Dear Runnerfolk: Ultrarunning Myths

Ultrarunning was once a little sport engaged in by only a few nut jobs with serious problems. Now it seems everyone is doing them, and that's a wonderful thing - except that there weren't enough nut jobs to mentor all these freshly-minted ultrarunners and pass on the lore and history of the sport and the hard-earned collective wisdom about how to do it well.

Myths and misinformation abound and I'm going to point out a few here that bug me. This will surely raise some hackles and cause considerable offense among those who dearly hold as sacrosanct rules of ultrarunning some of these things I'll call 'myths'. Hey, at least I just put them in a rant here where generally no one reads anyway!

I'll start with one of the biggest sacred cows that I think is actually bull:

"Eat before you're hungry. Drink before you're thirsty."

IN A NUTSHELL: follow this advice if you enjoy throwing up and peeing when you should be running instead.

Newsflash #1: 99.9% of human stomachs don't process food well while their surrounding human is engaging in extreme exertion.

Newsflash #2: 100% of normal humans in good condition carry enough body fat to fuel well over 100 miles of running. I'm actually what most would call 'pretty lean' and I have about 800 miles worth of fat hanging on me.

Way too many ultrarunners try to make their bodies process endless streams of unasked-for fluids, electrolytes, and calories while trying to run stupid long distances. Gary Cantrell, long-time columnist for Ultrarunning Magazine and an old-school ultrarunner whose opinions I greatly respect once said, "Considering all the overhydrating, overeating, and astonishingly excessive salt consumption we see, it is a tribute to the human body that it can withstand that kind of abuse and still finish an ultra."

Unless you are a well-trained elite runner racing for the win, your in-race fueling is far from critical to your performance and you have a huge amount of leeway in how much you have to eat while running an ultra. The truth is if you're well-trained you should be able to finish any short ultra (50M or less) on water alone.

Speaking of water - stop drinking so much! Water and electrolytes are interrelated and must be kept in balance to within a fairly tight range. Unless you are abnormally dehydrated, you begin every race in pretty good balance - except for one thing: if you're like most people you've been taking in way too much salt in your daily diet for the past... well... for the past.

I stumbled onto some research recently that supports a theory I've had for quite some time. Researchers looking into hypertension in 2012 used MRI to scan people for sodium, and they found something very interesting. The human body stores excess sodium in the skin as part of a mechanism for maintaining stable blood pressure (it also stores it in muscle tissue, but it's this skin storage that really interests me).

It used to be widely thought that the body could only store sodium in bone and that it was not very accessible. That was the thinking that underpinned the whole notion that athletes should take salt supplements to compensate for salt losses from sweating - but what if the salt we lose via sweat is only excess salt that our body is opportunistically dumping when we exercise?

BODY: Yay! I need to sweat! I finally can get rid of a bunch of the salt this dingleberry has been over-eating forever!

BRAIN: OMG! My skin is getting crusty! I'm losing salt! I'd better take a salt pill!

BODY: Dang! More salt! Now I'll need more water to get rid of that. [turns on thirst]

BRAIN: I'm thirsty. Better drink more water! Wait... now I'm sweating even more! Better take a salt pill!

Don't take salt unless you've got a craving for something salty (and then you might as well just eat something salty from an aid station rather than taking a pill - cuz you're probably hungry too, and when you're hungry is actually a pretty good time to eat - just sayin'). Don't drink water to some arbitrary schedule. Drink when you're thirsty - and sip; don't gulp!

This whole thing - the balance of food, fluids and electrolytes - is what we engineers call a control-feedback loop, and the worst thing you can do to a control-feedback loop is make wild, large over-corrections to it. That tends to destabilize it and make it swing from one extreme to another - and when the control-feedback loop is you, this involves considerable discomfort and hassle. Little tweaks are all that is needed, and your body is elegantly equipped with sensors and notification systems to let you know what tweak is needed and when it is needed. Trust them.

Eat WHEN you are hungry (and what you are hungry for) and drink WHEN you are thirsty!

"Ultras are 90% mental."

IN A NUTSHELL: ultras are 90% mental if you've only done 10% of the training you should have.

There's a lot of this myth going around these days, because there are a lot of new 'ultrarunners' at the back of the pack who seem to think it's fun to do some random, sketchy training and then jump into an ultra (because it's 'the next challenge' after they've done a marathon badly a few times).

Ultras can be run comfortably (relatively speaking) within a physical capability envelope and can require very little mental fortitude when you are actually well-trained for them. Until you experience this once you do not know the difference between pushing yourself to a reasonable degree versus doing something for which you are stupidly under-trained.

Now I hated to put 'ultrarunners' in quotes up there, by the way. Good, experienced, and respected ultrarunners with hearts to mentor newbies have a tradition of encouraging first-timers by telling them, "You're an ultrarunner now!" - no matter how lousy they did or how badly they screwed up their preparation for their first ultra. I like that, and I have been the beneficiary of it in my own first attempts. However...

...I'm less in favor of it when noobs and hackers say it to each other to convince themselves that they've now 'arrived.' I'm less in favor of it when it convinces people bumbling around in the dark that they're "doin' it right." For the record, they're not. The experienced ultrarunners who give you that sort of encouragement expect that you're going to grow and learn and improve - not just think, "Great! I'm all set then!" and go on death marching your way through one disaster after another.

If you're one of the noobs - and you care at all about how you're doing this sport - you should make it your first priority to find yourself a real mentor. Not some other clueless noob, and not somebody who's done, like, three more ultras than you have (because they're still clueless noobs too), but somebody who's been running ultras for years, with races of all kinds and distances under their belts. The sad thing is that these days there are far more clueless noobs flocking into ultras than there are experienced and willing mentors. If you find one, pay attention and learn - or they'll pretty quickly write you off and move on to someone else.

"Ultramarathons are trail races."

IN A NUTSHELL: ultras are races longer than the standard marathon distance (26.2 miles) and are run on any surface.

Admittedly, beginning in the 1990s trail running began to take over the (much older) sport of ultrarunning, and huge numbers of freshly minted ultrarunners and trail runners have little to no idea of ultrarunning's true history and scope. Some facts to put things into perspective:

• Ted Corbitt is generally regarded as "the father of American Ultrarunning." He won the first American ultra of the 'modern era' in 1958. It was a road 30M.
• There was a time period of several decades in the late 1800s when ultra-distance 'walking' events of up to six days in duration were the most popular sport in America. Large crowds packed into Madison Square Garden in New York City to watch the great 'pedestrians' and 'pedestriennes' go 'round and 'round.
• The oldest ultra in the world still being held is the 89K (54-mile) Comrades in South Africa. It was first held in 1921. It is a road race (most of the oldest ultramarathons are).
• The longest ultramarathon in the world is the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race. It is run as laps around a large city block in Flushing Meadows, NY.
• The oldest 100K in America, the Jack Bristol Lake Waramaug Ultra, is a road race.
• Perhaps the greatest ultrarunner of the modern era, Yiannis Kouros made his reputation running unbelievably good times at the Spartathlon - a 153-mile road race in Greece - and racking up unbelievable distance totals in multi-day races (also on roads).

Many ultras in America (still showing my native bias here) continue to be held on surfaces other than trails. They include very long, point-to-point races, long single-loop races, short-loop fixed-time races, and even long fixed-time track events.

Given the current popularity of trail ultras, it is understandable when new ultrarunners talk as though trail running is ultrarunning, however ultrarunning is a much older, richer and more varied sport, and there are many ways to enjoy the pain of covering very long distances on foot!

"Experiment of One"

IN A NUTSHELL: phrase used by noobs to justify not listening to good advice from experienced ultrarunners.

It might be a bit of a stretch to call this one a 'myth.' It was respected runner and author George Sheehan who coined this oft-repeated phrase, and there is a very real element of figuring out what works best for you that is part of learning to be an ultrarunner. However, the use many people put this legitimate concept to qualifies it to make this list.

You are an experiment of one. However you are also a human being attempting an activity that other human beings have been doing for thousands of years and have been doing scientifically for quite some time now as well. If you share 95% of your genes with a chimpanzee then you have one heck of a lot in common with every other homo sapiens trying to run 50K. It is very unlikely that you are a major exception to even one rule, let alone many.

The 'best' training approach for you will not be that different from others'.
The 'best' in-race fueling strategy for you will be similar to many other peoples'.
Most of the problems you encounter will already have been solved by many others.

Not every solution will work for you - but one of them probably will. You can continue to try to make up your own, or you can listen to others and try some of the things that have worked for them. Again, this is mentoring and it generally leads to people learning things much more quickly and much less painfully.

"RICE"

IN A NUTSHELL: good advice that often is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Disclaimer: not a doctor, don't play one. I just read a lot. Listen to your doctor if you're seeing one. Otherwise, what are you paying him or her for?

"RICE!" I don't know how  many times I've seen that answer reflexively given in response to a question about how to deal with an injury. It's an acronym that stands for:

Rest
Ice
Compression
Elevation

Again, 'myth' is a strong word here. The devil is in the details. RICE is an excellent protocol for reducing edema (swelling) in the initial stages of an acute injury, and is a good protocol for muscle strains. However, it has some downsides for tendon and ligament strains - which constitute a pretty high percentage of running-related injuries in my experience.

Tendons and ligaments have poor blood supply and take much longer to heal than muscle. Ice reduces blood flow to the area being iced, and reduced blood flow means a reduced supply of proteins and other things your body needs to rebuild damaged tissue. Ice may be beneficial to these injuries in the first 48 hours post-injury, but beyond that heat or 'contrast' baths (alternating cold/hot finishing with hot) may be better.

Rest may be even more of a problem. It's not only important that your tendons and ligaments heal but that they heal well, and complete cessation from activity allows scar tissue to form in ways that impair function of the tissue, potentially leading to long-term problems. Gentle and appropriate movement of the injured limb promotes rebuilding of the tissue in a more functional configuration.

For tendon and ligament injuries, after the acute stage (again 48 hours or so post-injury) a better treatment protocol is MEAT:

Movement
Exercise
Analgesics
Treatment

This tracks with a rule of thumb I've long followed from another old-school ultrarunner I know. Ray Krolewicz has said more than once on the ultra list: "If you're injured, slow down and run more." The longer I run ultras the more reasons I see that this is incredibly good advice - but one is that gentle movement helps injuries heal better.

For any sort of tendinitis, think MEAT not RICE.

"Cross-train"

IN A NUTSHELL: 'cross-training' is what people who don't have the base they need for the necessary running workouts do instead to convince themselves they are 'ready' for that next ultra anyway (and to avoid hurting themselves during training).

I will admit again here, that calling this an outright myth may be going too far. There are some benefits to certain other types of training done alongside running. Many runners do yoga to maintain flexibility and avoid becoming one-dimensional. I myself have benefited from a modest core strengthening regimen. Furthermore, if you like doing these things then by all means do them!

Where I think many go wrong though is with the notion that other types of  training can be 'as good as running' in preparation to run ultramarathons. For example, lots of people ride bicycles as an adjunct to running on the theory that they are getting a higher volume of aerobic training with less impact to the body - which is true. I see a problem there though. If your plan is to run ultramarathons, then what is it exactly that you are training for? High volumes of running impact to the body. How do you train for that by not doing that?

Underlying this cross-training business is a "Mr. Language Person" peeve of mine (credit to Dave Barry for that title): non-specific use of the terms 'fitness' and/or 'endurance.' People throw those words around as though they identify something fungible - like money - that you can spend on anything you like. But 'fitness' means "suitability to purpose." It implies a task for which you are fit. 'Endurance' must be considered at least somewhat with respect to just what it is you mean to endure.

You cannot be simultaneously fit (at least not well-fit) to squat three times your body weight and to run a fast 100-miler. You cannot train to endure tens of thousands of reps of leaping and landing (absorbing a force equal to three times your body weight with each footfall) by spinning on a bicycle for miles.

If you want to be a good runner there is no substitute for lots and lots of running as your training. If you can't sustain high volumes of running without injury that quite probably just means either that you have not yet been patient enough and persistent enough at building your average weekly training volume - or else you may have some biomechanical issue that should be investigated and addressed.

"Replace your shoes every 300 miles"

IN A NUTSHELL: if you're so fragile that losing a modicum of squishiness in a few millimeters of foam under your feet will break you then what makes you think you should run ultras?

Training to run ultramarathons is about building a body that can withstand the forces involved in running very long distances. If you start to become injured when your shoes get a few miles on them it probably means that you're not there yet and you're trying to run more miles than you're trained for - and you're relying on shoe cushion as a sort of band-aid. Now you may actually need that band-aid right now, but a band-aid is not meant to be a permanent solution and your training is supposed to be taking you somewhere.

I have observed that few people who are really well-trained - people who have logged 2000, 3000, 4000 (or more) training miles per year for years - care so much about the condition and freshness of their shoes. If these people thought they needed new running shoes every 300 miles they'd have to buy a new pair of shoes almost every month - and what about all of the minimalists out there running in shoes that had zero cushioning to begin with? How does that work?

"Those people are all genetic freaks."

No, they're trained. You can be a 'genetic freak' too - or you can keep doing what you're doing and replace your shoes every 300 miles.

"I'm not peeing enough!"

IN A NUTSHELL: if you're peeing regularly in a short ultra (or frequently in any ultra) you're probably drinking too much.

Once when I was running my first 50-miler I ran for a bit with a guy in the concurrent 100-miler who told me he made sure he peed every hour for at least fifteen seconds. I think he actually counted it out to himself silently as the stream flowed. "One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi..."

"Wow," I thought first, "I never pee anywhere near that much."
"Gee," I thought next, "this guy really has this stuff well-regimented."

Except he didn't finish.

I might urinate once in a 50K, and once or twice in a 50-miler or a 12-hour. Whenever I do urinate the color has always been fine - no indication that I am dehydrated, and (so far) no signs of blood or myoglobin that might indicate more serious problems. I just don't need to pee that much.

I worried about my shortcomings as a urine producer for probably a year or two after that encounter in the 50-miler. Then I 'discovered' anti-diuretic hormone (ADH). Anti-diuretic hormone is released by the body during exercise to reduce fluid losses by inhibiting urine production. In other words, it saves water by stopping you from turning it into pee.

My experience is that ADH rules - out to somewhere around twelve hours of continuous effort. Beyond that I settle into a fairly normal urination pattern for the duration of my activity - that is, a normal urge to urinate every couple of hours or so with normal volume and normal (adequately hydrated) coloration. I've only found two ways to overcome ADH in the early hours of an ultra:

1. Drink an awful lot of water, forcing my body to get rid of it.
2. Take a salt pill, forcing my body to use water to get rid of that.

Neither of those things is particularly helpful (see myth #1), and if I don't do them I get to just run and everything works out dandy - so I don't worry about how much I pee.

U-pick: "[Blisters | Chafing | Blackened toenails] are inevitable when you run ultras"

IN A NUTSHELL: most 'inevitable' problems in ultras are avoided by large numbers of participants simply by learning how not to have those things happen.

Blisters: almost always avoidable with proper preparation and appropriate in-race management of developing issues.

Chafing: the same. There are zillions of options for lube, and one will work for you with proper application and (if necessary) reapplication.

Blackened toenails: most often the result of poorly fitted shoes. Make sure your toe-boxes are roomy enough that your toes are hitting neither the end nor the ceiling of the box, and that your foot is properly anchored at the heel of the shoe so that it does not slide forward. Over-striding might also contribute to toes sliding and hitting the end of the toe box. Pay attention to whether you need to shorten your stride in order to land with your foot more under your center of gravity. Also, for heaven's sake trim your toenails before you run an ultra!

These are all examples of things where what works for one runner may not work for every runner. Once again though, someone out there (and probably a large group of someones) has already figured this problem out and has a solution for it. One of them will work for you.

For all foot-related problems I highly recommend John Vonhof's book, "Fixing your Feet." It is the bible of foot care for both athletes and military personnel.

To Sum Up...

Ultras are hard, and consequently people worry a lot about exactly how to do them. People get superstitious about things. They happen to have a good race while using some particular brand of energy gel or sports drink and then swear for the rest of their ultra career that is the only thing that works for them. People looking for confidence going into a frightening challenge listen to and parrot all sorts of sometimes conflicting advice - much of it based on myth, superstition, outdated science, or random personal experience.

What so many green ultrarunners miss is that most of these things are only marginal issues anyway. I've prepared the following chart which I think will help crystallize the main idea behind much of this post and help you to focus on the main thing. I call this my "Chill Zone" theory of ultramarathon preparation:

Basically it says that the better trained you are to run an ultra, the less it matters whether you eat exactly the right stuff, or drink exactly the right amount of water, or wear exactly the right socks, or have exactly the right stuff in your drop bag (or even have a drop bag), or have a pacer, or... etc. The better trained you are the less anxiety you have about the details.

The reason for this is simple. If you are well-trained then your body and mind are not pegged at the absolute limit of what you can tolerate. You have a margin to work with. Push it if you want to, or relax and finish like it was just a long training run - your choice. Your mission then should not be to find out what other ultrarunners eat or drink. It should be to find out how good, experienced ultrarunners train.

I've run over twenty ultras, from 50K to 314 miles - so I am NOT experienced (neither am I good). That said, if I was asked to boil down training well for ultras to one and only one simple rule of thumb I think it would be this: if you want to be really comfortable running an ultra of a particular distance, then you should be averaging somewhere around that distance in weekly training mileage for at least three years before running the ultra.

Wanna feel like 50K is firmly in your wheelhouse? Run thirty-plus miles per week for three years and then run a 50K. Wanna own 50-milers? Push that weekly mileage up to fifty. If you've already got a base at thirty then you probably don't have to run fifties for three years, but get comfortable running fifty-mile weeks, week after week - like it ain't no thing. You'll finish that 50-miler in decent time and avoid the death march. 100-milers? I'm sure you've got the pattern. Here I think you can do well enough on a steady diet of seventy to eighty mile weeks - but if you can handle more then it would help.

If you want to be really good at any of the above distances then get yourself to the point you can run the recommended mileage while still doing weekly speed work and hill training. In any case, get yourself running 2500, 3000, 4000 or more miles per year for several years and then see how much you give a rip what brand of gels the aid stations stock or how many miles are on your shoes.

The mother of all these ultrarunning myths is the unspoken myth that there is some secret shortcut that will make finishing an ultra easier - some high-speed bypass around the tedious business of slowly wearing off all the rubber from soles of your training shoes. There isn't - and that, dear readers, is cold, hard reality.