The Longest Race

by Ed Ayres

  A third alternative is what Scandinavian athletes call fartlek—highly irregular shifts of speed within a single run so that you’re trying to “surprise” your body and build its resilience and adaptability along with its aerobic capacity. The logic of these patterns is that if you train your body to run fairly often at faster-than-race pace, then “dropping down” to race pace will enable you to feel very comfortable at that pace on the day of the big race. In the fast-pace training, rather than rely on stopwatches, heart monitors, or other techno-assists, practice relying on your own developing ability to “listen to your body.” With practice, you won’t need electronic monitors to tell you what’s happening with your heart, lungs, hormones, and metabolic waste. And in the long run, it’s better if you don’t. You do value independence, don’t you?

  Varying routes (and thus terrain) is important for both physical and psychological reasons. Uphill and downhill running put different stresses on the muscles and tendons, and both differ from running on the flat. A runner I know who had no hills near his home trained for running a mountain ultra by doing long sessions on a treadmill raised to steep-climb settings. He thought that as long as he could handle the climbs, the descents would be no problem. But when he ran the race, the miles-long descents were murder on his quadriceps, which get the lion’s share of downhill braking. Unfortunately, treadmills don’t have steep downhill settings. If you don’t have hills or mountains near home that are comparable to those you’ll encounter in your race, you can train just about as well by running up-and-down repeats of a smaller hill. But again, try not to use just one route. Different grades of climbing or descent, like different speeds, use different combinations of muscle fibers. In training, run as many different hills, of different steepness, as possible. And for similar physiological reasons on a more “micro” level, seek out different surfaces as well. Pine-needle paths, dirt, gravel, grass, and pavement each put different stresses on the feet and legs (and even on the core muscles used for balance), and you need to feel at home with all of them when you race.

  As for mental engagement, experienced runners often distinguish between “associative” running, in which you are focused on all the physical and environmental factors affecting your performance, and “dissociative” running, in which you’re not consciously paying attention to the running but are letting your mind wander. Both have their place. It’s important to sometimes focus on the running itself, so that you are well attuned to the progress of your conditioning and so that you can consciously practice (or “visualize”) racing conditions. But there are also times when it’s important to let running be an escape from the stresses of the workplace or home, or our troubled world. On some days it may be better for your mental and physical health to let yourself recall what you said in a conversation that’s bugging you, and then fantasize about what you’d like to have said, than to be thinking about your stride length or tempo. The more practiced you become, the more the running can take care of itself for hours at a time, while your mind takes care of business.

  There’s also a kind of engagement that is neither associative nor dissociative, but an integration of both—occasioned by a run in a beautiful place, or past an inspiring scene. If you come over a mountain pass and see an amazing cloud formation and feel your spirit lift, it’s a chance to feel your body lifting at the same time; you can be physically aware of being light on your feet and psychologically energized by the scene. It’s especially rewarding to integrate both physical and mental experience with the environment you are traversing. That’s a big reason why millions of people in the past twenty years have shifted from the roads to the trails—and why most ultras now are on trails.

  4. Balance Stress and Rest

  This is tricky and complex. Taking time to rest is not a matter of compromise. You don’t compromise anything by seeking the right balance. Movies about heroic warriors perpetuate the idea that the harder you can train without collapsing, the stronger you will be. Yes, it’s basic physiology that stressing a muscle in a workout tears it down a little and stimulates it to grow back stronger. That’s true of all physiological systems and mental skills. But the “growing back” part is too easily neglected. In any exercise, you can reach a point beyond which there aren’t enough hours left in the night to fully recover before the next day—so the next day’s workout begins with less muscle or resilience than the day before, and the training effect begins to reverse. Symptoms of improper balance between stress and rest include a “stale” or “flat” feeling, a slump in performance, and then—inevitably, sooner or later—illness or injury. And if you don’t learn, you could experience burnout and permanent injury.

  Part of the complexity is that different kinds of exercise require different amounts of recovery. Speed work requires more recovery time between sessions than slow base building. It may be counterintuitive, but twelve quarter-mile intervals totaling just three fast miles (or six if you count the alternating slow laps), may need three times as much rest between sessions as longer but slower 10-milers do. Similarly, intense weight-lifting routines require two or three times as much rest between sessions as sit-ups.

  Another complexity is that physical exercise is not the only source of stress in your life, so it’s not the only stress you have to take into consideration in finding optimal rest and regeneration. Ever since the pioneer endocrinologist Hans Selye began his research on the “stresses of life” almost a century ago, we’ve understood that while such varied experiences as financial trouble, a car crash, the death of a spouse, a new baby, or the planning for a wedding are all very different, their effects on an individual can add up. A runner who is coping with heavy stress at work or at home, whether emotional, mental, or physical, may not be able to carry as much workload in his or her training as one who feels relaxed and on top of the world. On the other hand, if you’ve already built some endurance as a runner, you can probably handle more stress in your life as a whole than you could if you were sedentary. Again, the ideal regimen is to find a balance between the cumulative stress of everything that’s happening, including the running, and the amount of rest (sleep, days off, easy runs) needed to keep building endurance.

  5. Practice Form

  Here’s where a lot of even very experienced ultrarunners fall short. They got to be what they are—quite competent at getting through a 50K or 100-mile race—by learning the arts of patience and mental toughness, and by doggedly doing the mileage. Yet they run with handicaps and miss out on a big part of what could help them run faster and more enjoyably. Watch a random group of ultrarunners in action, and they look healthy, happy, gnarly, and game, but not especially athletic.

  One of the great attractions of spectator sports like basketball or soccer, or of Olympic sports like gymnastics and swimming, is the wonder of the human body in motion. Arguably, there is nothing more beautiful on earth, because there is nothing more complex, and when all the complexities are in synch—in “the zone”—it’s thrilling to watch. And, for the athlete, a thrill to experience. More generally, beyond sport, it’s this most amazing of nature’s wonders that gives us the pleasures of dancing and the integration of body movement with music. Life is movement.

  Running will be more enjoyable—and your performances more satisfying—if you practice your movement the way a swimmer or basketball player or dancer does. First, as you run, your body should be vertical, not leaning forward. For generations, cartoonists and logo designers have depicted running as an act of tilting forward, but in the real world that would result in falling down on your face. (The only exception is the start of a sprint, when gravity is actually employed as a momentary boost to initial forward propulsion for a few yards, with the legs moving at maximum anaerobic speed to “catch up” with the torso, and even then the sprinter is fully upright within ten yards.) Second, it’s important not to “cheat” on the verticality by sagging into a “C” shape, as many joggers and slower runners (especially older ones) do, with their heads appearing to
be properly aligned over their feet but their butts and hips hanging behind them. The result is that, while the C-shaped runner doesn’t fall on his face, his lower torso is perpetually struggling to keep pace with the knees and chest, and there’s no forward momentum. The way to remedy this is to focus on keeping your hips forward and your back straight, not slumped. Third, your feet should point straight forward, so that you’re not wasting energy or inviting injury with excessive lateral motion. Recreational runners can sometimes be spotted jogging with feet splayed so far outward that the knees are thrown awkwardly inward—increasing the risk of injury to both feet and knees, not to mention expending so much energy that long-distance running would be out of the question except for a masochist. Fourth, the arms should be swinging forward and back, fairly vertically like the body (not with elbows poking horizontally out to the side), and fairly loose. Practice checking to make sure your shoulders are relaxed, not clenched. Fifth, keep the head fairly still, not wobbling left and right as if tethered to the arms. The head is where the sense of balance is seated. While you’re running on rough terrain, your legs and hips may make continuous complex movements to keep the balance, but it’s the head’s job to guide these movements by maintaining an independent, relatively unwavering forward track relative to the horizon.

  These basics can’t convey the real complexity of good running form, however. They can help you avoid or correct gross mistakes or misconceptions, but the best way to acquire good form may be simply to observe outstanding runners and—if you observe them often enough—to subconsciously incorporate what they’re doing into your own form. This is what kids do when they watch elite athletes in a stadium or on TV. High school basketball players have better moves today than they did half a century ago, not just because they’re better coached, but because they’ve spent more hours watching NBA and NCAA games. That’s not to say personal coaching by an expert in the biomechanics of running might not help, but simply watching great athletes can do wonders for getting your ancient running instincts activated. The best coaching you can get might be watching videos of great marathon runners or—if you can find them—ultrarunners like Scott Jurek, Ann Trason, or Michael Wardian.

  6. Neither a Loner nor a Groupie Be

  A healthy and fit human is a social animal. We survived our evolution for a hundred millennia by working and cooperating in small groups: the family and tribe, and particularly the hunting party—the original cross-country team. If your cross-country team consists of the Olympic 5,000-meter champion and six C-shaped joggers, it will lose every meet! The scoring of cross-country is based on the recognition that at its roots, this is a team endeavor. Since humans could not have successfully hunted mammoths as lone heroes, they had to chase down their prey in packs, the way wolves do. So, it’s in our genes to run in groups. And most long-distance runners do at least some of their training (as well as all of their racing, of course) in groups. Lone heroes have been romanticized in our cultural consciousness by solitary comic-book superheroes, cowboy heroes like the Lone Ranger, and action-movie characters who are on the run from their erstwhile colleagues at the CIA and have to survive by their wits. But the biological reality is that humans are interdependent.

  On the other hand, in evolution, cooperation was essential, but limited by nature: The hunting party provided mutual protection, but if one member sat down in a funk and refused to continue, he probably got eaten by a lion. His funk genes weren’t perpetuated. And in the world we have inherited, society functions best if we cooperate but also continue to carry our own weight. We are interdependent but also independent.

  For the ultrarunner, to keep that sense of independence strong, it’s helpful to do a significant amount of running alone. If you can run with a companion or group once or twice a week, that’s good. But chances are, you spend most of your time both at work and at home interacting with others, so you probably don’t lack for social experience. What you may not have so much of is true independence. A few days a week of solitary running can do wonders for that. To practice feeling independent and self-sufficient on the trail is not just a boon to your running; it is one of the great rewards. Take your water bottle, but leave the GPS and smartphone at home. At least part of the time, it’s important to connect with the air, forest, wildlife, and the signals emanating from your own body, not just to chat with companions.

  7. Check Your Gear

  Long-distance running is a major sport (what?) but doesn’t require a major investment in equipment.

  This demands clarification. TV sports fans might find my designation of running as a major sport ludicrous, because in the mainstream media it isn’t even a minor sport—it is virtually nonexistent. But as measured not in numbers of spectators but in numbers of actual participants, it may come as a surprise to many TV producers that running is America’s most popular sport. In a recent survey, the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association found that more than forty-nine million Americans run regularly, as compared with about eleven million who play baseball and eleven million who play basketball.

  The primary reason for the huge disparity between participation and media coverage is, of course, the fact that running is not a spectator sport, and in the current culture of high-speed thrills and highlights it can’t attract large audiences. And even if it could, the cost of taking TV cameras and crews up single-track mountain trails would be prohibitive. But a second reason is that ultrarunning is a minimalist activity; it doesn’t sell the gargantuan volumes of equipment that other sports do. It doesn’t offer advertisers the same cybernetic spectacles of athletes’ bodies bedecked in superhero-like uniforms, helmets, pads, gloves, and shoes, and wielding bats, rackets, sticks, and clubs, as well as skis, skates, boards, bicycles, and even motorcycles, power boats, parachutes, and racing cars.

  As a long-distance runner, you don’t need any of that stuff, except the shoes—and a fair number of minimalists in recent years have even tried going without the shoes. On the other hand, there’s a short list of functional equipment, including shoes, that you will find useful. And because of the greater demands for nutrient replenishment and rehydration at beyond-marathon distances, you’ll need several pieces of equipment that a marathoner or 10K runner won’t normally need.

  Running shoes are your most important equipment, no matter what barefoot advocates might say. Bare feet might work on a nicely groomed dirt or pine-needle path in the park, but not on a road shoulder where there will be broken glass, or on a trail where you’ll encounter thousands of rocks, ruts, roots, and maybe an occasional snake. You don’t need high-tech, $150 or $200 shoes, and they don’t have to be “trail” shoes, even if all your running is on trails—good road-running shoes are usually fine. On the other hand, don’t buy shoes that are cheap knockoffs of respected brands but that have prices too good to be true. A good rule of thumb: Don’t buy shoes that cost less than $50, which too often turn out to be bricks. Brands that offer good long-distance running shoes include (in alphabetical order) Adidas, Asics, Brooks, Montrail, Mizuno, New Balance, Nike, Reebok, and Saucony. There may be others, but ask a salesperson who is himself or herself a runner before making a choice. The features to look for are (1) durability, (2) a strong, roomy toe-box (to protect your toes when you kick a rock), (3) enough cushioning to help compensate for the fact that it’s been at least ten thousand years since our species ran barefoot in the wild, (4) flexibility (bend the shoe in half; if it’s hard to bend, it might be passable for walking, but not for running), and, perhaps most important, (5) a very comfortable fit, with room for the toes to wiggle. Be sure to ask the salesperson about durability, especially at the outer corner of the heel (where most of us touch down, and wear is greatest), since that’s the one thing you can’t see for yourself in a store or online. Don’t buy separate “racing” shoes for your race; run your ultra in the same shoes you train in.

  Shorts and shirts are easier. They need only to be comfortable and loose enough to permit unrestricted leg and arm motion (a
nd air cooling), and made of a quick-drying (or “wicking”) material, so you won’t be lugging around pounds of sweat.

  A hat is de rigueur for an ultrarunner, both to protect against hours of UV exposure and to provide a visor when running into the sun. A baseball-style hat is perfect, if it has mesh ventilation for sweat evaporation and cooling. If you’re rich, buy two hats—a white one for maximum sun reflection in summer, and a black one for solar heat-absorption on a cold day (or for going on a running date with a Goth). If you live or race in a place where there’s serious freezing, a knit hat is best because you need to protect your ears.

  A water bottle (or other water-carrying system) is essential for an ultrarunner. Most popular is a bottle you carry in your hand, held by a comfortable strap so there’s no muscular tension. Another option is a belt that carries one or two bottles (or four small ones) at the small of the back. A third option is a Camelbak, with which you can carry a large quantity of water (and ice, if you like) in a backpack-like container, and which you drink from through a tube. I’ve never used one of those (I prefer the hand bottle, or a combination of hand bottle and single-bottle belt), and all I can say about the Camelbak is that if the runner just ahead or behind you has filled it with ice cubes, the sound of the cubes slamming back and forth with each step he takes on what would otherwise be a quiet trail can drive you crazy.