Listen to the full interview with Ann Trason
The popularity of ultra running has shot through the roof with finisher numbers in the U.S. nearly tripling since 2007, and the number of women in the traditionally male-dominated sport rising dramatically.
One of the world’s most famous female runners is Ann Trason, who broke 20 records in her day. Her signature race is the 100 Mile Western States Endurance Run from Squaw Valley to Auburn in California.
Ann has run this trail so often that she knows it like the back of her hand. Once at night, when she didn’t want competitors to know how close ahead she was, she switched off her light and ran in the dark.
“It’s a place I call my home, it’s a special place,” she says sitting on a bench overlooking the Western States trail leading up to Auburn. She still remembers the first time she ran it.
“It captured something in me, I just felt it was in my blood, I can’t explain the beauty, the freedom.”
The Western States is the world’s oldest and arguably most famous 100-mile race. It leads runners through snowy mountains and boiling hot canyons, over rocky trails and hanging bridges – all with only 30 hours to finish. If you are even one second over, bad luck. No finisher buckle for you.
Ann has won this race 14 times and her course record of 17:37:51 stood for 18 years. But she has never really identified with the term “elite”, she says.
“My favourite runs are things where I run across the Sierras by myself,” she says. “I would just do these runs and mail my clothes somewhere and spend the night and then run back to my car a different way. That’s my favourite thing to do in the world. If I could do that every day, I’d be happy.”
Even if she doesn’t identify with the term elite, Ann has had the competitiveness of an elite runner from the very start. She doesn’t like to be shown up. After learning that one of her idols, Sally Edwards, had run the American River 50 Mile Endurance Run, she decided to sign up too, only six weeks before the event.
Ann caught up with Sally during the race, but the more experienced runner called her a rabbit, suggesting Ann was going out too fast and wouldn’t be able to keep up. That comment didn’t go down well.
“My feelings got hurt, and I decided I was either going to die or I was going to beat her,” Ann recalls.
She won American River that year and set the course record. And then she heard about Western States. When she called home to talk about the 100 mile race, her mother said: “Oh you heard about that? I was afraid of that.”
Knowing how to prepare for such a distance wasn’t easy. The sport was far from as popular as it is now and there was little information to go by.
“There was one guy, Chuck Jones, who’d won it and he ran like a 180, 200 miles a week. So I thought that’s what you did.”
The plan didn’t go well and she ended up with a swollen knee three weeks before the race, dropping out at mile 50. The second year, she became very dehydrated and felt miserable at mile 93 – and the medical staff pulled her.
But this second defeat prompted a big rethink. Ann retreated to her parents’ remote property and spent days writing down everything she had learned in the last two years, seeking solutions for the problems that had cost her the finish. This analysis was to be the key to her subsequent successes.
From then on, she always noted down three problems she might experience during a race and how she would deal with them, be it gear failures or insufficient calorie intake.
“I set my watch to go off every 30 minutes so it reminded me to eat.”
To stay alert mentally, she invented games, such as pretending that every mile she ran represented her age.
It worked well at Western States where runners are faced with a massive climb right at the start. Those first steep miles can discourage runners, but Ann used to tell herself that she was just a few years old and learning to walk. Once you are over that mountain though, there is a lot of downhill.
“At mile 16 and you’re like, you’re adolescent, you better calm down and control your enthusiasm, because you’re going to hit middle age.”
Middle age is the gruelingly hot canyon section, and Ann would promise herself a beautiful retirement of fast running if she took care of herself in middle age. Finally even she would run out of energy, but that’s to be expected when you hit 90.
“With mile 93 when I feel really horrible, I go hey! You’re 93 years old, you’re moving, good going!”
It’s not surprising that Ann has become such an expert at overcoming challenges. She had to.
At college she suffered a knee injury and could no longer run. But after completing her biochemistry degree with honours at UC Berkeley, she got back into training and did a Half Ironman. Then she got hit by a car during bike training and decided to stay away from motor vehicles. She started trail running.
There were plenty of other injuries. She’s run both the Comrades 90k and Western States with a torn cruciate ligament, once badly tore a hamstring and still raced on it, and she has often struggled with back pain. Her surgeon thinks she has a very high pain threshold.
These days women make up nearly a third of the field at ultramarathons, but times were different when Ann started out in the 80s.
“It would be all guys and then there’d be Ann,” she says. “There were a lot fewer women running. There were still a lot of very talented women running, but probably not the depth.”
That also showed itself in some of the attitudes. After she failed to finish Western States twice, a male friend told her she simply didn’t have the right genes for this “man’s sport”. At the next WS race, Ann got back at him.
“When I saw him at mile 75, 70, when I passed him, I asked him how his genes were doing,” she laughs. That year she finished, and won.
Her gene-focused friend wasn’t the only one with outdated ideas. Taking women less seriously in the sport was a common attitude.
In 1996, Ann Trason told the New York Times that when she set a women’s world record some years earlier for 100 kilometers in the Netherlands, the media ignored her and instead focused on the male winner who’d finished ahead of her but hadn’t broken a record.
She also recalls that at some award ceremonies, the men received metal trophies and the women flowers that didn’t even last until they got home.
None of this could stop the sport’s rising popularity among women.
In 1987, when Ann entered WS for the first time, 16 of the 183 finishers were women – a mere 8.7%. In 2003, when Ann ran it for the last time, that percentage had increased to 20%. And at the 2015 Trails in Motion film festival, half the short films were about female athletes.
To be coached by Ann Trason check out her website.