Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner . . . . . . #10: Be at Home in the Wild

       A common failing of long-distance runners, especially on solo training runs, is the desire to get back home.  You're out on a bleak winter day, and you imagine being back in your living room, snug with a big sandwich, chips, and TV.  Do you have a fireplace?  Even worse.  Or, it's a hot summer day and the water in your bottle has gone tepid, and you anticipate getting back home and pouring cold juice over a tall glass of ice cubes, then exercising twenty seconds of patience to let the drink chill before beginning to sip.
       OK, the twenty seconds of patience could be a good sign--you're learning.  But the real problem here is your subconscious default feeling about "home."
       This is not to suggest there's anything wrong with your desire to get back to house and hearth.  But if that desire causes you to cut the run short, or skip it on a day when the weather looks bad, then there may be something important missing in your feel for the place where you're running.
     Our species evolved in the wild, and for every century we've been civilized, there were ten centuries or more when we lived in the wild, and that was home--and that deeper sense of home is still in our DNA.  One way to look at it is to consider that just as dogs are domesticated from wolves, modern humans are domesticated from nomadic hunter-gatherers.  Give a healthy dog a chance, and it will revel in being able to go for a run in fields or woods--and  significantly, it will most likely exhibit more pleasure with that outing than with any time it spends in the living room or dog house.  A dog that is too dog-show domesticated is a sad thing.  Ditto a  human who can't reconnect with our primordial love of the wild--the source of all our adventure, discovery, and sustenance for hundreds of thousands of years before we had sitcoms, spectator sports, or potato chips.
       The key is to see the wild not as lonely or sinister, as commonly depicted in TV shows or movies, but as a realm where you can be comfortable and self-reliant and free, and where you belong.  Once the wild feels like home, you're home free to be an ultrarunner.
                          
              --excerpted from an Appendix to the forthcoming book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance, to be published in October, copyright 2012, Ed Ayres

100 provocative quotes on running and endurance in 100 days

     For a long time, I swore I'd never do Twitter.  Just the words "Twitter" and "tweet". . . arrghh!  Quite aside from the fact that the whole thing sounds way too cute, you get only about one short sentence's worth of space.  But I have a book coming out in October, and a friend whose judgment I trust told me I need to get with the 21st century and and start tweeting!  Maybe it's a manifestation of what I call the "sprint culture" we live in.  Here's an analogy: The sound-bites of politicians, policymakers, and pundits these days compare to thoughtful discussion as a 100-meter dash compares to an ultramarathon.  Our evolution as intelligent bipeds prepared us for the ultra, but not so much for the sprint.  Ask any lion.
     What I came up with is to collect comments from people like Mark Twain, Clarence DeMar, and the Buddah, that are not too cute or inane and will actually fit in the Twitter box.  At the beginning of June, I launched a program to tweet 100 bodacious quotes over 100 days,  And then, for the convenience of people can't actually wait by their Twitter box all day to see what Thoreau thought about marathons, I decided that every 10 days I'll publish the latest 10 quotes here.  So, here are the first 10:

     #1.    "Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes." --Buddah

     #2     "Men ran after and ate horses for four hundred thousand years.  The outcome is more than a love of meat; it is a runner's body."  --Anthropologist Paul Shepard

     #3     "There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year...But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child."  --Dr. George Sheehan

     #4     "Every man dies, but not every man really lives."  --William Wallace, as played by Mel Gibson in 'Braveheart', cited in run100s.com.

     #5     "If you can fill the unforgiving minute / with sixty seconds worth of distance run / Yours is the Earth."  --Rudyard Kipling, in If

     #6     "I got plenty of cautions that one or two marathons was all a man should do in a lifetime." --Clarence DeMar in 1911, before the first of his 7 Boston Marathon wins and 65 marathons in all.

     #7     "Running has substantially shaped human evolution. Running made us human." --Evolutionary biologist Dennis Bramble

     #8     "What's true for us as individual humans is true for the civilization we create: a sprint culture, seeking ever greater speed in all things, cannot endure."  --my forthcoming book, The Longest Race

     #9     "I'm 84 years old.  Don't let the altar-boy face fool you."  --Johnny Kelly, after the finish of his 61st Boston Marathon

     #10    "There are clubs you can't belong to, neighborhoods you can't live in, schools you can't get into, but the roads are always open."  --Nike

Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner #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 5000 meter champion and six C-shaped joggers (people whose hips and butts hang out behind them instead of aligning vertically with their centers of gravity), 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 pop-cultural consciousness by solitary comic-book superheroes, cowboy heroes (a generation ago) like the Lone Ranger and subsequent John Wayne characters, 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 always interdependent.  (Even the lone, Montana-cabin recluse with his bag of potato chips, six-pack, and shotgun can't survive without there being farmers out there somewhere growing potatoes and hops, and truck drivers hauling the potatoes and hops to the processing plants, and the entrepreneurial-immigrant guy in the local 7-11 selling the chips and the beer.  Total independence is a delusion.)
     On the other hand, in our long 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 left behind and 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, to the extent that that is possible for a fundamentally social animal.  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 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.
    

Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner #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.
     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 his 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 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 as if you were trying to elbow your way through a crowd), 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 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.
                    --from an Appendix to The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon,
                       and the Case for Human Endurance, to be published in October.
                       Copyright 2012, Ed Ayres
    

Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner #4: Balance Stress and Rest

       This is tricky and complex.  Taking time to rest isn't 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.  OK, 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 betweeen 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 disability.  I've seen it happen to a lot of people.
     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 miles overall, 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 situps.
     Another complexity is that the 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 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 sendentary.  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.

     --From an Appendex to the book The Longest Run: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon,
       and the Case for Human Endurance, to be published in October.  Copyright 2012, Ed Ayres

Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner #3: Vary Everything -- Distance, Speed, Routes, Terrain, and Mental Engagement

This is a basic principle of biological and ecological health, including the ecology of your own life.  For biologists and ecologists, biodiversity--both within the genetics of a species and in the complexity of a whole ecosystem--is essential to long-run survival.  And for athletes and trainers, cross-training--combining the benefits of complementary forms of exercise--is one of the secrets of durability and resistance to injury.

     Probably the most basic variable in your training is the distance you run each day.  A successful pattern for many runners is to go short to moderate distances (5-10 miles) five days each week, and one day a week go long (15-30 miles).  To illustrate the importance of that weekly long run, consider two different patterns, each totaling 60 miles for the week.  The first is to run 10 miles a day for six days, then take a day off.  The second is to run 8 miles a day for five days, then 20 miles on the sixth.  While both yield the same total mileage, the first pattern never takes you past the point where you're running low on muscle glycogen and need to adapt to more efficient fat-burning metabolism for endurance.  The second takes you past that four times a month, or about forty  times in the year or so you'll be training for your ultra.  While there's no difference between these two patterns in total mileage, the second one provides a huge advantage in training effect.

       Varying speed is also important.  Here, too, a tried-and-true pattern for most people would be to run at slow-to-medium speeds four to six days a week, and faster for one or two days.  To try running fast more than once or twice a week is to invite injury.  "Fast" is a relative term, and in your first year of training for an ultra, it would be prudent to limit your fastest running to the taper phase (Note #2, below), and use more low-key variations of speed during base-building.  These broad categories ("slow" days, "fast" days) can be further broken down as you gain experience.  The "slow to medium" pace can vary from a lazy lope on some days to the pace you might actually hope to run a 50-kilometer race, on another.  Remember, running at ultra race pace doesn't mean you're doing a hard workout, if you're only holding that pace for 8 or 10 miles rather than 50 kilometers or 50 miles.  When you do intervals (again, not necessary at all during a first year of base building), there's no need to time them as you would if you were training for the 1500 or 5000 meters; what's important is simply to run fast enough to be breathing hard and making your heart beat fast.  An alternative to regular intervals such as you'd do on a track might be to run a longer stretch of several miles fast (a "threshold" run as described in Note #2), then slow down just long enough to recover before doing another several miles fast.  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 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 (an important goal) 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 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 a breeze.  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, none of the treadmills I've seen 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 (look up the elevation profile on the race website), 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, rocky trails 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 you performance, and "dissociative" running, in which you're not consciously paying attention to the running but are letting your thoughts 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's 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 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 are now on trails.

          --Excerpted from an Appendix to the forthcoming book The Longest Race:
             a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance,
             coming in October.   Copyright 2012 by Ed Ayres

Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner #2: Build, Sharpen, Taper

It’s good to have a target date in mind—the day of the ultra you’d like to run. That determines when you should aim to reach your peak—the highest degree of readiness you can hope to reach in the coming year. Then count backward, allowing a couple of weeks before the race for a “taper” (easing off on the training), and before that two or three weeks of sharpening (speed work) to put a little spring in your step.The time left between now and the sharpening is what you have available for building base—the accumulation of lots of miles at an easy-to-medium pace. Ideally, you’ll have six to eight months or more for base building—developing cardiovascular capacity and endurance. If you don’t have at least six months for base, pick a later race. Once you reach your peak,you may be able to hold it for two or three months (and even run another ultra, if you’re young and crazy) before needing to back off and rebuild base for the following year.

The basis of the one-year pattern may be the long evolution of our species in environments where climate played a larger role in our lives than it may seem to play now. Persistence hunting may have been more difficult or impossible in winter, necessitating periods of relative inactivity and subsistence on stored food. And the universal biological principle of cycles of rest and stress may also play a role. In any case, most ultrarunners make running a seasonal experience—we train year-round, but consciously prepare to be at our best during certain parts of the year, and to build or recover at others.

Some runners race year-round, incorporating races into the base building while forgoing sharpening and tapering. Year-round competitors also use races as their long training runs. If you’re preparing for your first ultra, you might benefit by doing something similar—running a marathon or half-marathon as a training run (not as hard as you can, six or seven weeks before your ultra.

In the sharpening phase, starting five or six weeks before the ultra, begin incorporating faster workouts (maybe one the first week, then two a week after that). “Faster” in this context doesn’t mean anaerobic running or sprinting, but might involve what I prefer to call anaerobic-threshold running. Some physiologists don’t like the term “anaerobic threshold” because they feel it implies that there’s a point at which, as the effort becomes more intense, you shift suddenly from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism—which is not quite what happens. Rather, there’s a zone of overlap. The academics prefer the term “lactate threshold,” which is defined as the level of intensity or caloric consumption at which the production of metabolic waste is right in balance with therate at which it is being cleared out. Any faster, and the waste builds up and you can’t go more than a minute or two before having to slow down and recover. Experience tells us that workouts right around the lactate threshold (also

called “tempo” runs) are the best thing you can do to build endurance. Research confirms it. But threshold running only works if you’ve done enough base building to support that kind of intensity without breaking down. And it only works if it’s done infrequently enough (once or twice a week at most) to allow full recovery between one “fast” day and the next. To begin your sharpening phase, you might do a warm-up of several miles at an easy pace (always warm up before any fast running), then accelerate to threshold (about as fast as you can keep up for at least five or ten minutes), then ease off for a while and go home. Three or four days later, do it again, only this time, take the threshold part a little farther. Maybe in the second week, do an interval workout—alternating faster-than-threshold surges and slow recovery, say, four times. The next time you do an interval workout, go six surges, and the one after that, eight. By then, you may be ready to taper. All the in-between days should be the same kinds of easy distance running you do in base building. Use whatever mix of threshold running and interval work suits you. Just don’t overdo it, because fast running raises the risk of injury. If you feel twinges, back off. The taper is a period of easing down on mileage and intensity—letting the body get some regeneration before the big day. On the day of the ultra, you want to start out feeling fresh and “hungry” to run, not tired out from all the miles you’ve been doing. The taper typically takes just a week or two—so if your total mileage the third week before the race is 70 miles, the second week out might be 40 and the last week before the race just 20. These numbers are somewhat arbitrary; your individual condition and ability to listen to your body will guide you on the details.

          --Excerpted from an Appendix to the forthcoming book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for    Human Endurance, to be published in October.