Guterl finished her loop, and the crowd watched to see if Hayward's head lamp would split the darkness, leading him in before the clock ticked 60. But as the final "time's almost up!" warning whistles blew, no shards of light glimmered on the trail. He'd gotten a little lost mid-circuit, and Guterl became the first woman victor in one of running's most epic, masochistic events.“i figure everyone already knows / but if you are living in a cave / maggie guterl of colorado won the 2019 world championship of backyard ultra at the big's backyard ultra,” the race director, Gary Cantrell (aka Lazarus Lake), wrote in an almost poetic post on Facebook. The "backyard" in the race title, by the way, is his backyard. “not the women's world championship / the world championship of everybody, period.”
Guterl was once a regular, midpack road runner who wandered onto a trail on a run in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, one day. After that, she took on more trail races, powered through longer trail races, got a coach , and now finds herself a world champion. With this victory, she joined a small but growing cadre of women athletes who are competing with elite men , and winning.
Endurance sports may not exactly be a level physiological (or social) playing field, but women do earn, as Guterl did, top overall spots in the most grueling events—which they wouldn’t in, say, sprinting . These long-slog races aren’t all about gigantic lung capacity and muscle measurements. They’re also about repetition, pacing, fatigue so extreme you get zombie eyes, hormone fluctuations, spiraling thoughts, high highs, low lows—and, mostly, not listening to that voice in your head that says, “You could just stop.”
