Ultramarathoner Scott Jurek set a new speed record Sunday for hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, beating the previous best recorded time by about three hours.
Jurek reached the trail head on Mount Katahdin shortly after 2 p.m., completing his hike in 46 days, eight hours and eight minutes, according to Twitter posts. Jurek tweeted a photograph of himself celebrating. Most people who try to hike the entire trail take months to cover the same ground.
Jurek, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, reported on his Facebook page late Saturday that he had spotted the peak of Katahdin for the first time.
“Hard to put into words,” he wrote.
Jurek hit the tree line on Mount Katahdin about 1 p.m. Sunday, according to a post on his Facebook page.
He used DeLorme’s InReach GPS mapping service to track his 2,180-mile trek between the trail heads on Springer Mountain in Georgia and on Mount Katahdin. He started the hike at 5:56 a.m. on May 27.
His progress was monitored at the Yarmouth mapping company’s mapping site.
Jurek was out to beat the previous record of 46 days, 11 hours and 20 minutes, set by long distance runner Jennifer Pharr Davis in 2011. He had to reach Katahdin’s Baxter Peak by 5:15 p.m. Sunday in order to do so.
An ultramarathon is a footrace that is longer than a marathon – namely, more than 26 miles, 385 yards.
Jurek has won numerous ultramarathon events and holds the U.S. record for 24-hour distance on all surfaces at 165.7 miles in 2010. He is a vegetarian and author of “Eat & Run.”
Jurek could not be reached for comment Sunday night.
About 2 million to 3 million people hike a section of the Appalachian Trail annually but only about 2,000 attempt a continuous hike, or “thru-hike.” It takes most thru-hikers six months of trekking to complete the trail, which winds its way up the East Coast through 14 states. Only one in four who attempts the thru-hike completes the journey.
Jurek, 41, told Runner’s World Newswire on the second day of the hike that this could be his last competitive endurance challenge before retiring to raise a family with his wife.
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