It’s not something I targeted, but I’ll end up with a new annual mileage record this year.
I can thank my shiny new annual mileage record to all the long ultras I raced this year. Normally I’ll mix in some 50Ks throughout the year, however 2023 was the first year where my shortest race was 50 miles. Now toss in Buckeye which was twice my longest prior race and it’s a wonder I’m only logging an extra 30 miles over 2021. The reality is I just didn’t have any sustained high mileage training weeks. I would jump up to 50-65 miles for a couple weeks leading up to a race, but that was about it. And that’s fine. I’m in this for the race experiences, not to go out and crush a bunch of training miles. My races are where I get most of my serious training stimulus and I don’t feel the need to put in a huge amount of effort outside of them.
My annual mileage totals do a good job of illustrating how I’ve approached my ultra career:
- Endurance Build: 2013-2014 (1,800-2,000 miles)
- Step Back/Recovery: 2015-2017 (1,700 miles)
- Transition: 2018 (2,100 miles)
- Lifestyle: 2019-current (2,500 miles)
In hindsight, I probably ran too many miles starting out. I never got injured, but I was definitely dealing with little niggles fairly constantly. I had no running background though and with the crazy goals I was starting to set for myself, I ran more miles than I necessarily wanted to. I was more than a little insecure in whether I even belonged in the ultra community and compensated by running miles. Lots and lots of miles.
Once I built up enough fitness to finish a hundred miler, I cut back about 10% on what I was running. My goal was to complete, not compete and I began to finally feel confident enough in my growing endurance abilities to run training more sustainably. This was more on the mental side of things than physical. I could physically handle the higher miles, I just didn’t want to run them. So I didn’t. In order to be in this community long term, you need to avoid getting burned out mentally as well as physically. I believe too many athletes get caught up in training their bodies and don’t realize how important the mental side of things are. We think of training our minds as pushing through adversity and forget that our minds need recovery just as much as our bodies. During these years, I learned to listen to my mind and what I truly wanted. As much as my early years gave me confidence that I could sustainably run ultras physically, this period taught me I could run them without getting burned out mentally.
And then gradually, I decided to run more. My weekly mileage just naturally crept up and I’ve been plus or minus 2500 miles per year since. It’s kind of amazing how steady I’ve been around this number on an annual basis considering how wildly my mileage can vary from week to week. I’ve been rocking mid-20s mileage since Devil Dog. This will creep up to about 40 over the next couple weeks and then I’m planning about six weeks in the 50-60 mile range heading into my first race of 2024. Mid-60s is what I maxed out in training this past year and I don’t really envision going above this. But then I’m going by feel and what I want to do so who knows what I’ll end up doing?
Hope you all had a great 2023. Bring on the New Year!