
Tara talks like someone who still has one foot at a thru-hiker campsite, eating candy and laughing with people named Mudbag. Not the usual elite-athlete origin story.
Then again, after she DNF’d Mammoth 200, she was back at her Airbnb within about 12 hours working on her Javelina race document. Crew, pacers, recovery, beet juice, sleep. Already building the next attempt.
She has described herself as sitting between two worlds. On one side are the dirtbag thru-hikers. Gushers, pretzels, trail names, weird friends, local events, too much candy, not much concern for how things look. On the other side are the pros who can tell you their sweat rate to the decimal and have a spreadsheet for their spreadsheet.
Tara Dower Can Do Both
She can joke about Cheez-Its and Gushers as an old nutrition plan and then run roughly 8-minute pace for 100 miles.
Clint Anders interested me because he lived on the line between ordinary and elite. Tara makes the line harder to see. She is not ordinary by any measure. You do not set the overall Appalachian Trail FKT or bury a Javelina course record by accident. But she carries the open-door energy of the side of trail running that was never built around contracts, rankings, and media weeks.
She does not seem eager to lose that either. She has said that if she went all the way into the elite trail running world, she worries she would lose the joy that brought her there in the first place.
Her first run at Western States did not become the race she wanted. She was sick, coughed her way through far more of the course than most people would have, and eventually DNF’d around mile 72. So she signed up for Javelina because she wanted back.
There are cleaner athlete stories. The phenom. The grinder. The road runner converting to trails. Tara Dower is stranger than that. She is the thru-hiker who failed 80 miles into the AT and then eventually returned to the same trail and broke the overall record.
She is the runner who says every mile just needs to be the best mile it can be. She is the elite who still sounds a little suspicious of becoming too elite.
Western States will not care about any of this. The course is hot, old, proud, and good at finding weak spots. Tara Dower knows that already. But when she starts in Olympic Valley, I will not be watching only for splits.
I want to see which version shows up.
Maybe all of them do. Candy Mama. The AT record holder. The Javelina winner. The DNF podcast host.
And maybe, somewhere inside the race everyone else is watching, Tara will see the older thing too. A line through the mountains. A clock. A hard way to get from here to there.
Not an FKT, technically.
But if she has the day she is capable of, maybe Auburn gets something close enough: the fastest known woman to the track.
Clint was the guy nobody knew yet.
Tara Dower is the person everybody is trying to figure out in real time.
