Enter a caption* Because the general rule of thumb, according to Jack Foster, is one (1) day of recovery per one (1) race mile.
January 15th: Willis River 50k
A warm-up fatass run to start the year. That is, the aid stations were stocked with “whatever you bring” and the water stops at the turnarounds were, literally, dudes with spigots. Still a nice run, even if the trails were primitive enough that at times I was literally tracking the runners ahead of me.
Also, had the following exchange with the race director run coordinator when I finished ahead of my brother and turned to go back to last.
Him: “Drop something?”
Me: “Naw, I’m just going back to run in the last bit with my brother.”
H: “I don’t see him.”
M: “Well, he took a wrong turn going into the second leg, so I’d guess he’s at least a few miles back, yet.”
February 11th: Holiday Lake 50k++
A relatively flat Horton 50k. A bit cold, I only barely beat my brother, and… that’s about it. No funny stories, unfortunately.
March 11th: Bel Monte 50-Miler
Already written about here. My brother kinda-sorta crushed me on this one in the last ten miles because… the short version is, because I’m an idiot. An idiot who decided that trying out Starting Strength while simultaneously embarking on a program of high-volume ultramarathoning would be a good idea because, so far as my thinking went, heavy squats and deadlifts work my leg muscles, running uses my leg muscles, so…
Yeah.
(Not to take anything away from my brother, of course – preparing for races like this is part of the race, and he ran well on top of that.)
(And that Rippetoe link above is something that I don’t entirely agree with, but I don’t want to get into a full-on fisking. Included mostly for comedic effect. [Besides, in addition to running I workout with SEAL Team Physical Training (i.e., bodyweight exercises galore) and do martial arts, so I’m in no current danger of devolving into one of the ectomorphic weaklings Rippetoe ridicules, and pounding a flat track is way different than a mile of 30%-grade switchbacks mixed in with hella technical downhills.])
BONUS March 18th: Charlottesville 10-Miler
My brother and I did this to support our mom. Yes, yes, thank you – we are dutiful & supportive & all-around awesome sons.
(**COUGH-COUGH** we also may have been carrying 40+# sandbags/rucksacks to make it a challenge for ourselves as well **COUGH-COUGH**)
BONUS April 1st: Charlottesville Marathon
So, one of the awkward things about ultrarunning is that you end up with a sort of skewed view of distances and running in general, basically one of your classic First World problems athletic-style. Such as, when you’re finishing up a marathon and someone in the crowd shouts out that you’ll remember this accomplishment for the rest of your life, and you’re thinking that
- this is a training run
- that you’re doing because the start line was, literally, a mile and a half from your front door.
Not that, you know, I crushzorred teh marathon timez or anything (I can run pretty far [though not by the standards of people who actually run far] and pretty fast [though not by the standards of people who actually run fast], just not both at the same time [by the – you get the idea]), but it still makes one feel kinda awkward.
April 29th: Promise Land 50k++
Last year I ran this in a suit. It was 50s/60s and drizzly the whole time, and I finished in 6:52:18. This year, it was about 90 with ridiculous humidity. I did not wear a suit. (I prolly would’ve died.)
I finished in 6:52:…28. Yup. Still a fun race.
May 13th: UROC 100k
Written about here. Nothing much to add.
June 10th-11th: OSS/CIA 50-Miler
How do you fall asleep while running? It’s simple:
- Habitually wake up at 0445-0500 all day, e’rryday.
- Sign up for an overnight 50-miler that starts at seven o’clock PM.
Crushrun solidly the first loop-marathon. Start the second one, run through the midnight hour.- Fall asleep while running.
Practically, the trick is to run in the exact center of the forest service road. Less chance of running into / over a snake, and you can use the camber to keep your feet lined up while you grab some shut-eye.
BONUS June 17th: STPT Frogman Challenge
Coming into the last stretch a few seconds ahead of my brother, I was thinking exactly the same thing as he was – we weren’t going to slack off, but the team ahead of us was comfortably ahead of us – 15, 20 seconds leaving the last obstacle – so we had a second-place finish we could live with.
(That is, if you get beat by, like, ten minutes at this distance, you think damn, that’s… kinda crushing. If you get beat by a second – or less **COUGH-COUGH**last-year’s-Guardians’-Gauntlet**COUGH-COUGH** – you’re kicking yourself because if you’d done any one of a dozen or more things just the slightest bit differently, you could’ve had it.)
Then we saw them working on the puzzle. (There were a couple of mental challenges in this race, in addition to the obstacles. One was the classic “sign with a math problem” leading up to the “How many US flags were on the sign?” question, and the other was a big-piece particle-board puzzle of the Budweiser.)
Now, I knew about the puzzle, in the abstract. We’ve had it at workouts before, and the last time this event was held the Charlottesville team narrowly lost to a Richmond team because of the puzzle. And I could have figured that, with only a hundred yards or less to the finish line, the puzzle had to be over the next rise.
It still caught me by surprise.
My brother and I had the same exact thought when we each saw the puzzles – with the first-place team struggling: “Crap. Damn. We can still win this. Gotta run faster.”
We did win this. HOOYAH.
July 8th: Cacapon 12-Hour
Why do I like ultras so much, and dislike conventional-slash-road races? I mean, apart from the fact that ultras have better scenery, better food, better people, longer distances, and cooler swag on average? (Practically, it’s also because I like the variety of the terrain both in terms of more muscular engagement than effectively standing on a treadmill, and because I run in VFFs (except when my feet have swollen up so much the day after a 100-miler that I can’t physically put them on).)
A recent 5k nature-trail fun(draising) fell run here in town had to alter its course because a tree fell on one of the boardwalks it usually uses – entailing precisely the kind of repair cost the race is held every year to help with.
People – yes, multiple persons, rather than an arbitrary unknown – complained to the race director about the different course, because it meant that their times wouldn’t be comparable to other years’.
At Cacapon – which, relevantly, was the official West Virginia state ultra championship – you ran a five mile loop as many times as you could within twelve hours. If you only had time to run a partial at the end, you could – they had three official turnaround points marked (doubling as marathon, 50k, and 100k fillers). When I headed out at at eleven+ hours, I asked if I needed to snap a picture of myself with the turnaround sign.
Nah, the race director said. It’s cool.
So – while I realize that this is only a single example, it is still emblematic of the divide I have seen, speaking as broadly and bluntly as possible for comedic effect:
- Road Runners: Bitch about an act of God affecting the course of a charity fun run.
- Ultra Runners: State championships are on the honor system.
TL;DR – ultrarunners : road runners :: ultimate frisbee : …a bunch of hypercompetitive rule-obsessed ref-sucking assholes.
I really thought I’d’ve thought of a better example by the time I finished writing that analogy.
August 5th: Dahlgren Heritage Rail Trail 50k
This one was a flat 50k we used as a warm-up / tune-up for the 100-miler the next month. Highlights include the race director, regarding the fact that there were apparently some smaller side trails that people had somehow wandered off onto in years past, advising runners to, “When in doubt, think like a train.”
The intention being, of course, given that except for one bit run through a cemetery at the turnaround point, and so within sight and earshot of the aid station there, the entire course was on a rail trail, if you found yourself about to turn off onto a narrow walking path winding up, down, and around hills and lakes, you should ask yourself – would a train really follow this path?
My brother and I took it far more literally and (quietly) shouted (and continue to shout at apropos in-race moments, such as the transition to the towpath at JFK) “CHOO CHOO MOTHAFUCKAH!” as we crossed roads, daring any cars to mess with a fukken’ TRAIN COMIN’ THRU!!!.
(In the course of researching this post (i.e., random googling to find funny pictures to break up WALL OF TEXT), I found out that “Choo Choo, Motherfucker!” is in fact a thing, which is to say, a meme.
Huh. More surprising than bicycle gangs still being a thing, less disturbing than Sexy Panda Guy.
I just realized that since I’m writing this in random bits as I can be arsed to, the explanation (such as it is…) of ‘Sexy Panda Guy’ is still in the future.)
September 9th-10th: Pine Creek Challenge
Already written about in exhaustive, nay, excessive detail here.
BONUS September 23rd: Guardians’ Gauntlet
Last year I came in second by a fraction of a second. I… while I am not in the habit of blaming external factors for my loss(es), I will in that case attribute it to the fact that I was wearing a kilt. And I may have had to address one near-malfunction mid-race*.
(*It was a kilt designed for running, and I was wearing compression shorts, but still – nobody wants to see a 180# dude with keirin-cut quads in just compression shorts doin’ a trail OCR.)
(And why was I wearing a kilt? Because a coupla weeks before the race I said “I’ll run this race in a kilt!”. Beyond that, it gets a bit hazy.)
I won this year, but the important thing – the awesome thing – was getting to do a bonnet slide (hood slide for you Yanks) across a real police car. Note that the ‘awesome’ thing was the opportunity, and not my actual execution. This is the type specimen:
And here is… me. (Watermarks are because I’m not gonna pay however much for a photo which will only ever be used to make fun of myself.)
DOUBLE BONUS September 23rd-24th: Legends Brewing 12-Hour Ultra
A rough embedded recapping of the events that led up to my running this race:
Brother: “Let’s do another all night run two weeks after the 100-miler!”
Me: “Let me check to make sure that I don’t have to fly out on a business trip the afternoon of the 24th.”
[Five seconds pass, in which time I am unable to find out any trip details.]
Me:
[Five more seconds pass after I sign up.]
Me: “23rd… why does that sound familiar?”
[Realizes that, oh, shit, I was already signed up for a race that day.]
[Realizes that, no, it’s cool, I’ll just run the Guardians’ Gauntlet in the morning, catch a quick nap, drive to Richmond, and run all night.]
TL;DR – my calves locked up on me after three laps. No cramping or soreness per se, I just felt 99% sure that if I straightened my leg faster than an old man getting up out of a sprung sofa I’d tear a muscle like wet tissue. I struggled through a couple more laps to end up just under forty miles before crashing.
My brother, on the other hand, said ‘fuck yo’ bitchin’, legs!’ and banged out seven (7) laps to win a backpack full of beer.
Literally – the ultra was put on by a brewing company, so while the winners got a case each and the top finishers their choice of Black Diamond and Osprey gear, everyone who did at least an ultra (four or more (4+) laps) got a six-pack and all the bottled water they could haul away.
So, yeah – little bro literally won a backpack full of beer. Hoo-fuckin’-yah.
(I don’t drink, but nevertheless find great hilarity in the fact that, while much was made of there being a beer stop at the Richmond Marathon [i.e., a couple of card tables with paper cups of canned brew], Dahlgren and Cacapon both had pint glasses for the finishers. Hell, the race medal at Cacapon was literally a bottle opener. Not ‘could be used as a bottle opener’, was literally a bottle opener with the race graphics etched on it, hung from a ribbon.
And – tho’ I was not there to see it – at one of the aid stations at Bel Monte, a runner came to the top of the switchbacks and was asked what the volunteers could get him – Tailwind, hot chocolate, soup, so on. He joked that some Jim Beam wouldn’t be half bad right then. One of the volunteers told him to hold up, grabbed a bottle from their truck, and asked him if Jack Daniels would do.
So yeah, enjoy your little sloshing cups of flat beer, flatland marathoners. We got shots by the fireside watching the sunset from the top of a muvvafukkin mountain for our mid-race libations.)
October 14th: New River Trail 50k
Aw, yeah, I won my age group! (**COUGH-COUGH** meaning I beat my brother **COUGH-COUGH**).
Ultrarunning is kinda weird in that it skews way older than most other athletic endeavors (not sure I’d call it a ‘sport’) – the average age of the top 10 finishers at UROC this past year was 32.7, for example. Lots of reasons for this, off the top of my head (which means some may be ridiculously off-base) (and of course excepting random freaks of nature like Jurek / Jornet):
- They’re usually at a minimum full-day affairs held in out-of-the-way places, often with crew, so the logistics of a race are much more involved than parking and walking to the start line of a 5k.
- It’s really not a good idea for growing kids to be putting in the sort of training / racing mileage that ultras entail; thus, a lot of people don’t start this distance of running until late teens or early twenties, after running in college in a lot of cases. (Blah-blah, ‘ten-years-to-mastery’, blah & cetera.)
- Despite the recent surge in popularity, ultramarathons are still kinda relatively unknown compared to marathons, let alone shorter distances.
- Psychology – I’m not going to say that it’s all mind-over-matter, but mind does matter. Personally, even if I were in identical shape physically, I doubt that five or ten years ago I’d’ve been mentally up for tackling something best described as “You’re going to run. You’re going to keep running. The sun will rise, and then set, and you will still be running. The sun will come up again and, if you’ve been running all night, you should be just about done. If you stopped, or slept, or rested, you’ll have a ways to go still. And unless you have your mind right, you’ll suffer that entire time.”
BONUS++ November 11th: VCU Health 8k + Richmond Marathon AKA Makeshift Patchwork Ultra
I initially planned to run the 8k and then ruck the half-marathon, but ended up changing to running the 8k and the full marathon. (Not only was I not the only one to do the combo this year, but I’ve heard from someone in Richmond that there’s a group who will wake up hella early, run the marathon course backwards to arrive at the starting line right before the gun, and then run it forwards.
So, I wasn’t the craziest person there.)
Hilariously enough, not only can I precisely map my subjective memories onto the Garmin pace-graph from my watch, I can also pinpoint the precise moments when I began to pick up the pace towards the finish line. (Context – the last stretch of the course, shared by all three races, is moderately downhill.)
Which is to say, I crossed the finish line for the 8k at a 4:06 pace, and for the marathon at a 5:23.
Truly and verily, coked-out orangutan is my spirit animal.
(Basically, without bothering to look up my exact paces for each race, I did the 8k in a bit over thirty minutes and the marathon in a bit over 4 hours. I’m more okay with the 8k time than the marathon, but for what amounts to a 50k with the worst possible pacing / splits in the world, it was a good run.)
November 18th: JFK 50-Miler
There are many things that cross your mind while running 31, 50, or 100 miles, or more. Sometimes your perceptions of things end up quite different than they would be in normal life, whether for philosophical, psychological, or physical reasons. Pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice, a mind without purpose or occupation will wander in dark places, that sort of thing.
Or you, you know, hallucinate from the incredible amount of stress and exertion. Whatev’s.
The point being, the following series of thoughts occurred to me at about mile 10ish of this year’s JFK, on the AT section.
- Oh, there’s sexy panda guy!
- Huh, do they make ‘sexy panda’ costumes in men’s sizes, or did he have to tailor that himself?
- It doesn’t seem odd that I’m having these thoughts.
- I’m mildly concerned that it doesn’t seem odd that I’m having these thoughts…
Yeah, so, there are regular people who run ultras (‘regular’…), there are people that might attract a bit of attention (says the guy who wore a suit at Promise Land, and whose brother’s shirt policy is, unless he’d be impaired by hypothermia, he ain’t wearing one, regardless of time of year (December), temperature (thirties), or weather (rainy, and windy)), and then there are people like ‘Sexy Panda Guy’.
As illustration, consider this generic ‘sexy panda costume’:
Now, imagine that instead of heels, they’re wearing running shoes. And that the costume is made even ‘”‘sexier'”‘ by cutting out the middle ~6″ to turn it into booty shorts + crop top. And finally, though you can’t see it from this angle, don’t forget the little black pom-pom bob-tail. And add a tramp stamp.
…
And instead of a pretty young lady, it’s a dude. ‘Bout 5’9″, 5’10”, maybe a buck-sixty-five.
That is ‘Sexy Panda Guy’.
My brother and I also each broke 9 hours, setting PRs by 140-something and 35 minutes, respectively (he had some rough luck when we first ran it last year) but, you know, it’s kinda hard to say much after Sexy Panda Guy, so… yeah.
December 16th: Seashore Nature Trail 50k
All right, last run of the year! Well… last ultramarathon of the year, at least. Better weather than last year, almost perfect, in fact. Li’l bro beat me by about ~18 minutes, which was likely attributable to a combination of this being ‘his‘ race and his ‘fuck yo’ legs’ attitude, and my whacked nutrition and going out too fast for the level of pain I was willing to accept in the second half.
Just to be clear, those are reasons, not excuses. It’s a fine line, to be sure, but if you just shrug and say “I didn’t do as well as I could’ve”, well, you’ll never do as well as you could have. You need to think on why you didn’t do as well as you could’ve, so you know what to fix, what to work on. In this case, I could’ve paid more attention to what I ate the couple of days before the race, paced myself better at the beginning, and popped a couple of ibuprofen. I didn’t, so I didn’t finish as fast as I could have if I did do those things.
That said, excuses are especially pernicious in that you’re saying “I didn’t do as well as I could’ve because of X and it’s not my fault and I don’t need to change anything.” Sometimes, yes, an excuse is perfectly valid. If you don’t win gold because you got your knee smashed by a police baton, yes, that’s something completely out of your control. You can’t exactly add “don’t get assaulted by a jealous rival’s conspirator” to your training routine. (That said, Kerrigan did win silver, and the decision on gold was close & controversial, so just because an excuse is valid doesn’t make it sufficient. [And this was a random example prompted by walking past the poster for I, Tonya going to and from my office.])
But most times, no, an excuse is just an excuse. “I didn’t win because I was up late playing World of Warcraft.” Well, yes, that may be the direct cause, but it’s still your own fuckin’ fault for doing that, and it’s something you definitely should change if you really want to win. If you want to half-ass it and lie to yourself to save your ego, on the other hand, instead of winning, sure, go ahead. And now –
Thoughtful Answers to Sometimes Snippy Questions and/or Comments
How do you train for something like this?
I don’t, and whenever anybody asks me for advice on running I straight-up tell them that I am a horrible person to be asking.
Less glibly, I don’t do any running-specific training. I run to and from workout each weekday, go on a longer run on Saturdays, and do martial arts some weeknights and most Sundays. And that’s it. I don’t taper, or periodize, or any of the other stuff you’d do to go for your best possible time, because one, that would be too much drudge work and I just like to run, and two, I’m not going to be raking in the podium swag regardless of how much I do or do not train so I just enjoy running, and three…
Well, that’s enough for me, but I think it sort of takes away from the challenge and adventure of stuff like this to prepare like that. I wake up, I get dressed, putting on a hydration vest if the distance calls for it, and start running. It’s simple.
WHY?
Why not? Like I said, I just like running.
As for why races, well, it takes care of all of the non-running stuff that I’d otherwise have to worry about. Yes, I could drive out to the Blue Ridge and make sure that I have emergency contacts ready and cell reception or shortwave, stash water and food along the course, plan out the route I’ll run, and do it on my own. So much easier though to just run Bel Monte or UROC.
(Incidentally why I’m not super fond of in-city marathons – if I wanted to run 26.2 miles in the city, I could just… walk out my front door and run 26.2 miles in the city. Plus, the city marathons I’ve done have been much more focused on running a marathon, on accomplishing a specific milestone (be it completion or time) instead of just having fun running (and not to say that all the participants were like that, but the guiding ethos of the organizing bodies seemed to be).
Ultras are far more along the lines of: Hey, you weirdos like to run? All right, let’s go running! You like to run more? Let’s run more! Don’t worry about that other stuff, just have fun and run!)
An older couple out walking, during a Saturday STPT run option: “Just wait until you’re our age.”
I run and do all of this stuff so that I will (inshallah) be able to keep doing it at their age, even if at some point I’ll have to take things down a notch. (Although Zeke Zucker at age 60 crushed my JFK PR, and was only twelve minutes behind me at 71, so there’s a while to go yet…)
Too many people to enumerate: “Enjoy it while you can…”
Yes! Yes! A THOUSAND TIMES YES-YES-YES! That is the entire point of doing crazy stuff like this. I can do it, I like doing it, and I won’t be able to do it forever, so I’m doing it now. Rather be ashes than dust!
Don Norum 