Simply over three months after the ladies’s 100-mile world file was most not too long ago lowered, American Ashley Paulson set a brand new mark on February 20, 2026, by operating 12:19:34 on the Jackpot 100 Mile in Henderson, Nevada. The occasion, held only a handful of miles away from the Las Vegas strip, served because the USATF 100 Mile Nationwide Championships. Paulson beat the previous girls’s file, which was set on the 2025 Tunnel Hill 100 Mile by Caitriona Jennings of Eire at 12:37:04, by greater than 17 minutes.
American Ashley Paulson setting a girls’s 100 mile world file on the 2026 Jackpot Extremely 100 Mile. Picture: Aravaipa Working/R21 Images
Working round a 1.19-mile (1.91 kilometers) loop across the 31-acre pond on the heart of Cornerstone Park, racers skilled cool temperatures all through the day. The 8 a.m. begin time noticed calm circumstances on the former gravel mine, with the wind choosing up because the day wore on.
To interrupt the earlier file, Paulson must maintain a mean tempo of seven:34 minutes per mile over the course of the 100 miles. She began the race aggressively, operating splits hovering round 7 minutes per mile for in regards to the first 20 miles. Though she nonetheless had a couple of laps at that tempo over the next 25 miles, the bulk have been round 7:10 per mile. About midway by the occasion, with about 6 hours on the clock, Paulson’s tempo slowed considerably, and it appeared to simply be a matter of seeing how a lot of the buffer she’d constructed — which was on the order of half an hour — would stay. Her tempo hovered round 7:30-minute miles up till the 80-mile mark after which crept additional up with a fifth of the space left to cowl. Ultimately, even because the buffer shrank by a bit of bit within the last miles, Paulson held on to set a brand new world file.
Ashley Paulson celebrating after setting a girls’s 100 mile world file. Picture: Aravaipa Working/R21 Images
That is the primary world file for Paulson is maybe greatest recognized for holding the ladies’s course file on the Badwater 135 Mile. She first set the file there in 2022, putting third general, after which reset it the next 12 months, shaving almost 2.5 hours off her earlier time and profitable the occasion general. Paulson isn’t any stranger to the Jackpot course, having received the 100-mile occasion in 2024 however DNFing in 2025. She’s additionally received the 2025 Bigfoot 200 Mile — an occasion the place she positioned second in 2024. Moreover, she received the 2025 Zion 100 Mile and the 2023 Throughout the Years 100 Mile, and was ninth on the 2024 Cocodona 250 Mile.
Coming into the Jackpot 100 Mile, Paulson had clearly said her intention to go after the 100-mile world file in an Instagram put up. The course is USATF-certified, and the file should be ratified by the Worldwide Affiliation of Ultrarunners.
[Ashley Paulson served a six-month doping sanction in 2015 and 2016 due to a doping violation in triathlon for a positive test for ostarine, a selective androgen receptor modulator (SARM), from a contaminated supplement.]
