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Imagine being cramped in an airplane like you're in a small car, sitting shoulder to shoulder with a teammate for hours at a time.

You're flying across a desert, sweat is collecting on your body and the sun seems to be hanging just above your head, but you have to keep the air vents closed because opening them would slow down your plane.

A team of three women — two of them with St. Louis ties — stuck through four days of this, traveling 2,720 miles from Prescott, Ariz., to Daytona Beach, Fla., as they competed in the country's oldest all-women airplane race.

So why do they do it?

"It's completely liberating when you're busy at home, life, work, and bosses and timeframes and timelines," said teammate Denise Robinson, 55, of Connecticut. "When you walk around to an airfield, walking to your plane, everything is completely gone except you, the plane, the weather and your flight plan."

The team, called Purple Hearts because they're fundraising to support military families, also includes Cary Fletcher of St. Louis and Terry Camp, who lived in Maryland Heights for more than a decade and now lives in Connecticut.

This past week, they participated in the 40th annual Air Race Classic. Amelia Earhart was one of the first women to participate in this race, which traces its origins to 1929.

Participants are given a handicap to their plane as a challenge to overcome. The Purple Hearts, who flew Robinson's Piper Archer II plane, had to deal with an extra rudder.

The goal is to race your plane as fast as possible in spite of the handicap and other obstacles that come up, while strategically making use of tailwinds and other factors to maximize their speed. The race happens over the course of four days, but pilots only fly a specific distance for a certain amount of time each day.

The Purple Hearts overcame a broken rudder and a lost alternator, as well as desert summer heat. They finished on Friday with 2½ hours before the deadline for the planes to arrive.

"I think it's very empowering," said Camp. "It makes you feel strong. It kind of symbolizes the strength of women, like the frontier spirit."

The women will hear Sunday where they placed among the 55 teams that competed.