I’ve gotten pretty consistent at the hundred mile distance over the past couple years. I am now able to head into races with solid pacing plans and can execute a race without making too many mistakes. And those that I do make are modest and don’t materially impact my finishing times. This consistency has kept me from having bad races, however the flip side is that I haven’t had any amazing races either. Part of this is that I’m not taking chances or daring to be great as I really don’t want to blow up and struggle late in races. Another contributor is that my training is still doing the same old, same old. Tough to improve when you’re not doing any interventions to drive improvement.
This chart of my hundreds over the past year does a pretty good job showing what I’m talking about.
All of those races are right on the line except two. Viaduct’s performance can be explained by the weather (very hot temperatures) and the mostly self-supported nature of the race that caused me to carry some extra gear. Those are probably worth maybe 30-45 minutes or about half the variance to my expected finish time. I felt pretty good with my performance after the race (almost even split it), however maybe this is just what a bad performance looks like for me. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
More Miles is almost 3 hours off the trendline. When I finished the first yard and saw the elevation number on my watch (558), I was mildly discouraged. I’m always looking for a hundred mile finish, however I knew the math on my finishing times and was pretty sure this was way too much elevation for me to be able to fit into a sub-24 hour hundred. I didn’t know how far I could actually go, but 24 hours seemed very unlikely. Thankfully, I never gave it another thought and just kept fueling and moving as efficiently as possible. This eventually led to my 24 hour hundred miler.
So Seriously, How Was That Possible?
I think there were three things that helped set me up for success, however were not the primary drivers of my outperformance:
- Perfect pacing
- Flawless nutrition
- Mild course profile for the elevation
Pacing. My pacing was on point pretty much right from the start. I targeted 55 minute yards and I was +/- 1 minute of that for every one except the first couple. I used those early yards to figure out the best way to efficiently cover the course. What to run, what to walk and how to run and walk those sections. Knowing the course well helped destress the experience and allowed me to spend all my mental energy on executing my race plan.
Nutrition. Fifty calories every. single. mile. No exceptions, no mistakes, no misses. I rotated through my candy choices (gummy bears, Snickers, Swedish fish, Twix, peanut M&Ms), supplemented with some of the aid station fare (watermelon, potatoes), and then relied heavily on Gu vanilla bean gels once the night yards got going. I started with Coke and Perpetuem in my bottles then mostly switched over to lemonade and water after about halfway. I pivoted when I felt it was necessary, but just kept steadily shoveling calories down the hatch mile by mile, hour by hour.
Course layout. Nothing by gentle rolling trails with limited to no technical sections. There were a couple muddy parts, but not enough to really cause much of an issue. From a pure numbers standpoint, More Miles looks on par with RR100, however the latter race had it’s elevation crammed into about 80% of the course and there were 16 quad crushing descents to deal with. Oh, and also lots more mud. Honestly, this course really wasn’t orders of magnitude harder than WG100 or DD100 which had some technical sections that just really slow you down.
My pacing and nutrition have been dialed in over the past year so I don’t think these contributed much. Course profile might be worth upwards of an hour, however it was still an awful lot of elevation gain/loss to deal with. That leaves me with just one factor I haven’t mentioned yet.
The Secret To Ultras
OK, time to hit you with my secret to ultras. Ready? If you want to get good at running long distances, then you need to . . . wait for it. . . run long distances. The corollary being that if you want to get good at running hundred milers, then you need to run hundred milers. Over the years, I’ve consistently done 3 spread somewhat haphazardly throughout the calendar. This has let me slowly dial things in and has lead to the consistency you see in the graph above. The past 12 months though has seen me finish 8 runs at or over a hundred with two of them over 200. I believe what I’m seeing in my More Miles race are all these long effort paying off in improved race performance. I don’t have Coast to Coaster in the chart above, but I was running strongly deep into the race on days 2 and 3. While pancake flat, it was orders of magnitude better than I’ve done late in similar races (sub 15 pace vs. 18-20min). This has to have given me a nice training boost in and of itself that most likely carried over to More Miles.
Or that’s my theory. I’ve a couple more races scheduled this summer, which will provide an opportunity to prove or disprove it. I can’t wait!