There are two ways to run marathons and ultras without “hitting the wall.” First, you can do high-mileage training and run your marathons very fast. My friend and former speedwork coach, 64-year-old Carl Ellsworth, won the 1994 and 1995 Northern California road-racing Grand Prix in his age group. Carl never uses sports drinks in the marathon or during training, only water, yet he never hits the wall. “When you’re out there for just three hours,” he told me with a smile, “the wall isn’t much of a problem.”
Another way to avoid the wall involves several factors. The first is training. Former Olympian Jeff Galloway says the body is only capable of doing on race day what it has done recently in training. So it’s a good idea to gradually build your long runs up to 26 miles or more, including frequent walking breaks. His marathon training program is explained in and (Shelter Publications, Bolinas, CA; or available directly from Galloway at (404) 875-4268).
The second strategy for “de-walling” the marathon involves appropriate fuels. I discussed these in “Running Your First 50-Miler.” That section also gives advice for carrying your own fuels, since most marathons provide sub-optimal race drinks at aid stations.
The question of fuels is trivial. It is simply not true that every fuel works equally well for every runner. Thus, it’s highly recommended that you experiment in training with the fuels mentioned here, as well as any other promising ones. Experiment and find the ones that work for you. It will make a world of difference in your races.
As a general rule, Kapha runners do well on GU, Pitta runners do well on Hammer Gel, and Vata runners don’t run marathons or ultras–they run 5K’s (if they can get that far without changing their minds).
SECRETS OF THE WILY OLD ULTRARUNNERS
I mentioned several ultramarathoning secrets in previous sections: duct tape, Trail Gators, fuels, 5:1 run/walk ratio. Here are some others:
[Training Mileage.] My friend and mentor, Jim Walker, had a revealing conversation with Jim King, three-time winner of the Western States 100.
Jim (Walker) was telling Jim (King) how he (Walker) had been training 120 miles per week in preparation for Western States. He was feeling pretty pleased and proud, and so he was very surprised when Jim King exclaimed. “Why are you killing yourself?! I won Western States three times, and I never ran more than about 70 miles a week!”
I’m not sure what this story proves, except that it’s impressive confirmation of something Dr. Timothy Noakes says in his authoritative book, . Researchers who studied the effects of high training mileage found that there were no significant improvements in endurance in runners who trained more than 70 miles/week–not even in runners who trained up to 230 miles/week.
Now, then, I know several runners who say they’ve run 100-mile and 50-mile races while training 90 and 120 miles per week, and who swear that they race faster, feel better, and recover faster on the higher mileage. How do you square this with Jim King’s experience, and the research that says 70 miles per week is enough?
I don’t know. But I suspect that age and individual differences play a role here. Past age 40, the body recovers slowly and needs more rest. Surely, there are 50- and 60-year-olds who can still run spectacular times. And it’s only logical that if you want to experience 100% of your potential as a racer, you’ll need to push hard in training, constantly exploring and pressing back the edges of what your body is capable of doing.
You may find that you simply break down if you train more than 70 miles per week. You may find that you can train for 100 miles a week, but when you add speedwork, you get sick, and your carefully built training program comes crashing down. Some people thrive on high mileage; some can’t handle it. There genetic limitations, and in the last analysis it’s up to you to find out what works best for your body.
You can handily finish a 50-miler on just 30 miles per week, provided you do lots of long runs. Or, you can do quite well in a 50-miler by running 70 or 90 miles a week. If you can run those 70-90 miles at 7:00 pace or faster, you’ll probably win races.
Set your goals and train accordingly. If you’re running ultras just for fun and social contact, foreseeing a long, gradual, comfortable improvement curve, with frequent races, then you surely don’t need to train high mileage. But if you want to race fast times, there simply is no getting around the need for lots of miles.
Let’s say you want to run a moderately fast 50, and you’ve decided to train 70 miles per week. How should you run those miles? Should you run fast, slow, short, or long?
The absolute first priority, regardless of your racing goal, is the long run. The training guide for entrants in the Western States race warns against running 90 miles per week in the form of six 15-mile runs, wrily noting: “You’ll be the best 15-mile runner in the race, but you probably will not finish.” (I’m paraphrasing.)
To run a 50 or 100, you do those training runs of 30+ miles, and you must do lots of them, using a walk-run strategy and building up to the point where you can run them on at least 2 out of 4 weekends per month, while decreasing the number of walking breaks, carefully monitoring yourself all the time to avoid overtraining.
If running 30 miles 2-4 times a month sounds a bit much, bear in mind that whatever your talents and condition, you will run those miles slowly enough that they don’t kill you. You be able to recover in time for the next run. You’re trying to improve, not destroy yourself. Right now, I can go out and run 30 miles and recover in 3-4 days, so long as I use the 5:1 run/walk strategy. By contrast, Dana Roueche can go out and run 33-36 miles every Saturday morning By the way, Dana gets up at 3 a.m. and runs from 4-10 a.m. so that he can keep the rest of Saturday free to spend with his family. In a word, awesome.
Don’t be guided by the amazing recovery times of ultrarunners with years and years of experience–to name just two: Matt Mahoney and Stan Jensen. Both ran Western States, then Hardrock two weeks later. As mentioned previously, Hardrock is the toughest trail 100, with over 32,000′ of climb, all of it in the wild backcountry of the Colordado Rockies.
By the way, I was enthusiastically telling my girlfriend Emily, a non-runner, about Matt and Stan’s feat. I said, “They climb 32,000 feet, and fifty percent of the runners drop out.” Emily said, “You mean, they fall off?” To give her credit, she promptly doubled over laughing.
Not a few ultrarunners get in their long runs by racing. I ran briefly with Suzi Shearer during the Sierra Nevada Endurance Run, a trail double marathon, and I asked her how she trains. “I don’t,” she said matter-of-factly. “I just race–probably two 50-milers or a 100 and a 50 every month. I might go out on a Wednesday and jog a few miles, but that’s all.”
Eric Robinson is another runner who trains by racing. Eric and I chatted during the ‘97 Jim Skophammer 24-Hour Run, where we were helping out on the sidelines. Eric said he enters at least two ultras per month and does no other running, except for a single midweek speedwork session. “I keep my race entries in a spreadsheet program, and sometimes I forget to log a race and realize on Friday that I’m entered in a race. It can get pretty hectic.”
[Training for the Downhills.] Race director Norm Klein says that 80% of the dropouts in Western States are caused by the quad-killing downhills of the notorious “Canyons” in the first 56 miles of the race.
Due to the prevailingsadism among race directors, virtually every trail ultra features lots of hills. If you’ve run hills regularly in training, you’ll probably have no problems with the . Everyone walks the uphills, anyway. The real killer is the .
I ran in the ‘97 Western States race and didn’t finish. I dropped out at 56 miles when the doctors said I was in danger of kidney failure. I’m not a big fan of dialysis or permanent kidney damage, so I quit.Yet I felt massively positive about my race. I knew there would be another 100, on another day. And I had a big cause for rejoicing: I had completed the most difficult part of the course, the Canyons, charging all the uphills at power-walk pace, without the slightest whisper of a shadow of a hint of a suggestion of quad pain. The next morning, I did a single-leg deep knee bend past 90 degrees, without any sensation of pain whatever.
Be warned: I suspect my DNF at Western States was at least partially caused by my Stormin’ Norman approach to the uphills. Afterwards, I did a little math, realizing that ultras are won on the downhills and the flats, not the uphills. He or she who can run fastest, for the longest time, wins. No one runs fast on the uphills at Western States. The winners at Western States average roughly nine minutes per mile, by walking the worst uphills and flying over the flats and downhills, with few walking breaks. Do not try this at home.
In sharp contrast to my experience at Western States, three years earlier my quads were trashed at the 1994 Sierra Nevada double marathon, which has just 3700′ of downhills. Clearly, I had done something meaningful in between.
Jim King, the three-time Western States champion, has been known to say, “Nobody can beat me on the hills.” A friend of mine saw Jim King trotting up a notoriously difficult two-mile hill in the Sierra foothills . Jim has huge quads. Apparently, he has his own secrets for developing hill-power.
Another extremely time-efficient way to build quad strength is with weights. In just two 45-minute workouts per week, you can harden your legs for the most demanding trail race. Here’s how.
The most important part of the hill-toughening workout is the slant leg-press machine. When I began strengthening my quads for Western States, I consulted my trainer, Bob Botkin. Bob is amazing. He certainly isn’t a gym-broiled human lobster, yet at age 76 he can do 12 , continuous reps of 410 pounds on the leg-press machine, in the middle of a 10-set lower-leg workout. Whoa!
Bob had me sit in the machine and place my feet on the upper right corners of the metal plate. He put 180 lbs (four 45-lb plates) on the bars. Then he instructed me to release the safety lock and bend my legs a little ways past 90 degrees and continue flexing and extending . “Don’t stop. Make it a ‘washing machine’ motion. After six reps you’re gonna hate me!”
After six reps my quads were not happy campers. And when Bob allowed me a one-minute break and put on another 25 lbs and had me do another 12-rep set, my quads were moaning softly. “There’s not a lot of time until your race, so you need to work out three times a week to get ready. You can do three sets with a 2-minute rest in between, adding 25 lbs for each set.”
The first two weeks were torture, but then my quads gradually began to adjust, and soon I was actually enjoying the challenge.
I’ll tell you, though, thrashing my quads three times a week at the gym completely ruined my enjoyment of running. My legs felt dead all the time, and I certainly couldn’t zip up the hills with my custmary elan. On the other hand, a simple 20-miler became as hard as 40 miles, so I felt I was gaining overall toughness by slogging through my long runs.
Eight weeks before Western States, I ran the What, Mi-Wok Trail 100K as a test. I power-walked the race with my buddy Dave Littlehales, a former 2:50 marathoner with congenital hip problems that forced him to give up running. Dave kept me skipping and jogging all day long, and we had a great time. In fact, I gained huge confidence from discovering that I could walk and slow-jog 62.2 miles at 16:00 pace, which translates to a 27-hour finish for 100 miles.
The Miwok 100K had 19,000′ of ascent/descent, yet after the race I had no quad soreness whatsoever. Very encouraging–and, as I mentioned earlier, the weights paid off richly at Western States.
I did several other exercises at the gym: calf raises, hamstring exercises, “butt machine” (the machine where you kick back against weight). Butt muscles (glutes) get a tough workout on the hills–my quads weren’t sore after WS100, but my butt sure was. I had told the awesome Suzi Shearer that I felt like a postulant entering the monastic order of 100-mile runners. Her dry comment: “Your postulant is gonna be draggin’ after Western States.” Anatomically, she was correct.
I also did lots of ab work, because I feel it helps my running form. Dave Littlehales and I figured out that if we can keep our weight centered over our hips and not let our butts stick out–”sitting in the bucket”–then running or power-walking becomes nearly effortless. I’ve played with this particular form adjustment late in 30-mile training runs, and it really works. I’ve also discovered that if I do my yoga stretches regularly, it becomes much easier to run with a straight spine and butt tucked in.
The nice thing about weights is that after you achieve a certain level of strength, you can cut back your gym visits to just once or twice a week. Matt Mahoney, perennial finisher at the Leadville Trail 100, runs just 15 miles per week but does lots of bicycling, swimming, and weight-lifting. Matt says that one tough weight workout per week keeps him ready for the mountain trails of Colorado. By the way, Matt also runs the Pike’s Peak Marathon ever year, just one week before Leadville. Is your jaw dropping? Mine is.
I once asked the runners on the Internet ultrarunning lists (see end of this article) how they prepare for the downhills. Over 40 ultrarunners responded, offering a wide spectrum of tactics from mountain biking on hills, to sprinting on a road bike, Stairmaster, running hilly loops, “wall sits” (sit against a wall with knees bent to 90 degrees), lunges, etc. Whatever method you choose, be strong or be sorry.
[Five-and-One Run/Walk Strategy.] I discussed this in detail under “Running Your First 50-Miler.” The 5:1 run/walk ratio is far more sparing of the body’s energy reserves than running 25:5.
Here’s a thought-provoking fact: if you could run for 5 minutes at 6:00 pace, and if you could repeat that 28 times, walking for 1 minute at 20:00 pace after each repetition (a shuffle!), you would finish the marathon in under 3 hours.
Of course, in a trail ultra it won’t always be possible to maintain a 5:1 pace because of the hills. Faced with a hilly course, many ultrarunners power-walk the uphills, go lickety-split on the downhills, and do 5:1 or some other run/walk ratio on any long, flat sections.
An afterthought regarding 5:1. Just because it may work well in a 50K or 50-mile, don’t expect it to work in a 100 or a 24-hour race. I’ve never completed a 100 or run a 24, so I’m not the one to give advice here. But from watching 24’s and 100’s, I’ve quickly realized that for the average, low-mileage plodder like me, 5:1 would be for races longer than 50 miles or 100K. Adjust and survive.
[Speedwork.] Hmmm…let’s see:
A 30-hour 100-miler is 18-minute pace.
A 27-hour 100-miler is 17-minute pace.
An 8:20 50-miler is 10-minute pace.
Well, gosh, those are all pretty slow running paces. So, who needs speedwork?
Not so fast. Speedwork is actually a great weapon for the ultrarunner. By running just 3 miles of fast quarters, halves, and miles, in virtually any combination, once a week, you can achieve three very useful things:
a. You’ll be able to complete the running segments of an ultra much faster. That’s because speedwork will make your low-effort “cruising speed” much faster. As a result, you’ll have better finishing times.
b. Your legs will get tougher and will feel less wiped-out in the late stages of the ultra. kind of speedwork will probably help. (Okay, 10 miles of 100-meter repeats? Be serious!)
c. Speedwork efficiently increases overall fitness, which helps your endurance.
[Blisters.] I mentioned duct tape earlier. Also worth mentioning is Compeed, a blister plaster that you can buy or order at your local drugstore. Ultrarunner Suzi Shearer swears by Compeed, and she should know. Don’t forget to get a copy of John Vonhof’s which includes numerous invaluable suggestions for preventing blisters.
[Nipples.] There’s a famous photo of Park Barner, a legendary ultrarunner of the 1970s, wearing a blood-streaked T-shirt after a 180-mile run on canal banks in Pennsylvania, during which he nearly froze to death during the night.
I’ve tried everything to protect my nipples, from Band-Aids to duct tape, and the only thing that works consistently is Vaseline. A single application is enough to get me through a 50, but you may need to experiment. You can buy little plastic screw-top cups in the cosmetic section of the drugstore and fill them with Vaseline for your drop bags.
[PhosFuel.] Dave Remington ran the Angeles Crest 100-Mile and crashed at 65 miles. Along came Bernie Leupold, a longtime ultrarunner who takes Twinlab PhosFuel and Siberian ginseng during 100-mile trail ultras.
Leupold recommended more PhosFuel. Remington recalls: “So I increased my dosage of PhosFuel to 2-3 per hour. Magic! Leg pain went away…. After the finish I felt fine and walked around talking to people. In the days following I did not have any muscle soreness, although there was some edema, swollen legs and stiffness (but not a lot).”
PhosFuel seems worth checking out, but be sure to test carefully before using it for ultras or for shot, fast races. I used PhosFuel during a 30K after following the 3-day “loading” process, as described on the label. By 10 miles I was dead. I thought, “Oh well, I’ll take 2 more and see what happens.” Two miles later, I had slowed to a crawl and felt like wandering off into a plowed field and taking a nap.
[The Dreaded DNF] Sooner or later, you’ll fail to finish an ultra, or you’ll finish in “limp-home mode.” Depending on your attitude, it will be no more than an emphasized learning experience or an implied evaluation by an unfeeling universe of your personal worth. My advice: cultivate the former attitude and avoid the latter. I’m eternally grateful to ultra veteran Herm Cohen, who watched me stagger out of the What, Mi-Wok Trail 100K and said, “Hey, it’s okay–I’ve DNF’d so many times I can’t remember. You’ll be back, just learn from it.” Herm was right–I was back, finishing Mi-Wok the next year feeling that I could have continued for another 30 miles.
Life never judges us; it only gives us feedback. I’ve never known an ultrarunner who simply quit. Life, like ultrarunning, is about RFP–”Relentless Forward Progress.” Any single race is only a single step along the road.
The most powerful attitude that will help you be a winner, even if on a particular day, the race “wins,” is expansiveness. See yourself as growing constantly through every experience.
Tanaka Shozo, a famous Japanese conservationist, said, “The question of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.” Ultrarunning is to a very large degree a question of the heart. Make yours big, and you’ll always be a winner.
Ultrarunning is not a macho sport. It’s a way to work on your human qualities. Among the ultrarunners I’ve met are many people of impressive character and warmth. I think particularly of the late Dick Collins, who ran over 1000 races and was a gentleman.
I hope this helps. Here’s the best tip of all: if you aren’t already on the ius-l and ultra lists, join them They’re the best source of information for ultrarunners, neophyte or old and hoary. Just yesterday, there was a post on the ius-l list from Tim Twietmeyer, many-times winner of the Western States 100.
To join the ius-l list, send an e-mail message to listserv@american.edu. In the body of the message, type: subscribe ius-l your name. (Substitute your name.) Don’t put anything else in the message. You’ll receive an e-mail message with further instructions.
To join the ultra list, send an e-mail message to listserv@listserv.dartmouth.edu. In the body of the message, type: subscribe ultra your name. (Substitute your name.) Don’t put anything else in the message. You’ll be added to the list, and you’ll receive further instructions by e-mail.
There are many ultrarunning resources on the Internet. An excellent place to begin exploring is Stan Jensen’s Web site at: http://www.run100s.com/
Another useful ultra site is David Blaikie’s Ultramarathon World: http://fox.nstn.ca/~dblaikie/index.html.
Here’s the URL for Jay Hodde’s excellent ultra site. Check the links list, which is very complete:
http://www.geocities.com/~ultrarun/
And, for a look at the hardest 100-miler of them all, check Jay Hodde’s pictures of the Hardrock 100 course. Wow! Imagine having 48 hours to cover 100 miles and climb 32,000′ over this kind of terrain:
http://www.geocities.com/~ultrarun/reports/HRH/HRHPhotoindex.htm
Good luck in your first ultra! See you on the trail.