A glimpse into 2026 suggests next year could be even brighter for this Colorado Springs runner.
Anne Flower had one heck of a 2025 running season, and will likely get strong consideration for ultrarunner of the year awards in the coming weeks. But 2026 could be even brighter for this rising star.
The 35-year-old Colorado Springs runner started her year by taking second at the Big Sur International Marathon (2:52:56) in April, then won the Leadville Trail Marathon, Leadville Silver Rush 50-miler, and the Leadville 100 (17:58:19)—famously breaking Anne Trason’s 31-year-old course record—and capped it off by shattering the world record for 50 miles (5:18:57) at the Tunnel Hill 50 in Vienna, Illinois on November 10.
Throw in her outright win at the 2024 Javelina Jundred 100K (8:23:13) and several ultra wins in Moab, Utah, since 2019, and you can see that Flower has been on an upward trajectory for years, all while balancing her career path as an emergency room doctor since 2017.
Here are six takeaways from the stunning season she had this year, and where she might be going in 2026.
Although she obliterated Courtney Olsen’s year-old world record at Tunnel Hill, surprisingly, it hadn’t been something she had planned on running for very long.
Flower is from Cincinnati and was planning to visit her family to celebrate her grandmother’s 97th birthday in early November. She had considered running the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon, but was nervous about running fast with the same gait on an achy hamstring. When she realized the Tunnel Hill races were the same weekend, she got in touch with race director Steve Durbin and signed up on November 1, just a week before the race.
Flower admits she didn’t know what to expect heading into Tunnel Hill. She had chatted with Olsen about the course prior to the 50-mile race (Olsen set a new American record of 6:59:55 in the 100K at Tunnel Hill), and was hoping to race alongside two-time U.S. Olympian and 2018 Boston Marathon champion Des Linden, who was signed up but withdrew six days before the race because of a minor injury suffered in the New York City Marathon on November 2.
Flower initially hoped to average 6:30 mile pace, but found herself running much faster than that with several top men. She said she felt great through the first marathon (averaging 6:15-6:20 pace), and believes she benefitted from the venue’s low-altitude and cool morning conditions.
“I wanted to podium for sure, and I knew I would be happy running under 6 hours, but I wasn’t sure how the rest would play out,” she said. “The first marathon obviously felt awesome. And then toward 35 miles, it was starting to get strenuous. It was getting hotter, and the terrain was a little more variable. Then about 38 was when I started having to come up with a mental model of how I was gonna get through these last 12. My paces didn’t get that much worse, but it felt much harder. The final miles felt pretty hard. It was definitely a case of the five stages of grief with some bargaining and negotiating, and figuring out how I was gonna get it done.”
The coolest thing about her record-setting win? She gave some of race earnings back to the local community of Vienna, and Durbin helped match it with a combined $1,000 donation to the Arrowleaf Client Choice Food Pantry.
Growing up in Cincinnati, Flower was a good high school runner but didn’t get into running longer distances until she was a medical student at Ohio University. After running her first half marathon, she entered Cincinnati’s Flying Pig Marathon in 2016 on a whim—and won in 2:55:46. But by the end of that year, she lowered her PR twice to 2:40:32.
While working as a resident physician at the University of Kentucky, she earned a qualifying entry into the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta, eventually finishing 113th out of 390 finishers in 2:44:23. She didn’t try to qualify for the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials in Orlando, Florida, but admits the thought of running fast for 26.2 miles on the roads still holds intrigue.
Although she’s emerged as a top ultrarunner, she said she’d consider going after the 2:37:00 qualifying time for the 2028 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon (which would require averaging 6-minute mile pace) and has toyed with the idea of running the California International Marathon on December 7 in Sacramento, California—a race that Courtney Dauwalter will be running.
“Yeah, that’s also very interesting to me,” she said. “I think on a really good day, I could go toward 2:37, but there’s no way I’m going to run 2:20. Marathoning is super incredible and going to the Olympic Trials is a big thrill, but then after that it’s a bit of a let-down for 99 percent of the runners (who don’t make the Olympic team).”
Flower is an emergency medicine doctor at UC Health’s Memorial Hospital Central in Colorado Springs (and other ER locations in Colorado Springs), a highly stressful job that presents different problem-solving challenges everyday. She typically works five morning shifts, five evening shifts and five overnight shifts each month, giving her flexibility to find time for long training runs around Colorado Springs.
On a recent episode of the Trail Society podcast, she described the parallels of ultrarunning with her job in emergency medicine. In the ER, she tries to control the stimuli she takes in, breathes deeply to lower her heart rate, and focuses on her medical training and skills. She uses similar tactics to stay calm and trust her training in running a race, she said, and relies on the balance that the two challenging parts of her life bring her on a regular basis.
“Medicine is still something I really enjoy,” she said. “It’s challenging. It’s fulfilling. It’s certainly not fun or easy all of the time. I would struggle to be as good at running if it was all that I did.”
Last summer in Leadville, Flower famously wore a pair of circa-2023 Hoka Tecton X2 shoes that she bought on Ebay. But at Tunnel Hill, she wore a pair of shiny new Hoka Rocket X2—the brand’s recently released carbon-plated road racing shoe—that Hoka sent her.
“It was awesome, a really good shoe for that course,” she said. “The challenge with Tunnel Hill is there’s a bajillion rocks and gravel of every size you can imagine, and a lot of the folks who wore (Nike) Alphaflys, the rocks were actually caught in the lower part of the shoe. But that didn’t happen for me. I felt very confident going into it that my footwear was not going to be the problem.”
If I was a sports marketing director for a running shoe company, I’d extend a 2026 contract to Flower in a heartbeat. She said she has reached out to several shoe brands, including Hoka, but so far she’s still a free agent. “In chats, nothing definite,” she says, “but it sounds reassuring,”
For better or for worse, a lot of the attention in trail running media coverage—especially in the U.S.—has gone to Courtney Dauwalter and Katie Schide, which has left some fans, media, podcasters, and followers of the sport to wonder who will emerge next at that top-tier international level. The answer is that many American women are right there—Abby Hall, Rachel Entrekin, Tara Dower, Riley Brady, Lotti Brinks, Careth Arnold, and Rachel Drake, to name a few—and many more right on the cusp, including Flower’s Colorado Springs training partner Hannah Allgood and another Colorado Springs doctor Lauren Puretz.
Flower has been inspired by the leveling up of women’s trail and ultrarunning in the U.S. While she’s been running ultras intentionally since 2019, she has mostly run races in Colorado and Utah during that span.
“There are definitely lots of people that have had incredible years,” Flower says. “I’ve had a lot of diversity in the races I’ve run, so I think that’s pretty cool as well.I’m excited to have done a fast 50-mile as well as a very mountainous 100-mile race. The only thing I was actually signed up for at the start of the year was the Leadville Trail Marathon. Everything else just kind of fell into place. But yeah, it’s been incredible. I’m super grateful for how everything has happened. It would be an honor to be considered for any awards, but there is a lot of good company.”
Flower admits Tunnel Hill’s very gradual rail trail course and its gradual ascents and descents are probably more optimally suited for her than a rugged trail mountain course. That could indicate she could also run well on the Western States 100 course. Flower is signed up for the Black Canyon Ultras 100K on February 14 in Arizona, which is somewhere in between, and if all goes well, she’ll be in contention to secure one of the three Golden Tickets for next summer’s Western States. “That’s what I’m looking toward next,” she said. “I think that’ll be really fun,” she said. “I’m curious to see how I stack up to a lot of very professional runners.”
With or without a shoe sponsor, the sky’s the limit for Flower. The relatively fast, flowy course of the Black Canyon 100K could be ideal for Flower, and earning a spot in the Western States 100 would be exciting—especially given her success over 50- and 100-milers. (She won all three of the 50-milers she’s entered and her only 100-miler.)
“I think I’m way more excited about running than I ever have been, honestly,” Flower told iRunFar’s Eszter Horanyi. “And I wasn’t sure exactly where my priorities would be in terms of looking at 2026, but I think that after some soul-searching and some discussions with my husband, I’m pretty all-in to see where this goes for the next months to a year to see what other races I might be able to get into and what might be possible. It’s also been really cool.”
