UltraRunning July 2019
- The Barkley Marathons
- 10 Times: A Western States Retrospective
- We Need to Talk About Sleep
- Training for the Flatlanders
- Lake Sonoma
- Nikki Kimball: Always a Runner
After falling in love with a man who shirks labels and simply states there is a darkness that at moments is all consuming, I have learned more profoundly than through all my years working in mental health the heartbreaking meaning behind this statement.
My dad retired in his late fifties and has been having the time of his life for the past few decades. He turns 85 this year and is still doing his thing – playing tennis, hunting all sorts of birds and doing real yard work. He loves to play games – especially bridge and gin rummy.
The sky was dark and the ground was dry when we arrived at the shore of Lake Superior for the ninth annual Wild Duluth 100K on October 21, 2017. There were 74 of us with our crews, gathered at Bayfront Park, only half of whom would finish.
As you begin to dive into the final weeks of training for spring ultras, consider which of your running compadrés might need a crew or pacer this season. With the pacer request page recently launched on the Western States website, there’s no guarantee all registered runners will be able to bring along someone to support them during the 100-mile adventure.
What am I doing here? And why did I decide that this was the race to “go for it?” Now I just wish I were at home between my own sheets with hyperactive bladder and bowels and cold sweaty feet and hands. Most of all, I wish that tomorrow held something other than an early rise and a day of exceedingly painful effort. Ah, well. close the eyes, breath deeply, and please, please, go to sleep.
Sure, runners can get snarky in the heat of the moment—at race officials or at their own crew and pacers when things don’t go their way. But this has more to do with the stress of the event, and having their needs (however illogical or self-entitled they may be) properly met.
Last year, my friend Todd Jennings and I organized a race to celebrate the Shawangunk Ridge Trail (SRT), a magical footpath that traverses the entire 74-mile length of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Paralyzed from the neck down, his head supported by a stainless steel band with pins penetrating his skull, Richard Dinges sat immobilized in a wheelchair last year still planning to run in the 1984 Catalina Marathon and Western States 100. “The doctors were pretty noncommittal,” Dinges said. “They just didn’t know what the outcome would be.”
Time… wouldn’t we all love to have more of it? This can be particularly true when we have a full-time…
The Incan Empire consisted of hundreds of thousands of square miles of land; its population blossomed, on some estimates, to…
By Katrin Silva I enjoy running with music. I don’t do it all the time, and never while racing. But…
This was my third time running the Hilo to Volcano 50K, as I had also participated in the 2004 and…
Some runners may be sensitive enough to their body’s rhythms and needs that they will instinctively know when it’s time for a walk. They are fortunate, and I don’t want to change their successful methods. Many of us, though, are fairly new to the game. and we don’t have an established sense of pace. However, it is not hard to plan and execute a race when a few simple calculations are made.
One of the simplest improvements a runner can make to his or her training is to approach every run with a simple question: “What am I trying to achieve today?” It sounds obvious, but it’s all too easy to get caught up aiming for weekly mileage targets for no better reason than because they sound impressive.
Your great victories seldom make entertaining stories. What people want to hear about are your appalling errors and grievous miscalculations.
Efficiency is a very good way of gauging a runner’s aerobic fitness. The problem is that measuring efficiency in a lab is not only inconvenient, it’s also expensive. Fortunately, there’s another way of measuring efficiency that doesn’t require a lab and can be done with common, everyday training technology.
When I was facing a huge life decision, my mom encouraged me to choose my destiny over my fate. I really didn’t know what she was talking about and when I looked the words up in the dictionary they were basically synonymous. More research revealed that the differences are subtle, but huge.
The article by Sally Edwards ( Ultramarathoning A Dying Sport?) in the September issue of Ultrarunning elicited considerable response. Some of the letters follow; additional comments on the subject or on other aspects of ultramarathoning are always welcome.
We have become a society of carb burners. That is where sports nutrition has been for the past couple of decades. Of the two main food sources the body uses for energy, carbohydrates and fats, our working muscles would prefer carbs because they create ATP (energy) faster. They are “easier” to convert into energy.