Jackson recently knocked nearly two days off the women’s unsupported White Mountains Direttissima FKT.
By Nate Weitzer
Lexi Jackson isn’t your typical athlete.
How many ultrarunners will smoke cigarettes to train for poor air quality? How many seasoned mountaineers will take a couple shots of Hennessy before descending a frozen mountain in a blaze of consolidated snow? Or eat fast food consistently, avoiding vegetables to the point their significant other sneaks them into meals?
Jackson has tried laying off those vices. She was vegan for eight years and quit smoking for 10, but she’s found a balance, and when it comes to her results, the proof is in the pudding.
The accomplished trail runner from southern New Hampshire is coming off her most impressive unsupported effort yet, a thru-hike of the White Mountains Direttissima linking all of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot peaks in record time (5 days, 16 hours, 30 minutes), chopping nearly two days off the previous female fastest known time.
She holds records for the Appalachian Trail sections of Connecticut and Massachusetts, the 215-mile New England Trail, and on over a hundred segments on trails in the Whites. Oh, and she completed the White Mountains Grid (each 4K in each month), with her dog.
It took the better part of a year to prepare for the Direttissima with help from her coach, former Appalachian Trail record-holder Joe “Stringbean” McConaughy. The optimized route includes about 86,000 feet of elevation gain and loss over 240 miles, and Jackson wanted to do it unsupported with no outside help other than the occasional safety check-in with her husband or friends via her Garmin inReach device.
Battling frigid temperatures with mixed precipitation, midday heat, drought, and the potential for problematic wildlife, she hiked and ran from Mount Moosilauke over Mount Cabot to the York Pond Trailhead from August 27 to September 1.
“It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve done,” Jackson said. “But fastpacking is where it’s at. I had so much fun. It was stressful and exhausting but I love spending time out in the mountains.”
Jackson’s journey to completing one of the most rugged multi-day routes in the world began just over 10 years ago, as she was looking for an outlet to improve her mental health while cutting back on drinking and smoking.
A self-described “drama geek” in high school, she didn’t play any sports growing up and spent most of her weekends partying into her mid 20s. A New Year’s Resolution set her on a new path, beginning with a 4 a.m. run on January 1, building toward her first 5k in July.
While she couldn’t get through a three-mile run without slowing to a walk, Jackson persisted with thrice weekly workouts, ran two of the 2.8-mile trail race, and caught the ultrarunning bug a few weeks later when she read Scott Jurek’s book, Eat & Run, and decided a 100-mile race would be her next goal.
In a six-month span she raced road marathons of the half and full distance, then ran a 32-mile race in the rocky terrain of Blue Hills Reservation in Massachusetts. The progression continued over the next two years with a 50K, a 50-miler, and in 2018, she ran Grindstone 100 in Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains. To her surprise, she finished third, and began focusing on her next challenge, the Superior 100 in Minnesota.
But COVID essentially shut down organized racing, so Jackson turned to the FKT (fastest known time) scene and set her sights on the Mid-State Trail, a hilly 91-mile course running down the spine of Massachusetts.
“Finishing after 22 hours of being outside by myself … I actually enjoy being in my head that long,” said Jackson. “Making it there with no help. It was such an empowering feeling.”
“I’ve always been used to doing things on my own,” she added, since she moved in with her grandparents at 11 and helped raise her younger sister. With her mother dealing with mental health issues and her father working long hours, Jackson started working part-time at 14, paid bills by 16, and moved into her own apartment at 18.
To this day, she jokes that her coaches [McConaughy and Scott Traer] are the only men she allows to tell her what to do, but recognizes that these longer efforts have forced her to rely on people a bit more.
McConaughy gave Jackson a crash course in multi-day efforts for her four-day adventure on the New England Trail in 2021, but the Direttissima is a different beast. Starting last December, they went over training programs and dialed in her gear, and after multiple trial runs in the White Mountains, Jackson was finally ready to set out in late August. She chose a late summer start to prioritize cooler weather and fewer bugs over the optimal daylight of early summer.
Everything in her pack was streamlined down to the ounce and she started with 26 pounds in her 30-liter Ultimate Direction Fastpack. Her sleep system weighed just 2.98 pounds. She carried just under two pounds of headlamps, batteries, and chargers along with 1.54 pounds of safety gear (Garmin, phone, and bear spray for the problematic “Pemi Bear” aggressing on hikers this summer). Clothing and gear added up to roughly 3.6 pounds, so the base weight was 11.16 pounds, with the rest of the weight coming from food and water.
Just three miles into her effort on the way up Moosilauke from Beaver Brook Trailhead, she injured her ankle. “My good ankle!” Jackson lamented (trail runners often turn one ankle more often due to imbalances, etc.). She thought about texting her husband to swing back and pick her up. She again thought about postponing when freezing precipitation pelted her on Franconia Ridge, and again when it poured throughout her third day on the route.
Yet each time, Jackson found the motivation to keep moving.
“I’m a pretty stubborn person so it takes a lot for me to even consider not finishing something,” she said. “Growing up, I had a traumatic childhood where I didn’t have control over much of anything. I’ve been through a lot, so when I think about whether I can get up and run the next day, I think about the friends I’ve lost, the friends rooting for me, the work I’ve put in, and remind myself how lucky I am to be here [in the mountains], no matter how much it hurts.”
That steady mentality doesn’t mean Jackson is emotionless. In fact, she can go from flying down a trail singing and dancing to crashing out in a bowl of tears within a couple of miles. The final push of her Direttissima brought out all the feelings, as she decided not to sleep at Dolly Copp Campground between the Carter-Moriah Range and the Northern Presidentials, tackling huge climbs, a 12-mile road run, and the final section of gnarled trail on the Kilkenny Ridge in a delirious drive to finish under the six-days threshold.
Recovering over the next few weeks with swollen feet (yet miraculously, no blisters) and aching muscles, Jackson started to dream about what might come next. While some of her habits differ from most elite runners, there is definitely a strong internal drive in Jackson that powers her to push into the unknown.
“Running tapped into a competitive side I didn’t know I had, especially being very shy and introverted growing up,” she said. “Not just competitive with others, but with myself. Once I started covering longer distances, it gave me a respect for my body, for what it can do, not what it looks like on the outside. The feeling of doing something you would’ve never thought possible is addicting. You think, ‘Wow I just did that, but can I do more? Can I do it faster?’”
Nate Weitzer is an avid trail runner, backcountry skier, and mountain climber living in North Woodstock, New Hampshire, where he writes for multiple publications. Over the past 20 years he’s thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail, climbed Mt. Rainier, Adams, Baker, Hood, and skied off multiple volcanoes. Weitzer has summitted the NH 48 in all four seasons, finished the ADK 46er list while working trail maintenance in the Keene Valley area, and completed the Colorado 14ers over the course of four summers. Read his profile of the inaugural White Mountains 100 here.
