Ultrarunning. Honestly, who came up with this name?
Take a perfectly reasonable sport like running and then decide, “Let’s do it for so long that our legs forget their purpose and our brains file HR complaints.” Then add trails so we can trip on roots, fall off ridges and tell people we “love nature” while aggressively yelling at mud.
That’s my sport.
Recently, I wrote “athlete” as my occupation while going through border control in Australia. The officer looked at my card like I’d claimed to be a part-time astronaut.
“What sport?” he asked.
“Running,” I said.
“Like… marathons?”
Usually I say, “Sure,” to avoid the conversation spiral, but this time I went for it. “I do ultramarathons.”
“So… more than a marathon?”
“Yeah. I race 100k and100 miles.”
“You run that whole time?”
Bless him. Absolutely not.
When I train for UTMB, I cross the finish line less like a runner and more like a tired goat with ski poles. At that stage, the difference between jogging, staggering and gravitational surrender is technical. My “running form” could legally be classified as interpretive dance.
After giving a talk to a group of school kids and describing the sport of ultrarunning, they gave me mixed looks of confusion, awe and concern for my sanity. One girl raised her hand to say she once reached the end of a school cross-country race and was barely able to take another step.
I assured her that ultramarathons are run at the intensity of “grandma searching for a bargain bin.” No one is sprinting, we’re all just politely hustling toward snacks.
Because honestly, the sport should be called: ultra eating, ultra problem-solving, ultra trying-not-to-throw-up or ultra emotional breakdowns in scenic locations.
Sometimes you feel fast and fierce, and other times you’re negotiating with your left knee like it’s a hostage situation. Sometimes it’s just you and a stranger power-hiking uphill together in total silence, bonding spiritually while pretending you’re fine.
They say running an ultra can be perceived as feeling like life in a day. A race is like going to school – you’re mostly there to attend health and PE, and then you end up in math class trying to convert min/km into cutoff times using a brain with the processing power of mashed potatoes. In English class, sentence structure is optional, and you communicate with your crew using interpretive grunts. And if things go south, you take science class and learn what happens when you combine gels, Coke, soup, coffee, potatoes and these days, bicarb. Spoiler: eruption.
“Ultra-whatever-you-want-to-call-it” is the best sport.
I’ll keep having these conversations with border security officers and confused children, hoping I convert at least one person into joining this wild world of voluntarily suffering in beautiful places.