Megan Eckert Ran Her First Race in 2016 and Now Holds the Six-Day World Record

Most mornings Megan Eckert runs the three miles to the Santa Fe school where she teaches special education, and in the afternoons she coaches cross-country and track at Capital High. Her students have her figured out. “The kids are like, ‘You’re that teacher that runs to work,'” she told iRunFar in a profile last year. Last week she covered 636.482 miles (1,024.319k) in six days at the GOMU 6-Day World Championship in Hungary, which is the farthest any woman has run in that time.

Her First Race Was in December 2016

She was 30. iRunFar reports it was the Rock and Roll half-marathon in San Antonio, entered because the man she was dating, now her husband, wanted to, and the Santa Fe New Mexican dates it to that December. She won a trail marathon the following May, per iRunFar, then ran her first ultra that August, a 60K at Capt’n Karl’s in Texas: 11th overall, third woman, 7:53:11. Her first 100-miler was the Habanero Hundred in August 2018, and she won it outright in 21:14:36, which is a strange thing to do on a first attempt at the distance.

Her file with the Deutsche Ultramarathon-Vereinigung, the sport’s results database, runs to 66 results across 54 events and 10,084 kilometers, and Hungary is not in it yet.

She Wins Outright on Loops and Against the Clock

The pattern in her results is not flat ground, it is repetition. Her outright wins, meaning first across the whole field rather than first woman, come on measured loops and in races scored by a clock: the Habanero Hundred in 2018, a 12-hour at The Circus later that year, the Capitan Mountain 34-hour, Six Days in the Dome, a 12-hour at Across the Years last December, and the world championship. Two of them are on trail rather than track; what they share is a loop and a deadline.

Mountain hundreds are harder for her, though not uniformly. Leadville in 2022 put her 101st overall and 15th woman, and Run Rabbit Run in 2024 put her 38th. She won the women’s race at Angeles Crest in 2024 in 22:02:52, seventh overall, and was second overall at the Northburn 100 in New Zealand in March. Her fastest 100 miles, 15:06:30, came as a split inside a 24-hour race on the track at Desert Solstice in December 2024, and her mountain hundreds have taken between 22 and 34 hours.

Three Six-Day Races, and the Record in Two of Them

She had not run one until June 2024, and she has still only run three. The first was Six Days in the Dome, on the 443-meter indoor oval at Milwaukee’s Pettit National Ice Center, where she covered 846.999k and finished ahead of the other 21 starters. At the world championships in France, run from April 28 to May 4 last year, she went 970.685k, which stood as the women’s best until last week and which the IAU has still not ratified. In Hungary she added 53.634k to it and won the race.

The Ultramarathon Database has her passing that old mark on lap 1,081, 135 hours and 38 minutes in, walking, after a night of long stops that included one lap of 38 minutes and 50 seconds. She had 8 hours and 22 minutes left on the clock, and she used them.

Away from the loops she is still formidable. She was second woman and eighth overall at Badwater 135 in July 2025. She held the women’s backyard ultra world record for a year with 87 laps at Big Dog’s in 2024, and was in the same race the following October when Sarah Perry took it with 95; Eckert got to 92 that day, her own best. This year brought third woman at the Cocodona 250 in May and the women’s win at the Vermont 100 in July, in 17:19:56.

No Coach, No Training Plan

“I don’t work with a coach. I don’t even follow a plan. Everything is very loose,” she told iRunFar. She is candid with the teenagers she coaches, too. “I’m not a fast person, and they’re running these 5ks, and they’re quick,” she told the same profile.

She starts by saying she does not know why she is this good, then answers anyway. “I don’t really know why I’m so good,” she told the Santa Fe New Mexican in 2024, before getting to her actual point: “If you’re always comparing yourself to everybody else, you’re never going to be confident enough to even chase your own goals.” Once a race is under way, she told her crew at the backyard ultra, either she times out or she gets injured, “but there’s no backing out. That’s not an option.”

What She Is Chasing

Eckert has said she wants an overall record rather than a women’s one, though she was talking about a different race at the time. Asked by iRunFar in February 2025 about going back to Big Dog’s, she said she would “like to see if I could hold the overall [record] at some point.” She has not got that one. She does have an outright win over a men’s field at a world championship, and a six-day distance 23k short of the best on record.

GOMU lists that best as Ivan Zaborskii’s 1,047.554k from 2025, and it is waiting on ratification too. At the pace Eckert held in Hungary, 23k is a little over three hours.

She turned 40 four weeks before the race.