While spending the semester studying near the bottom of the globe, Ann Spencer has also stayed on top of her mountain- and trail-running game.
The 22-year-old from Anchorage on Friday won the women's division in the Northburn 50-kilometer race in Cromwell, New Zealand, in what was not only her debut at the 31-mile distance but also the farthest she has ever run.
Fueled by frosting and gummy bears on a course that featured more than 8,500 feet of elevation gain and equal descent, Spencer clocked 6 hours, 6 minutes, and finished third overall.
" We started at 6 a.m. in the dark, which is also something I had never done before," Spencer said by email. "My headlamp was pretty bad so I kept having to run in front of other people and steal their light until the sun came up.
"Looking down the mountain and seeing the trail of bobbing lights winding their way up the trail was beautiful though. It reminded me of fireflies."
Spencer is a student at Middlebury College in Vermont and studying this semester at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, before returning to Middlebury later this year.
Spencer's 50K victory marked the second long race she has run recently after she "decided I would chase the mountain running circuit while I was here."
In February, Spencer finished second among women and 19th overall in The Hillary 34K (21 miles). She clocked 3:40:37, which topped the previous race record by 3:36 and was the second-fastest time in race history. Spencer also persevered in difficult conditions.
"That was a really hard race — 85 degrees and no breeze almost killed this Alaskan," Spencer reported. "It was a mental game of 'just keep moving' for the last hour or so."
Spencer made her first big impression on Alaska's mountain-running scene as an 18-year-old in 2013, when she finished third in her senior-race debut at Mount Marathon, considered the Super Bowl/Olympics of mountain-running in the state. She clocked 56:15 for the journey up and down the 3,022-foot peak in Seward. That was about nine minutes faster than her goal of 1:05:00 and considerably better than her other goal of a top-15 finish.
Last summer, Spencer finished fifth at Mount Marathon in a personal-best 55:11. She also finished third at Government Peak, an uphill-only race, and fifth in the Crow Pass Crossing back-country marathon.