THE DIRT DIVA

A vibrant and vivacious personality, Catra Corbett is a confident and omnipresent competitor. And she’s running for her life.

- Alisha McDarris

CATRA CORBETT IS AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE IN ULTRARUNNING AND AN UNMISSABLE ICON ON THE TRAIL.

It would be hard to miss her fluorescent and usually matching athletic wear, bright-pink locks twisted into twin buns on the top of her head, tattoos and facial piercings a blur in the California sun as she whisks by you with a smile (and at least one dachshund running alongside).

Catra Corbett turns heads. She’s impossible not to notice at the dozens of ultras or, if you happen to be in the California backcountry, solo trail excursions she runs every year. Now 56, Corbett, of Bishop, California, holds the FKT for a double run of the John Muir Trail: over 400 miles in 12 days 4 hours 57 minutes. Now she runs it nearly every summer, just for fun.

She is the first American woman to run 100 100-mile races. She’s podiumed in 64 ultras across the country, including placing third at the Beyond Limits 72-hour ultra just this April. She’s the only woman to complete the San Diego 100 10 times, and she regularly orchestrates solo hundred-milers just for the heck of it.

And this year, she plans to be the first person to run the Triple Crown of 200s (the Bigfoot, Tahoe and Moab Endurance Runs) three times.

“She is persistent,” says her friend and fellow runner Mike Palmer. “She’s unique in that most of the time she accomplishes what she says she’s going to do no matter how outlandish it may seem to others.”

However, Corbett wasn’t always a picture of such confident, determined energy on the trail. In fact, her running career didn’t start on a high-school track or a college cross-country team. It began in a jail cell.

In The Beginning