Glass ceiling is awfully thin at this race

For decades, researchers have theorized that the graphs of male strength and female endurance must intersect at some point beyond the typical 26-mile marathon. Western States 100 competitor Ann Trason has been running inexorably closer to that point every year since 1991.

The race is remarkable as an event in which the gender barrier of athletics is challenged each year. Trason, of Kensington, California, has consistently beat nearly all of the men in this race, pushing the envelope in a way that has physiologists and human performance specialists anticipating a breakthrough.

In fact, in May of 1992 she won the Quicksilver 50-Mile Endurance Race in San Jose outright, over a good men's field. But a victory at the Western States 100, which draws the best ultramarathoners in the country, would silence male apologists and signal a true competitive equality not dreamed of when the Olympics banned women from running the 800 meters in 1924 because it was considered too far.

In 1989, Trason won the Western States women's category in 18 hours and 47 minutes, and cracked the top 10 overall. In 1992, her time of 18:14 was third overall. After another third-place finish the next year, she was second overall in 1994, only 46 minutes back from Tim Twietmeyer.

But last year she wasn't just politely knocking at the door to sporting equality; she was ready to knock it down. In horrendous conditions, she trailed Twietmeyer's 18:34.58 by a mere five minutes and three seconds, whipping one of the fabled running Tarahumara Indians of Copper Canyon, Mexico, by another six minutes and 378 other men and women by even more staggering margins.

Adding to her legend: the Tarahumaras were, to say the least, a bit put off by sharing the trail with a woman. By many accounts they teased and taunted her as she passed them. They called her "the white witch."

While physiologists hail the speed with which women have progressed in endurance sports--the most common citation being Ingrid Kristiansen's world marathon record of two hours and 21 minutes, 11 percent slower than the men's record of 2:06.50--Trason alone seems able to make that quantum leap in a major sport not aided by machine. While even the incomparable Paula Newby-Fraser has been noted for her 11th overall finish at the Hawaiian Ironman, her best time remains 10.8 percent slower than Mark Allen's mark there.

It is out on the rugged and forbidding trails of the Western States--where performances differ every year due to huge variations in weather and conditions--that Trason works her magic. In a race of this length, the importance of sheer physical power drops to something under 10 percent and mental strength dominates, says Sally Edwards, the 1979 Western States winner and endurance sport pioneer. Somewhere out beyond the 60- or 70-mile mark, some 12 hours into the race, hormonal and muscle mass differences melt away and it becomes a race of almost pure spirit.

In 1988, in her second attempt at Western States, Trason's late-race vomiting took a course medical worker by surprise. He put her on an IV and halted her race. But now they all know. As she told Outside magazine in 1993, "Now I'm used to throwing up. I do it all the time. There's just something about my stomach. I can't go more than 12 hours into a race without throwing up. But I've learned to adjust to it. Now I don't even slow down."

Add to that races run with hamstring pulls, swollen ankles, a myriad of other leg injuries, and a racing regimen where there is little or no such thing as tapering and a recuperative run may be 35 miles in the hills of the Bay Area.

Back in the early 1990s, her husband, ultramarathoner Carl Andersen, (who was one of only eight men to beat her to the finish in his only completed Western States 100 in 1991) told Outside: "Trail etiquette says you make way for the overtaking runner, but none of those guys would get off the trail for Ann." That soon changed, he said. "She's so good that men have sort of made an exception for her. There are all the rest of the women, and then there's Ann."

Trason, a shy 35-year-old bio-tech researcher when she is not running impossible distances at impossible speeds, says she is not in it to beat other people--men or women--and races only to challenge herself. Andersen says she seems to become truly herself only on the trails of the Western States or on the trails of Mount Tamalpais near her home in the Bay Area, away from the limelight and the fancy full color ads for her nutrition company and for Nike (she is the only ultramarathoner in their stable).

Actually, the anticipation of a victory over the men weighs heavily on her. "Sometimes I think it is unfair," Trason said. "Why isn't [being] first woman enough? If I am not at least second overall here (at the Western States 100), they will say I slipped." She can muster a quiet giggle of satisfaction when recalling her fiercest challenge: "For me, just scaring Tim [Twietmeyer] last year was enough. When he saw me run into Auburn Lake Trails checkpoint last year, his eyes were as big as saucers."

This year's race could be a tough one for Trason. After training for the women's Olympic marathon trials in February, she emerged from that session with a left leg nerve injury that did not allow her to run at all until late April.

Nonetheless, with legendary powers of recuperation, she managed to get ready for the famous 53.8-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa, and obliterated the women's record by 19 minutes with a 6:13 clocking on the tougher uphill course on June 17th.

To put this all in perspective, three-time men's Western States 100 winner Tom Johnson ran Comrades, too, finishing seventh overall, and did not even contemplate racing Western States this year.

Trason's husband is also her greatest admirer. "Ann is so tough, so fierce. The world will be watching Michael Johnson try for his double [medals] in Atlanta; but in my mind, Ann's Comrades-Western States double is far tougher," Andersen said.