More is Different

What do you do the week before a 100 miler in the mountains?  Not much.  Short runs.  More sleep.  Avoid stress. Try not to look too often at the extended weather forecast (looks good right now, but with a bizarre discrepancy between weather-underground and weather.com...stop!)  Find something to do with all that "extra" energy you would have used up in early morning runs or weekend long runs.  I was almost giddy with it this morning. Also important, if hard: don't second guess your training.  What has worked for me for the past 4 (injury free) years has been a 3-day/week schedule (the runs tend to be long).  I've done marathons, 50 milers, and 100s on that schedule.  And faster than than I was running the previous 5 years.  I recommend this to over-45 runners in particular.  But there's always that little voice, getting a bit louder before a major event like this, suggesting maybe a 4th or a 5th day would have helped.  May...

For all the meticulous planning that goes into an event like this, you would think I might carefully read the directions posted very clearly, very explicitly, on the race site.  Mandatory 8 hours trail work .  Do it before September 1 or your entry is forfeit.  This rather crucial detail escaped my notice until sometime during the past week, so early last Friday morning, I set off from Maryland to Camp Shenandoah for a day of trail work and a 29-mile training run the following Saturday.  Both were more than worth the pre-dawn, three-and-a-half hour trip. The weather cooperated and work was a blast, despite or maybe because of the challenging tangle of branches and downed trees that had been dumped on the trail, courtesy of this past summer's "derecho" winds.  Our team performed brilliantly.  We worked under the watchful eye of our fearless leader, Daren Marceau of North Carolina--and I say fearless more than metaphorically.  As the rest of us ba...

Most of us who run ultras or road marathons have experienced this. An apparently fit runner drops dead in a major city marathon and friends, relatives, and colleagues send you the link with various well-meant, hand-wringing cautions. The latest argument that perhaps gardening or dog-walking would be a saner pursuit than running is a study coming out of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings (not a competitive peer-reviewed journal), and making the virtual rounds in various formats. The upshot of this article is that "extreme" and "chronic" exercise--which for this researcher includes the marathon on up, and any pace faster than 10 minutes a mile--can damage the heart and perhaps shorten, not lengthen, one's life. The instinct for ultra runners is to be dismissive, or say something about the inherent risk of any activity (or for that matter, inactivity). This time was different for me. It prompted some hard thinking. After 30+ years of relatively "normal...