Nick Fowler Broke the Pacific Crest Trail Record Without a Support Crew

Nick Fowler has crossed the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail faster than anyone on record, and he did it carrying his own food. He reached the Mexican border at 9:34 p.m. on Aug. 22, 45 days, 17 hours and 47 minutes after leaving Canada. Aurélien Sanchez ran the trail in the opposite direction in July with a crew driving the route for him, and Fowler is 2 hours 24 minutes quicker. No outright record on the PCT has been set without a crew before.

A supported fastest known time is the easier way to go fast. The crew drives ahead, cooks, paces and has a bed ready when the runner stops. Self-supported means none of that. A runner can buy food in a town, sleep in a motel and fill up at a tap, but has to walk to all of it, and can take nothing from anybody who is out there to help. In practice it means carrying days of food at a time across the gaps between resupply towns, plus the extra miles of walking into them and out.

Fowler is 38, an entrepreneur from Oklahoma with a wife and a two-year-old son, and he came to all this late: his first long hike was in 2019, and he did not know what a fastest known time was until January 2021. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, which reported the record on Thursday, that he had raised his daily intake from 10,000 calories to 12,000, a good chunk of it from bottled Starbucks Frappuccinos.

What 57 Miles a Day Looks Like

He left the Canadian border at 3:47 a.m. on July 8 and averaged 57 miles a day for the next six and a half weeks. The day-by-day log he filed with his FKT submission shows how little those days varied: 46 miles at the shortest, 64.9 at the longest, roughly 18 hours on his feet in each. He also covered about 11.1 miles that are not on the trail at all, detouring for water and for the resupply stops he has to reach on foot.

Almost everything he did differently was an adjustment to his last attempt. He ate more, changed socks every 100 miles, cut vents into his shorts and went through about 15 pairs of shoes. He still lost 15 lb. “I was moving slower but I was moving longer,” he told the Chronicle, describing a method built on hours rather than pace. Of the Southern California desert he walked into at the end of August: “It’s extremely hot, and I don’t deal with heat very well.”

That 2023 attempt was also self-supported and also north to south, and took him 52 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes. He has taken 6 days, 15 hours and 31 minutes off his own time. “Anything I wished I had more of in ’23, I gave it to myself this time,” he said.

Twenty-One Years of Crewed Records

Every outright record on the PCT since David Horton’s 66 days in 2005 has belonged to a runner with a crew. Josh Garrett took it in 2013, Joe McConaughy in 2014, Karel Sabbe in 2016, Timothy Olson in 2021, and Sabbe again in 2023 in 46 days, 12 hours, 50 minutes. Sabbe’s time survived three summers, then fell twice inside 30 days, to Sanchez in July and to Fowler in August.

This is the second time Fowler has taken an outright record off a crewed one. In November 2024 he walked the 817-mile Arizona Trail self-supported in 12 days, 17 hours, 33 minutes, which iRunFar reported was quicker than McConaughy’s supported time on the same route. McConaughy is the coach Fowler hired in 2021, and his name is on the list above too.

The Other Runner on the Trail

Sanchez left Campo, Calif., on June 8 with his partner Lucille Malgouyres and her cousin Martin Tullot meeting him by road. iRunFar reported that a foot infection put him in the hospital for a night late in the attempt, and that he went back out and finished on July 23 in 45 days, 20 hours, 11 minutes. Fowler was two weeks into his own attempt by then, walking the other way, and the two met on the trail and covered a stretch together.

“I don’t consider that he beat my FKT,” Sanchez told the Chronicle. “I consider that he improved all FKT(s) of the Pacific Crest Trail from history, and I see that as very much inspiring.”

Fowler has filed a Garmin tracking link, a live tracking stream and a GPX file with Fastest Known Time, which reviews the evidence before a submission stands. Sanchez keeps the supported record either way: his 45 days, 20 hours, 11 minutes is still the fastest anyone has crossed the trail with help.