Life in a Day
Why running an ultramarathon is one of the most intense experiences you can have
I’ve previously written about how everyone should run a marathon once in their life, if they are able to. If you were horrified by that idea, you’re probably not going to love the prospect of running an ultramarathon.
An ultramarathon is technically any distance longer than a marathon (26.2 miles), but in practice it most often means a footrace of 50km, 50 miles, 100km or 100 miles.
They can be much, much longer – there is a grand slam of 200+ mile races in the US, and the UK’s Spine Race (268 miles) is fast becoming a real bucket list race (if you love being cold and lonely in the dark and not sleeping for five straight days, in January).
Running ultras is also more common than you might have realised - there is a global circuit of 100-milers, culminating in the blue riband event the UTMB each August. Wherever you are in the world, there is probably a 100-mile race surprisingly near to you.
Ultras have also been around a lot longer than you might expect. As far back as the 1870s, the most popular spectator sport in the world was the six-day race, where athletes would try and run as many laps of a circular track as they could between Monday morning and Saturday night in a given week.
These tracks were often much smaller than today’s athletics tracks, meaning that many thousands of laps would be completed, with the top athletes covering over 500 miles and earning themselves life-changing amounts of money in the process.
These days, running an ultra has joined Ironman triathlons, wild swimming and climbing mountains as the modern person’s mid-life crisis (a red sports car or a motorbike is not for everyone, after all).
Aside from the different distances, ultrarunning includes different disciplines. Many of the highest-profile races will take place on trails (that is, footpaths across rural land), which makes them both more physically demanding but easier on the legs as you’re not just doing the same movements for hours on end.
There are road races and track races – if you’re so minded, you can do a 24-hour track race (yes, that’s running around an athletics track for 24 hours to see how far you can go). South Africa’s Comrades Marathon is a 56-mile road race and the legendary Spartathlon in Greece triples that distance. The Badwater Ultra covers 135 miles, on roads, through Death Valley, one of the hottest places in the world.
There are also oddities like the Backyard Ultra format, whereby competitors run a 4.167 mile loop (a ‘yard’), usually on trails, once each hour until they can’t go on. 24 ‘yards’ (that’s hours) gets you 100 miles. The cruel twist is that the race continues until there is only one competitor left – they are declared the winner, and everyone else gets a DNF (did not finish).
The Backyard season culminates in Big’s Backyard Ultra, effectively the world championship. In the 2023 version, a staggering 7 runners were still going after 100 continuous hours (that’s hours, not miles), with the eventual winner Harvey Lewis completing his 108th loop for an unimaginable total of 450 miles run. Five days, four nights, no sleep, just running.
If you really, really feel like punishing yourself, the ultimate is surely the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100. That’s a 3100-mile race, around the same block in New York, where competitors run roughly 65 miles a day for the best part of two months.
But I wouldn’t suggest starting your ultra career with that. If you have run a marathon, you can certainly run a 50k and from there it’s easier to see how those longer distances start to seem possible.
One of the reasons why ultrarunning has grown in popularity is the sheer range of emotions and sense of journey that one can experience in less than 24 hours. It’s often been called ‘Life in a Day’ – including in Billy Yang’s YouTube film of the same name.
Where else can you experience utter joy, the depths of despair, illness, recovery, tears, laughter and more in a single day? Probably childbirth. Maybe a Cup Final, but running an ultra is much less expensive. I’ve run four now and have got a huge amount from each one, with joy and despair present in roughly equal measure.
If you watch any films about ultrarunning, or interviews with ultrarunners, they will almost always tell you how they ‘learnt a lot about themselves’; very rarely do they elaborate on exactly what it was that they learnt. I believe this is partly because it’s hard to put into words, partly because it’s an intensely personal experience that is difficult to articulate to someone that hasn’t experienced it (and with someone who has, you don’t need to).
So in an attempt to put this right, here’s what I’ve learnt from my limited experience of ultrarunning so far.
You can do things that you never thought possible: It’s only after you’ve attempted your first ultra, when you’ve taken yourself to death’s door and have either stopped or carried on, that you realise you could have done more. And when you see what humans have been able to do
Your body is an awful lot more resilient than it would have you believe – this becomes apparent through the training, on race day, and in how you recover. Those niggles that seem like terminal injuries can usually be worked through, overcome, then forgotten. When I stopped during my first ultra, after 36 miles, I was convinced I would die if I went any further. When I looked back, and learnt more, I realised I was only just entering the realm of suffering.
What circles of hell did I miss out on by quitting? At least several.
Your brain lies to you - it will do everything it can to convince you that your body is done, when it isn’t. You can see this in sprint finishes, or in fact in any finish, when you suddenly get a burst of additional energy. Physically, it was there all along, but your brain kept it safe from you until it knew you were nearly there.
Your brain can save your life, but it’s also the enemy when it comes to pushing yourself further. It can be cajoled, persuaded, bullied and tricked into achieving almost anything, and certainly more than it would let you think it/you can.
Pain is just a sensation – sometimes it’s a buzzing noise, sometimes it’s more acute, sometimes you can just stop noticing it altogether. The level of suffering is so far beyond what most people would consider normal, but you can come through it and out the other side.
In my first (and so far only) 50+ mile race, I asked a seasoned ultrarunner if the pain stopped at any point, as I tended to find that everything hurt after about 24 miles. He said he’d found that it all went away after 50 miles, and after that you kind of stopped noticing (presumably as you’re distracted by the delirium and hallucinations by then). Sure enough, I passed the 50 mile mark and realised that nothing hurt any more. I was numb, but moving. Not dead.
People are wonderful, especially race volunteers, marshals and organisers. Running any race, but particularly trail races and even more so in longer distances, is an incredibly life-affirming experience. And your gratitude, memories and perspective are all magnified by the fact that you are pushing yourself so far and so hard. I don’t normally cry at anything. Except on ultras when I cry at literally everything.
Running in the dark is… wonderful, terrifying, a sensory experience. I don’t like it. I’m convinced I’m going to be eaten by … something, even though we’re fortunate enough to be top of the food chain in the UK. But it’s exhilarating, that vague sense of danger, or peril, of being out past your bedtime.
You get to eat, all day long. It’s continuous eating, while you run! There’s a famous quote (I think from ultrarunner Robbie Britton although he may not have been the first to say it) that ultrarunning is an eating competition with some running thrown in, and I’d agree.
The first 35 miles is mostly about physical fitness. After that, it’s almost entirely down to your ability to withstand discomfort and keep food down, while moving usually really slowly. But you eat all the time – you have to, otherwise you just won’t get the calories in you need.
It’s not a young person’s game – you’ll see more people in their 50s doing this than those in their 20s. This might change over future decades, but for now it seems better suited to the more mature runner. As you change the way you train, there are distinct advantages to being a bit longer-in-the-tooth, including mental resilience, sheer experience and a dulling of the instinct to go faster.
The longer the distance, the more variety you want and need in the terrain. Road marathons and half-marathons will often advertise that they are ‘fast and flat’, but in an ultra, fast and flat will kill you. You want nice soft ground, hills, turns - variety. Then you can use all the parts of your body and share the pain. You also get to use poles for the hills; you can have a nice change of socks halfway round. And did I mention that you get to eat cake all day long?
Now I do completely accept than running an ultra is not for everyone (whereas I do genuinely believe a marathon can be achieved by anyone who does the training). But what’s your equivalent? Is there another avenue of life or experience where you could push yourself this hard, ask yourself such questions, plumb such depths of anguish and come back to joy and celebrations, within the same day?
Or otherwise, if you’re training for something already, why not make an ultra a future goal?