Austin runners hope to set record on Wonderland Trail in Washington
Allison Macsas and Mallory Brooks will run rugged 93-mile trail without outside support.
The Wonderland Trail circumnavigates Mount Rainier in Washington, and most people who see it carry loaded backpacks, sleep in tents and stop periodically to snap photos or soak their feet in streams.
Not Allison Macsas or Mallory Brooks.
The two Austin runners hope to set a new women’s time record as they cover the 93-mile trail without outside support. Weather permitting, they plan to begin their attempt today.
Time records are kept in three divisions — supported, in which crew members can help a runner by providing food or shoes or anything they need; self-supported, in which a runner can cache food or mail packages to him or herself; and unsupported, in which a runner can only carry his or her own supplies or eat and drink what they find in the wild.
Candice Burt holds the current women’s unsupported record of 31 hours, 11 minutes and 56 seconds. That’s just over a 20-minute pace, on a rugged, single-track trail with 22,000 feet of elevation gain and loss.
Macsas and Brooks would like to break the 30-hour barrier, and they’ve got a good shot of doing it. They’re aiming for a 15- to 16-minute-permile moving pace; stops to put on or take off layers, filter water, change socks and do other maintenance will drop that speed to between 17 and 19 minutes per mile.
“We definitely want to push that bar as low as we can, so we set a harder bar for the next people to leap over,” says Brooks, 33. “We don’t want to barely shave it off — it’s better to really push it to a new level.”