If you want to succeed in ultras, then I have one skill for you to focus your time and attention. It’s not downhill technical descents. Not eating while running. Nor is it dealing with adversity. Though all those will surely benefit you, there’s one other skill I would recommend you hone:
Patience.
So I’m not breaking any news when I say ultras are hard. When you attempt a difficult task, it will take you time to complete it. The harder the task, the longer the timeframe. No matter how much you’ve run in the past or how good of shape you’re in, it’s going to take some time for you to become successful. Here are some ways where patience will pay off for you.
Mileage
The 10% rule is don’t increase your weekly mileage more than 10% from the prior week. This is probably the best known training guideline, yet everyone still screws up their running volume by doing too much too fast. You get into running and you love it so you just throw miles at your body like it’s indestructible. The truth is though that you just don’t know any better.
Races
I’m sure there are people out there who run just for the fun of it, but for most of us it’s all about the races. This is the motivating factor that gets us out of bed at 4am or pushes us to complete a long run. While your regional race options used to be pretty limited back in the day, these days you can probably find a race near you every weekend of the year. This will definitely tempt you to do too many. Limit yourself to a couple per year starting out and then add more annually as you gain experience. These races aren’t going anywhere and will be there to run in subsequent years.
Probably even more important is to be patient as you move up in distance. Don’t go straight to a hundred. Working your way up from 50K to 50M to 100M is the safer way to approach ultras. Sure you could possibly Goggins your way to a finish, but your risk of injury increases dramatically the quicker you try to move up in distance. Take your time and enjoy the shorter ultras. They’re just as fun and satisfying as the longer races.
Pacing
So, yeah. Don’t go out too fast. This one is much easier said than done and frankly I’m still struggling here.
Injuries
You should slowly increasing your training miles when you’re starting out and it is doubly true coming back from an injury. Better an extra couple days off running or couple extra weeks building back to your normal volume, than to spend an extra couple months not doing what you love. Again, easier said than done though.
Developing Proficiency
If you’re going to be apply this super skill to anything, apply it to your expectations with ultras in general. Don’t expect to be good at them after a couple of races. We tend to think that being good at running in general should translate into being good at ultras relatively quickly. The truth is that running long distances is hard. Like really hard. The number of variables that you need to account for and master increases dramatically as you move past the marathon distance. There’s no blueprint for what to eat, drink, or how often to do either. You need different pacing strategies for trails and roads. Out-and-back courses need to be approached differently than big loops which are different than short loops. Running at night will be different. Even more so when sleep deprived. Now throw in changing weather conditions and the fact that your body will react to them differently depending on whether you’ve just started or have been out moving for 15 hours. Then there’s footcare, chafing, GI issues, etc., etc.
And you really expect to master all this after 5 or 6 races? It took me that long to get a general feel for what my major problem areas where going to be. It wasn’t until I was 10-15 races into my career that I started feeling “comfortable”. Not comfortable as they were easy, but comfortable in that I knew what was going to go wrong, how long that was likely to last, and several ways to fix or mitigate it. Forty plus and I’m still figuring stuff out. So cut yourself some slack and don’t get frustrated when your races are harder than you think they should be. Remember that if these were easy, you probably wouldn’t be nearly as obsessed interested in running insanely long distances.
If you work to develop this super skill, you’ll have many years to enjoy this wonderful sport. Now, how much longer do I have to wait for my next hundred miler. . .