I am doing something unusual for this race: I am writing two race reports. The first report I wrote, and posted, was a fairly traditional race report: recounting the race itself and how I felt during the race. I want to take a different tack with this one, and write a shorter synopsis of the race, focusing more on my race goals and strategy.
Goals and Objectives
I had one goal going into this race: finish. By that, I don’t mean “finish at all costs” or “finish even if it’s a bad idea,” I mean finish the race well by running within my abilities: controlling what I could control to make the run as successful as possible. I had tried the fifty mile difference several times before, ever since a guy I was running with on a frozen river said that, in his experience, the fifty is where ultramarathons really start to feel different than “just” a long marathon.
That said, I am still me. If I enter a race, I want to do fairly well. For me that means trying to finish in the top 10% of finishers (5% is preferable). I had some times in mind, but I used those more to scope out when my crew should plan to get to various aid stations than any firm time goals.
Strategy - Training
I arranged my strategy around that one goal. Leading up to the race, I had nearly two years of some of the most consistent training of my life. The numbers aren’t eye-popping, but the training was both steady and focused and, if I do say so myself, well-executed, following a training plan I’d worked out myself using principles from both “The Happy Runner” and “Training Essentials for Ultrarunning.” In the months leading up to the race, I ran consistently high-for-me mileage, including five weeks in a row around my own top training mileage, with no real issues.
Three weeks out from the race, I went out for my longest training run - 22 miles out at Afton. I imagine most competitive ultra-marathoners don’t consider that very long for the longest training run of a cycle. But it works out to about three hours for me, which is where I want to be if I’m going to run truly long. I felt great the whole time, finishing with an 8:36 average pace, and feeling like I easily could have done more. The next day, I popped off a hard four-miler on legs that were tired, regardless of how they felt the day before.
My last workout before the race, just a week out, was a downhill session at Hyland Hills, running up the ski hills at an easy pace, then bombing down them to prep my legs for the downhills on the course (I only ever do one downhill workout. My legs get a lot of downhill on my normal training runs, so I don’t believe I need anything more). Ideally I would have placed this workout 10-14 days out from the event, giving my legs a little more time to recover, but the ideal rarely happens.
Strategy - Mental
I have had a bad patch in every single run or race longer than 25k. By “bad patch,” I mean a time where I have not only had to walk, but also had the voice in the back of my head start nagging at me to just quit now. I mean a patch where I questioned why I was out there: what was I even doing this for? I knew that, to finish this race, I would have to 1) be ready for a bad patch, but also 2) try to avoid that patch if possible.
Being ready for the bad patch was relatively straightforward: I’ve been there before. I know the difference between a bad patch that I can recover from and a race-ending issue. I know that if I’m able to push through the bad patch, focus on what I can control, and just keep moving forward, there will be a better patch on the other side.
So I focused on goal two: avoiding the bad patch. I had a few strategies for this.
Mantras - I know many, many athletes who use matras while racing for a simple reason: they work. I chose three for this race. For the first 22 miles (~40% of the race), I would repeat “relax and enjoy,” reminding myself that it was still early, and that I really was lucky to be out there. For the next 20 miles or so, I would repeat “get in it” or just “get in,” a phrase we used to use on my ultimate frisbee team in Scotland, reminding me to buckle down and get into the race itself. Finally, if needed, I’d use “gut it out,” to get through the last few miles, and any bad patches I may have.
The Watch - I have a watch that gives me almost any data I want. Pace, heart race, cadence, time, distance - I can even hook up a power meter if I want. In practice, I rarely want to see all that in a race, so I set my watch up showing only two custom faces: one giving time of day, total elapsed time, and current cadence; and the other showing lap time and distance, total elapsed time and lap number. I chose never to see the whole distance I’d covered because 1) in the beginning, it’s just a reminder of how far you still have to go and 2) it’s not useful in my other strategy: thinking aid-station to aid station.
Compartmentalizing - The watch setup ties in with this: I broke the race up into chunks based on the location of aid stations. Each section between aid stations I treated as its own whole. I had a little cheat sheet with (short) descriptions of the trail conditions (elevation, etc), and on the flip side had a printed copy of the elevation profile for the race, all “laminated” using shipping tape. A common strategy in ultramarathons, in each section I concentrated solely on getting to the next aid station. This helped me keep from getting overwhelmed by the thought that I would be running 18 miles farther than I ever had in my life up until this day.
Strategy - Physical
Much of my physical strategy was taken care of before I ever started the race, in my training runs for the past two years. I did have a couple strategies around nutrition and the actual day-of running that played well.
Nutrition and Hydration - Over the past several years, I’ve developed a nutrition and hydration plan that works really well for me, giving me enough food intake and water intake while never overdoing it and still leaving room for adjustment on the fly. Every ten minutes, I take a drink (usually alternating water and sports drink depending on whether or not I’m eating). I’ll adjust amounts to thirst, but I (almost) always take a sip at ten minutes. On the 20, 40, and 00 minute marks, I’ll take 75-85 calories. For Superior, that was entirely in the form of Honey Stinger Chews and Waffles (each pack of one or the other is 150-160 calories, so I took half a portion every time). On the hour, since it was hot and humid for the North Shore in September, I’d take a salt tab.
Other Physical Details - Not much to say here. The usual ideas for ultras apply: walk any hill that’s too steep or long to run comfortably (there were lots of stairs on this course). New for me, I opted to use trekking poles for a few portions of the course (Carlton Peak and Moose Mountain). These climbs came late in the course and are both steep and technical, with large steps up and drops down. Having a crew meant that I could pick up and drop off the poles when necessary, so I didn’t have to carry them the whole race.
Implementation - Race Day
For a full race report, you can see my other write up. I wrote that oneas much for me as anybody else, but I did want to share how the race itself went and how I implemented, or didn’t implement, the strategies above.
In a nutshell, the race itself went really well, better than I ever could have hoped. I got to run the first three miles or so with a running friend of mine I met during the Hixon 50k in 2018. Unfortunately, he pulled up with a “popped” hamstring a few miles in and eventually had to drop, but it was a great way to spend the first miles in the dark. After he fell back, I caught up to a few runners who had taken wrong turns in the dark, and hitched themselves to my wagon for a time. It was nice to have the company, but after the second aid station, we split up and I was on my own for the rest of the race, save for the runners in the 50, and in the 100 and marathon who I passed along the way.
“Relax and enjoy” worked so well in the first 20 miles that I decided to use it for my mantra the entire day. The other two were never necessary. And I truly did relax and enjoy the race until the last four miles or so. I took the opportunity to spot and identify mushrooms on the trail (for those who are interested: we passed hen of the woods, several types of boletes, both chanterelles and Jack o Lanterns, pheasant backs, and several LBMs of unknown varieties). When I spotted a particularly good view, I stopped to take a picture. And I just thoroughly enjoyed the experience or being out for a full day on a trail, sharing the joy and difficulty with the others on the course.
My fueling and hydration plan was extremely successful overall. Relatively early on in the race, I started taking a one-minute walk break every ten minutes while I ate and/or drank. I started the walk breaks after having some trouble with my footing a couple times (the SHT is notoriously technical much of the time), and kept it going because it seemed to work well for me. The only issue I had with nutrition was that, after 40 miles or so, I started to get tired of the options I had with me (three flavors of chews and two flavors of waffles) but nothing else seemed to work either. With a good squirt of water, I found I could still eat the waffles and gels, so I chose to stick with them, but in the future I’ll be looking for another food option.
To my surprise, I didn’t have the proverbial bad patch during this race. In fact, I felt better throughout the race than I have in any shorter ultra or marathon that I’ve run. I had a brief low period during the nearly 10-mile stretch between the second and third aid stations, but other than that, I felt remarkably good all day.
Running downhill into the Temperance River aid station, one of the longest and steepest descents on the course, the outside of my right quad started to hurt a little, something that would nag me throughout the rest of the course. But at no point did I feel like it was easier to walk than it was to run (save for steepish uphills), so I just kept on running, taking my quick walk breaks every 10 minutes.
It was only when I reached the spring 50k course, between Sawbill and Oberg aid stations, that a marathoner mentioned I was in sixth place, shocking me out of my “relax and enjoy” headspace. I had no idea how far in front fifth place was, but the news gave me a mental boost.
Turns out he wasn’t that far ahead. I caught up to fifth place in the next aid station, but chose not to pass him immediately. I waited to take one of my walk breaks first, then ran past him. He had apparently been having some difficulties, and taken a long break at one aid station.
I motored up Moose Mountain, using my trekking poles to good effect and passing marathoners left and right. It was only at the very end, on the hellishly shallow grade up Mystery Mountain (seriously, it’s a runnable grade some 49 miles into a 52 mile race) that it started to get harder to will myself to run after each walk break. Had I known through here that I was only 10 minutes out of fourth place, I wonder if I might have pushed harder, but I didn’t know.
As a final boost, around mile 50, Amanda “Smashem” Basham popped out on the trail in front of me, cheering the runners on. And with that encouragement, I pushed on to the finish, clocking an 8:36 last mile - my fastest of the day - to finish in 10 hours, 43 minutes, 45 seconds.
Afterwards
Despite how great my legs felt (relatively speaking) the entire race, I nonetheless couldn’t walk easily once I finished. I went straight from feeling like I could keep going for . . . well forever, to having difficulty walking down stairs. I guess that’s a “welcome to ultra” moment. My breakdown, an emotional reaction that I get after every large race, was pretty short this race. Overall, I just felt satisfied.
I may end up writing a third post based on this race, with overall thoughts from this race, but I’ll put a few here. I want to give a huge thank you to everybody involved in this race. Thanks to my crew for being out there for me all day, and only seeing me for a few minutes during the race. Thanks to all the volunteers (the race had a 3-1 runner-volunteer ratio this year) for making this race possible. And thank you most of all to John and Cheri for working tirelessly to navigate Covid and a freaking wildfire in the weeks leading up to the race, and yet putting on a smooth, wonderful event as always.
And of course, I am already plotting the next adventure(s).
