(Baby) Don't Fear the Ultra
Why running extra long is truly mad fun. (Really.)
(To regular readers: thanks for all the messages of love and support received, both on Substack and privately, after I posted about Emerging from the Wreckage 24 hours ago. And now back to our regular scheduled programming: this here long post below, delayed after last weekend was derailed.)
In my previous posts on running, I have:
explained how I only became a so-called runner after becoming a parent,
offered some tips and tricks for road running across a couple of separate articles, here and here,
and more recently wrote about “My Happy Place,” the trails – and more specifically, running them.
You don’t have to be a genius to work out that these articles have been in the form of a progression, and for runners, such a progression in gains and goals usually reaches a long finish with the “ultra marathon,” or “ultra” for short.
However, to avoid getting off on the wrong foot (ouch!) there is nothing “short” about an ultra. (And to avoid further confusion, we are not talking about the football fanatics here or any other use of the word except in running.) While one of the beauties of the ultra-marathon distance is that there is no set distance, indeed no officially recognized dictionary definition, general perception and common understanding has it that an ultra-marathon is considered anything longer than a marathon distance, almost always involving a preference for trails over road and therefore almost certainly involving some proper elevation on “technical terrain” in the process. In other words, an ultra is not only likely to be longer than 26(.2) miles, but likely to take disproportionately longer than your average road marathon too.
But then again, there are no rules. The 30k/18.5 mile Escarpment Trail Run, which I have now completed 15 times and which I discussed at some length in “My Happy Place,” is included on the go-to site Ultra Sign-Up, and though its comparatively shorter distance doesn’t meet that common definition of an ultra-marathon, I would challenge any fast – and preferably young - road marathon runner to come out and try it and see what they are really made of before dismissing it as remotely less difficult.1
That said, most ultra runners would consider the base ultra distance to be 50k (31 miles), with personal tick boxes when you then clock something approximate to a 50 miler, a 100k, a 100 miler and so on, and on and on, until infinity. Or at least until Infinitus: Ultra Sign-Up shows an 888-kilometer race in Vermont next spring by that name, which only one person out of seven entrants actually finished last year – and it took him 228 hours (by my calculation, 9 and a half days).
Similarly, anyone who has watched documentaries about the Barkley Marathons – the first and most famous of which, from 2014, was subtitled “The Race that Eats Its Young” – would surely believe that only a sadist could design, and only masochists could possibly ever desire to undertake, such a cruel course: five loops, in altering directions, of a 20+mile circuit famed for its lack of navigation, its impossible terrain, the lack of visual evidence (photos and video being banned), and the need to tear off specific pages from specific books hidden at certain plot points. The kind of people who take on the Infinitus 888 or the Barkley Marathons fall somewhere between Super Human or, as Funkadelic put it, Super Stupid. British veterinarian Jasmin Paris absolutely fits into the former camp: in 2024, she became the first woman to complete a course that the race director, the chain-smoking “Lazarus”, stated on that 2014 film was too difficult for a woman ever to complete within the 60-hr cutoff. Jasmin came home with just 99 seconds to spare. (You can see her finish in the clip above. If it is painful to watch, imagine how it felt for her!)
For the record, I am neither Super Human nor Super Stupid. The most distance I have covered in a single event, at least to date, is a measly 100 kilometers. I have yet to compete in a 24-hour plus race. I don’t win any age groups, let alone races. But I am, at least these days, something of a “weekend” ultra - someone who, with every passing year, at least considers taking on something longer, or more challenging. And in a world where so many people are now running road marathons that many former marathoners are moving up to the ultra distance almost as a matter of (a more freewheeling and inexpensive) course, there is always something longer or more challenging to take on. And there always people challenging you to do so.
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Flash back to when I first moved to the Catskill, in the mid noughties. As I trotted over the mountain trails on half-day runs with like-minded nature-lovers and Escarpment addicts, I would frequently be paid some form of troubling compliment along the lines of, “What’s your next ultra?” The inference in that question was that not only did I have what it took to complete these longer distances, but that I had already done so and was no doubt preparing for more.
So, for a number of years, I replied truthfully, “I’ve never run one,” before offering the following, equally legitimate excuse: “I don’t have the time.” Depending on my trail partners and their willingness to hear blasphemy, I might also have added, “I’m not sure I have the inclination either.”
You see, pure biophysics dictates that the shorter a distance we run, the faster we can go. That’s why Noah Lyles, fresh off his 100m VAR-certified photo-finish in the Paris Olympics, is the latest to be considered “the world’s fastest man” and why the maximum speed attained by such elite sprinters – 25mph – cannot be replicated even on a 200m course. By comparison, the world’s elite road marathoners, some of the greatest athletes in the world, trot along at barely that half that speed (all things being relevant: you trying running a single mile at 4:26 pace, let alone 26.2 of them!). The top ultra athletes, such as Paris’s fellow Brit Tom Evans at last year’s Western States 100-miler, considered the pre-eminent ultra race on the planet, are twice as slow again, turning in their miles at something close to a 9-minute pace. At a certain point – or rather, a certain distance - one might reasonably conclude that you could walk just as fast.
Indeed you can. And I have done just that. But I am getting ahead of myself. Back when my trail running peeps were encouraging me to go long(er), I was happy to be going fast(er). I didn’t really see the point in slowing down; I had specific improvements I was after on the distances I was currently competing in. And generally, I met them.
But I was also being truthful when I said I did not have the time. I felt blessed to be living in the heart of the Catskills Mountains, where my long-suffering wife perhaps suffered a little less by allowing me to occasionally blow off weekend steam with long outings on the local trails, with or without company, and to then blow it out in whale-like gushes of exertion on the annual Escarpment Run, the only long trail race in the Mountains, though one of considerable pedigree and renown. The costs of entrance fees and travel for the truly long-distance events held elsewhere would only take me (further) away from familial responsibilities in terms of both time and money; there would be less opportunity to write, to play music, to go on outings with the kids. In fact, in those earlier ultra days, I would conduct my own unofficial but not entirely unscientific survey, and concluded that the vast majority of ultra runners I knew were either not yet parents, were empty nesters or parents of increasingly self-sufficient teens, or had never had kids to begin with.
Of course, for all that I had two kids at home, eventually I succumbed to a combination of peer pressure and curiosity. In 2012, at age 48, I tossed my hat in the ring, threw my tent in the back of the car, and pitched camp in a designated area of Hector State Park, along with just about all the other entrants for the Finger Lakes 50s, a relatively low-key (though perennially sold-out) event held the weekend before the July 4th holiday in the heart of New York’s pre-eminent wine country. The next morning, after being woken by a dawn bugle, I wrestled to make coffee in time (nobody told me it was being made for us!), before choosing whether to run one, two or two-point-something times around what I recall as a relatively forgiving trail course, clocking up 25k, 50k or 50 miles in the process. I had already opted for the middle distance and under the circumstances, on what was a warm day, I had a great time, finishing in the top half of the pack at six-and-a-half hours exactly, by far the longest I’d ever spent time running close to continually, and also of course my longest distance till then.
I crossed the finish line right alongside the new buddy I’d made on the course, a 30-year-old called Joel who I duly talked into trying out the Escarpment (which he did). He in turn tried to tempt me into the mysterious rehydrating powers of the beer stop (his girlfriend met him with a can at a pre-arranged road intersection). I declined the offer, but as I sank a couple of ales back at the campground with just about all the other competitors later in the evening, I truly understood the appeal of the ultra-marathon. You can keep your self-congratulatory “50k” or “200mile” bumper stickers. Mine would read:
Ultra runs are mad fun.
Nonetheless, I was not an instant convert. When the ultra-marathon distance quite literally landed on my doorstep the following year with the inaugural Manitou’s Revenge, organized by local hiker-runners Charlie Gadol and Mike Siudy, I took one look at the 56-mile route and its accompanying elevation, and knowing most though not all steps of that course, which wound its way through several ranges of the Catskills Mountains, declined to enter… at least for the full distance. I ran as part of a relay instead, covering the last 25 or so miles in eight hours. Two years later, I covered the same distance in under seven hours. In-between, I volunteered one year and had the excuse of being on the other side of the world on a year out in 2016.
By the time I returned, however, Charlie and Mike’s brutal course had not only achieved legendary status already – shortened to something around 54 miles and now absent any relay options, it’s widely considered the hardest c. 50-miler/100k event in the eastern United States – but had spawned a more manageable event later in the year, the Cat’s Tail Marathon, a course that almost magically seems to take in exactly 26.2 miles, all but the last half-mile on the mountains. As with Manitou’s, the Cat’s Tail concludes at the Parish Hall in Phoenicia, which was my local village at the time. Given that I had not yet run myself out of steam, I had certainly run out of excuses.
And so, in 2017, I was among the small handful of Catskills fanatics to compete in what is now the trifecta of distance trail races: Manitou’s Revenge in mid-June, the Escarpment in late July, and the Cat’s Tail in mid-October. Not only did I complete all three, but thanks to Dick Vincent’s incredible coaching skills, I broke my personal 4hr goal on the Escarpment. I will almost certainly never do so again.
But that’s by the bye. As noted earlier, real ultras – the proper long distances – are not about speed. They are about stamina and endurance, about finding something inside you that you didn’t know you had… Though once you discover you do have it, you realize that all of us have it, that humans are ultra-marathoners quite literally by nature; it’s how we persevered and prospered as a species, and it is only in recent centuries that this innate attribute has been knocked into remission due to our increasingly mechanized and sedentary lifestyles).
At their toughest, ultras are largely about digging in, refusing to quit, taking refuge in the fact that if you can just continue to put one step in front of another, while also staying upright (far from guaranteed), eventually you will reach the finish line. And exhausted though you may be in that moment, and possibly for much of the next few days, there will come a time, almost certainly within 48 hours of completion, where you feel utterly elated about your achievement and eager to come back for more. Humans, after all, have a remarkable ability to forget about pain and remember instead the pleasure.
Having a positive attitude in the first place certainly helps in that regard. That mid-June Saturday in 2017, I set off on the Manitou’s Revenge course, at 5:30 in the morning, determined that despite the 53-54 miles to the finish line, despite the 15,000ft of climbing (“much of it rocky and precipitous” states the web site with extreme underemphasis, failing to note that this makes the descents that much harder), nothing would stop me having a “beautiful day.” And nothing did – although the fact that the U2 song of the same name did not just embed itself in my brain but played on repeat for the majority of the 17 and three-quarter hours I was out there certainly came close.
In all seriousness though, knowing that I was hardly going to win the event, and knowing that I had a relatively generous 23 hours to complete it, I set about the event as if an all-day hike. In fact, when I interviewed Mike Siudy about “Running an Ultra” (a deliberate double-entendre as he is both race director and a competitor), he noted that for all its difficult terrain, Manitou’s can be successfully approached as “a long hike with some jogging in-between.” Indeed, for just about anyone who is already a decent hiker, there is this undisputable attraction: the longer trail ultras are never a “race” for anyone but those up front that you are not going to catch anyway. The vast majority of ultra-marathoners hike anything that even looks uphill, run the flats, and treat the downhills with a combination of enthusiastic caution and cautious enthusiasm.
I practiced this method on my lone 100k event, the Devil Dog Ultras in Virginia in early December 2021, and I completed the course in a little over 17 hours, crossing the finish line at something like a running pace and with a big fat smile on my face. Had the entire adventure been fun? No, though primarily that was due to me over-eating at the various aid stations and having a different case of the runs as a result. But what was I meant to do? I mean, when volunteers get up even earlier than the competitors to set up cooking stoves and greet us with fresh falafel and potato soup mid-race, wouldn’t it be rude to decline?
Given that dodgy stomach, I was at least consoled by the fact I wasn’t (yet) dumb enough to run the full 100-mile distance, which necessitated two more circuits than I completed. No, after that successful first 100k, I went back to my cheap hotel room, got a few hours’ patchy sleep, and upon returning to the course in the late morning to retrieve my drop-off bag, had the fun of seeing some of the later 100-milers make it home well within their 32-hour cutoff. And also, for the most part, with smiles on their faces – though on reflection, it’s possible they were grimaces.
For completing the Devil’s Dog Ultra, I received a bullet that doubles as a bottle opener. Really. Here’s a picture of it.2
The Finger Lakes 50k also gave me a bottle opener, a more conventional one. I usually get a pint glass at Manitou’s Revenge or the Cat’s Tail and most other trail races, too; I gave half a dozen to the local thrift shop on moving recently and still have enough left over to host a football team. As I mentioned on the trails post, very few events off the roads offer real prizes, and the ultras exemplify this “you’re in it for the fun” aspect, and while hoodies are more common “swag” than your typical race day “technical tee,” they often come at an extra cost (or commitment). Sitting here typing this out, I’m truly stuck to recall ever witnessing an awards ceremony.
No, ultras are the fanzines of distance running. Gleefully irreverent and held purely for the sake of it, they are nonetheless capable of inspiration, offer rare moments of insight, are generally inexpensive, and become an addictive subculture all of their own.
Just as fanzines are famously confessional and perhaps, as a result, often elicit über-honest responses from interviewees, people share life stories on Ultras. If you decide to partner up with someone in the latter stages to help get each other through the final miles, as I did with a female runner on the Devil’s Dog Ultra (it was her debut 100k too), chances are you will learn a lot about that person, and perhaps form a friendship as a result.
And while ultras are certainly organized “events,” requiring permits, medical teams, sweeps, and a legion of volunteers,3 the lack of formal definition allows me to challenge the given perception that all ultras have to be events to begin with. A self-designed course undertaken solo or with just a group of friends can be considered an ultra. My friend Amy decided to navigate Connecticut from tip to tail, on trail; that’s an ultra by anyone’s standard. I once joined another friend Tom for part of his attempt to complete all five of the Catskills fire towers in one day, something no one else had apparently done before; it necessitated him driving between them on a set schedule.
Impressively, the aforementioned Mike Siudy set about covering all 35 of the Catskills’ 3500ft-plus peaks in one go, without using a vehicle to navigate between them; he achieved the 144-mile self-designed circuit in 57 hours (and says that he ran very little of it). And Ken Posner, who I have featured twice on my One Step Beyond podcast, once ran from Death Valley (282 ft below sea level) to the top of Mt Whitney (14,500ft above sea level) – and then, because there isn’t much else to do at the top of the contiguous USA, all the way back again. It was a total of 270 miles, and he became the fastest of the thirty or so people who’ve completed this “Badwater Double.”
Sometimes races are held on recognized multi-day hiking courses. The Spine Race, which covers all 268 miles of the Pennine Way in England, considers itself “Britain’s most brutal endurance race,” with a 168-hour cut off (a mere week, in case you were wondering), but the course itself is a recognized national treasure that others choose to hike over a period of many weeks.
The same with the Appalachian Trail, which covers almost 2200 miles as it winds through 14 US States from Georgia to Maine. Taking on the entire course over a period of months is a common endeavor among all manner of age ranges and fitness levels, with an 83-year-old completing it in 2021, presumably at the leisurely pace the retired can afford… But at the opposite end of that time scale, breaking the Fastest Known Time on the Appalachian Trail became a determined goal for top ultra-marathoner (and pioneering vegan endurance athlete) Scott Jurek in 2015, as he aged out from being one of the GOATs. He covered almost 50 miles a day for 46 days straight, much of it in agony, to beat the record by mere hours. His book about this mid-life crisis event, North, co-written with his wife Jenny, without whose support his FKT would have been a non-starter, makes for compelling reading.
As for me, the Devil’s Dog 100k remains, to date, my humble longest distance. And though a little shorter in length, my second Manitou’s Revenge, earlier in 2021, remains the longest time I have been on a course, a combination of humidity and humidity slowing me that year to 19 and a quarter hours. My best time? Emotionally, there have been a series of them, and I’ll detail my fave/maddest/hardest events, both long and short, on a final – for now – forthcoming running post. But in terms of speed? It matters, and it doesn’t. I like to place well, to test myself hard enough to know that I’ve done my best. But primarily, I’m out to have mad fun.
More reading on running
Indeed, this past July 28, 2024, I found myself helping set both a pace and a path for a 25-year-old who had come up Georgia for the Escarpment Run, having been sold on its special qualities by friends. When he told me it was his first trail race, I was surprised; he was certainly jumping in at the deep end. How had he qualified, I asked? By running a marathon, he said. OK, I said, how fast? Two hours, forty-five, he said. That is fast, I noted, like really fast, even for a young ‘un. And sure enough, at a certain point, he took off from me. Then I caught him; he’d almost rolled an ankle on the downhill. Soon, he took off from me again. Close to the finish, I caught him again at my steady pace. This time it was his thighs; they were killing him. I tried to bring him home in my slipstream, and to his credit, he finished only a couple of minutes behind this 60-year-old. I wanted to get a picture of us together but I found him slumped on a folding chair, dazed and confused, looking shellshocked, completely unable to talk, let alone walk – barely living proof that running a fast road marathon does not translate to the trails.
There’s a reason they give out a bullet. From the Devil Dog website: “The name Devil Dog comes from our respect for the Marine Corps. It’s fitting this race takes place in Prince William Forest Park, across the street from Marine Corps Base Quantico.”
Volunteers go the extra mile. In 2018, the year I hiked into the final aid station for Manitou’s, I also hiked back out again to replenish our supplies (and in again, of course). We set up disco lights, put out chairs, brewed broth, and welcomed the runners as they steadily became walkers. We were then stuck on the mountain until close to dawn waiting for the “sweeps” to bring in a competitor who had lost his prescription glasses and was covering the aforementioned steep uphill at approximately one mile an hour. By the time we escorted him down our side-trail, it had been a 22-hr day. It was mad fun throughout. (Almost.)
Great piece, Tony, and clear evidence that you have to write a book about running.