Training report – 100-miler – from the front lines
Saturday, I had 30 miles on the calendar followed by a 15 miler on Sunday. I was thinking about it all week. I wasn’t afraid of it, per se, but I was thinking about it.
I didn’t think it would be too much of a problem. I’m in decent aerobic shape. I’ve got no obvious injuries or ailments. I’d just go slow and enjoy the trails. No problem.
Last time I trained for an ultra, a 50-miler at that time, I had tried some of these back-to-back weekend long runs. I remember that second day sucked so I changed the plan to go extra long one day and rest the second.
This time around, training for 100-miler and coach has me doing a bunch of back-to-back mileage on the weekends. The point, he says is to learn how to run on tired legs. But it is more than that. The point is to make it suck. The point is to make you miserable and then make you run some more. Or walk. Or stumble. Or whatever. For a long, long time.
Some of it is normal volume training to condition the legs. But, as I get into the training I realize it has more to do with just letting go of actual running and coming to grips with surviving.
I had a plan for that 30-miler on Saturday.
I’d get up early, around 5:00. I’d pack my cooler with water, smoothies and sundries. Set it at the trail head on the other side of my garden. Run a 2-mile warm up with Buddy. Then hit 5 laps of my normal 10k trail loop, with lots of hike breaks and whatever else I needed.
Piece of cake.
I downloaded a few hours of podcasts. Made sure I had everything I needed the night before. Ready to go. I figured somewhere around 5 hours would be reasonable. I had things to do in the afternoon. Just because I have these monster, crushing runs doesn’t mean I can skip my weekend chores.
But, as that lecherous old Scott Robert Burns noted, the best laid plans of mice and men most oft go a’gley.
…
When you have these types of failures in otherwise predictable workouts, you spend a lot of time turning them over in your mind. You try to make sense. You try to find the why. It’s the forensic necessity of finding the pattern and making sense.
I didn’t eat anything stupid Friday night and I stayed away from the beer. I was trying to give the workout its due.
Maybe it was that I spent Friday afternoon going after my accumulated woodpile with my chain saw. I’m guessing that took something out of me even though it’s not the most strenuous of labor. I hate to think I’m so fragile. But, I’m sure that episodic activity took something from Saturday morning.
Maybe it was the weather. The thunderstorms that were supposed to roll through did not. The first real humidity and heat of the new season clung to the housel like a warm washcloth.
Maybe it was that we had to stay up late to watch the Celtics basketball game. A curse of being a Boston sports fan is that there is always someone in the playoffs. The national audience requires that we on the East Coast stay up past our old-people bedtimes.
Maybe it was that after the game it was hot in our bedroom and I didn’t sleep well. I probably woke up dehydrated. I slept late and didn’t get to the trails until after 7:00. I felt terrible from the start. I was physically tired, and it was already getting hot and still humid.
This was the first real hot and humid day. I have been getting out in the mornings when it is typically in the 50’s and cool. The last couple races I’ve run have been in the cold rain. I am not acclimated.
I don’t know what it was, but I felt shitty from the start. Dead legs. No energy. Very high sweat rate.
At the end my warm up with Buddy I dropped him at the house and went out into the first lap. At the end of the first lap I was soaked. I had already drunk my way through my hand held and half the bladder in my backpack. I stopped to refill from my cooler and was beset by big, aggressive mosquitos.
Dancing around trying to pour water into my backpack, I was a sight, I’m sure. Some deranged forest god. Not one of the cute, furry gods. One of the nasty satyr types.
I felt terrible from the start. Tired, hot and no energy. But, I rationalized. I knew I was supposed to be training tired. This was just getting me there faster. I figured it was good thing. I was already feeling terrible and still had 20 miles to slog through. That’s exactly the training I was supposed to be doing right?
In the second lap I started hiking the hills. I realized I had forgotten to lube my inner thighs. With the humidity they quickly turned to raw hamburger before I could get back to my aid station. Pushing through, right? Discomfort, right? Embrace the suck, right?
My neck and shoulders got sore. Not cramping per se, more fatigued and tight. That was probably a hangover from the chainsawing. The pack hung heavy on my back with a dull throbbing pain.
By the third lap I was walking the hills in addition to walking every 20 minutes. I was wrecked. You don’t want to drag your toes when you’re trail running. You’ll fall down. Which I did. My sweaty body rolled in dirt and I came up covered in dirt like some strange woodland confection. But, I had to get up and keep moving or the mosquitoes would get me.
I got about a mile into the fourth lap and was walking so much I figured I’d might as well just turn around and walk home. I was broken and exhausted. 20 miles was enough.
It took a while to walk home. The walk of shame. I dragged my cooler into the kitchen. I laid a towel on the floor, next to the dog, laid on top of it and passed out for an hour.
Coach told me to hurry up and get acclimated when I reported in. This 100-miler aint no joke he said. No kidding coach. Luckily the cold front rolled through and I was able to knock off 15 miles the following day with relative ease and vigor.
…
I thought this training was going to be lots of long lovely slow runs in the forest. Now I see it is more then that. It is some form of ultra-running hazing ritual that I have to get through. It designed to break me, or at least change the way I think about distance and time.
Let’s review the things I am learning.
It forces you to look at time differently. I have stuff to do and spending 7 or 8 or 9 hours in a training run every Saturday makes me anxious for all those other things I need to do. It’s a long day. For these runs I need to learn how stop worrying about when I’m going to be done and treat them like open-ended, fairly endless tasks. I have to compress time to learn how to be in the moment for hours on end and let the actual starts and ends slip away into just being.
There’s a fair amount of boredom in these long runs. After a few hours of running 10K laps in the forest it gets boring. I’ll have to figure out how to distract myself. I tried a bunch of podcasts but frankly they are not that interesting after a while. Maybe it’s time to learn a language or listen to some audio books.
Another thing is the loneliness. One of the big reasons I run is the social and community aspect. The dog is too old to go long with me anymore – he’s only good for 2 miles. When I get out more than 10 miles no one in my club wants to go with me. I’ll have to investigate building a new community of ultra-friends so I can avoid social isolation.
Another symptom is I’m super hungry, hangry, all the time. I’ve managed to gain weight since the marathon. I’m not going to worry about it but I feel a bit possessed by demons.
And then there is the constant sleepiness. I’m so sleepy. I get to about 2 in the afternoon and I want to nap. I’m traveling this week and I’m going to experiment with throwing a bit of jet lag and sleep deprivation on top of that. What could go wrong?
When I get into these super long distances it’s not the same running. I have to figure out how to slow it down from the start. I have to figure out how to spread my available energy over that distance. Not to make it easy or comfortable, no, just to make it more consistent and predictable.
Because at the end of the day it’s going to be a slog. It’s going to be a trudge. I can’t make it not a trudge. There’s no training that is going to make me jump around and yell ‘Weeeee!’ when I’m into that 7th hour of trail work. It’s about learning to live with the trudge. It’s about finding the trudge-zone you can live with. Embrace the trudge.
I’ve got 35 and 20 on the calendar for this weekend. That will get me close to 80 miles for the week.
Embrace the suck.