Running marathons
on consecutive days isn’t as mind-blowingly difficult as most people think it
is. You don’t have to have superhuman
abilities to do it. Like anything else
that’s difficult, you need to have a good plan, and you need to prepare
yourself for it. I’m going to try to
explain it from three different perspectives.
1) It’s more
psychological than physical
It’s been said
that running a marathon is as much psychological as it is physical. With something like this, the psychological
component is even larger.
Before you can do
something, you first have to visualize yourself doing it. If you tell yourself something is impossible,
then you’re right, it is impossible.
You’ll never be able to do it if you don’t even try. That’s one of the things I admire in most of
the ultrarunners I’ve met. They never
ask themselves, “Can I do this?” They
skip right over that part and instead ask, “HOW can I do this?”
More than 20 years
ago, I met a runner from Minnesota named Burt Carlson. Burt was almost twice my age, but he was
running marathons every other weekend and also doing 24-hour races. This was long before clubs like Marathons
Maniacs were founded. I had never met
anyone else who did that many marathons.
One time, I bumped
into Burt at a race in Wisconsin. He was
wearing a T-shirt from a race in South Dakota that was held the previous
weekend. I knew he was also planning to
do the Twin Cities Marathon the next weekend.
That’s three weekends in a row. I
asked Burt, “How do you run marathons so often?” He replied, “When you see a race on the
calendar that sounds interesting, you sign up for it. Once you’re signed up for it, it’s gonna
happen.” The simplicity of that answer
blew me away. He was right, though. Once you decide to do it, you’ll find a way
to make it happen.
When I was working
on running marathons in all 50 states, I knew there were runners like Burt who
would do two marathons in one weekend.
They called it a “double.” It was
a way of saving on travel expenses, but I couldn’t imagine doing two marathons
in one weekend. Then I found out there
was a marathon in Rhode Island the day before a marathon in Connecticut that I
was already signed up for. They were
only 20 miles away from each other. I
didn’t even need to change my flight.
That was so convenient that I had to give it a try. It was difficult, but it wasn’t nearly as
tough as I thought it would be.
After doing two
“doubles,” I was ready to try a “triple.”
It went much better than I expected.
After two “triples,” I tried my first “quadzilla.” Eventually, I did a five-day series, where
each race was in a different state. Even
after doing three of those, I never dared to try a longer series.
The Running Ragged
20in20 series was originally going to be three separate series that happened to
be back-to-back. The Heartland series
was seven days, the Summer Camp Series was six days, and the Prairie Series was
seven days. If you did all three, you
could run marathons for 20 straight days.
I had no intention of doing that.
My original plan was just to do the Summer Camp Series. Even that seemed intimidating, since they
were all trail races.
It was only after
the three series were combined into one, with all the races within a short
driving distance of each other, that I decided to do all 20 races. I really didn’t think I could do it, but I
suspended my disbelief and signed up. As
Burt would say, now it was gonna happen.
The moment I signed up for it, I knew I would somehow find a way to get
through it, even though I still didn’t know how. The commitment came first. Then I figured out how. That’s how it works. The body will do what the mind tells it to
do, but first you have to believe.
2) It’s all about
pacing
The farther you
run, the slower you have to go. For
distances slower than a marathon, it’s pretty obvious how that works. In a 200-meter sprint, you go as fast as you
possible can. If you’re running a mile,
you have to hold back a little. If you
run the first lap as fast as you can, you’ll be out of breath before the second
lap.
It’s the same for
a 5K, a 10K, a half marathon or a marathon.
Those are all distances where you can run non-stop the whole way, but
the farther you go, the slower you have to go.
Ideally, you want to pace yourself so that you can run the whole race at
the same pace. It’s been said that if
you run one minute too fast in the first half of a 10K race, it’ll cost you two
minutes in the second half. In longer
distances, starting too fast can be even more costly.
My understanding
of how to pace myself for longer distances changed dramatically when I trained
for my first 24-hour race. Before that, my
longest race was a marathon, and my longest training run was 32.5 miles. I always tried to run non-stop. If I walked during a race, it’s because I was
already overwhelmed with soreness and fatigue.
I walked only when I was ready to give up. I always equated walking with failure.
There’s a race in
Minneapolis called the FANS 24-Hour Race.
Every year, I saw this race on the calendar, and it just seemed crazy. “Nobody can run for 24 hours,” I thought. Actually, I knew people actually did races
like this, and I knew that some people could even run 100 miles in a race like
this. I couldn’t understand how.
In 1997, I went
out to watch the race. I showed up after
people had already been running for about eight hours. I was only there for about an hour, but after
talking to some of the people who were familiar with the race, I was
intrigued. I decided to give it a try
the next year.
My original goal
was to run 100K. Doing it in a 24-hour
race meant I effectively wouldn’t have to worry about time limits. I would run for as long as it took to finish
100 kilometers. Then I would stop.
I didn’t know how
to pace myself for 100 kilometers, much less 24 hours. When I did training runs that were farther
than a marathon, I always got slower and slower in the late miles. Even if I ran at the slowest pace that I
could comfortably run, it wasn’t sustainable for 100 kilometers. At some point, I would have to walk. After that, I didn’t expect to complete more
than three miles per hour for the rest of the race.
I pondered whether
it would be possible to keep going for the full 24 hours. At some point, even walking would be
difficult. I fully expected if I was
still moving at night, I might only be able to cover two miles per hour. As I estimated how far I could run/walk in
24 hours, I never came up with anything higher than 80 miles.
About six months
before the race, I met two runners who had done it before. They both ran at least 100 miles. When they explained how they paced
themselves, it opened up a whole new world for me.
To run 100 miles
in 24 hours, you need to maintain an average pace of 14:24 per mile. I couldn’t actually run that slowly. At some point, running at a slower pace
becomes so inefficient that you’re using just as much energy as you would
running faster. To achieve a slower
pace, you need to alternate between running and walking.
I had never done
that before. I had never even considered
it. Armed with this knowledge, I did
training runs of as much as 40 miles where I never ran long enough to get tired
before taking a nice long walking break.
In the race, it worked great. I’d
run only to the next aid station. Then I’d
walk for several minutes. By the time I
started running again, I felt as good as when I started. If I did enough walking, I could go for
several hours and still feel fresh.
Before I knew how to pace myself with walking
breaks, running 100 miles in 24 hours seemed impossible. Once I knew how, I had no doubt I could do
it. I ended up running 111.2 miles in my
first 24-hour race.
After that, I came
to a whole new understanding of how far I could run. I’m now of the belief that there’s no such
thing as a distance that’s too far, provided you go at the right pace. For any given distance, there’s a pace that
makes it sustainable. You may need to
alternate between walking and running.
If it’s a long enough distance, you may need to add sleeping
breaks. The longest organized race I’ve
every heard of is a 3,100-mile race. I
have a friend who has finished that race.
Any distance is possible with enough time.
My approach to running
marathons on two, three, four, or five consecutive days was always to go a
little slower than I would if I was just doing one race. The first time I did a “triple,” my average
pace was about 30 seconds per mile slower than my pace in a single all-out marathon. By the third day, I had sore muscles, but I
could dig deep and get through it, knowing it was the last day. In my first five-day series, I slowed my pace
by at least a minute per mile. It got
harder each day, but it was sustainable for five days. It probably wouldn’t have been sustainable for
six days.
For my 20-day series,
I needed a new approach. I couldn’t just
slow down a little. I needed to slow
down a lot. I couldn’t afford to have
each day feel more difficult than the day before – not for 20 days. Instead, I tried to find a pace that felt so
easy, I could wake up every morning feeling like all I did the day before was
my daily training run. In this case, my
daily runs were almost five hours long, but it was five hours of easy running mixed
with walking.
I didn’t know at
the start of the series how slow I would need to go. On the first day, I paced myself much like I
would in a 24-hour race, except I stopped after only five hours. With each passing day, I found I could go just
a little bit faster, and still feel fine the next morning. My pace on the first day was conservative
enough that I actually went faster each day for the first eight days of the
series.
I eventually found
that the right pace had me finishing each race with an average time of about
4:40. For comparison, the last three
times I ran road marathons that weren’t part of a multiday series, my times
were 3:41, 3:46, and 3:42, respectively.
During this series, I was running my races about an hour slower than I
normally would. I slowed down by more
than two minutes per mile.
I referred to my
pace as the “Goldilocks pace.” I was
going slow enough that it didn’t leave me feeling sore or fatigued, yet still
fast enough that I still had most of the day to recover and rest up for the
next race. Some people were walking the
whole way, with the result that it often took them more than nine hours to
finish. That gave them far less recovery
time. I actually think what they were
doing was more difficult than what I was doing.
3) I had 19 hours
of recovery time for every 5 hours of running
Even though I was going
at a slower pace than I would in a single race, I still finished each race
within five hours. That meant I had 19
hours to recover before the next race.
That’s almost four hours of recovery for every hour of running. I had the luxury of eating and drinking
enough to replenish myself, icing anything that might be inflamed, taking a hot
bath, stretching, and massaging my legs, all before dinner. I could relax for an hour or two after dinner
and still go to bed early.
I often got eight
or nine hours of sleep, yet I was still up at least three hours before the next
race. That gave me time to eat a normal
breakfast, and do more icing, bathing, stretching, and massage before the race.
I ran 524 miles
over a span of 20 days. That’s extreme,
yet it’s not all that impressive when you compare it to what people do in multi-day
races. I know people who have covered
that many miles in a six-day race. They
didn’t have the luxury of a full-night’s sleep.
At best, they could grab a short nap each night. The rest of the time, they had to keep
moving.
Most people have
the perception that it takes weeks or months to recover from a marathon. There are two reasons for that. The first reason is that elite runners give
themselves months of recovery time before doing another marathon. They do that because they need to be at their
absolute peak on race day. It’s not
enough to be healthy and fit enough to simply finish a marathon. If your livelihood depends on winning races, and
you’re competing with the best runners in the world, you can’t afford to be
slow by even a minute or two. I wasn’t
trying to compete at that level. On
average, I was running times that were a full hour slower than what I would do
in a standalone race. If necessary, I
could’ve slowed down even more.
The second reason
people think it takes a long time to recover from a marathon is because of the
way most people train. Most people never
run farther than 20 miles in training.
On race day, they’re pushing their bodies way beyond what they’re used
to. Your body adapts to what you do
frequently in training. If you don’t
routinely run 26.2 miles in training, then it’s only natural that running that
far in a race is going to leave you feeling like you got run over by a truck.
When I started
running marathons, I trained just like everyone else. The day after a race, I could barely walk
down a flight of stairs. The turning
point came when I joined Marathon Maniacs. That's a club that's all about running marathons frequently. I was skeptical about running marathons every week or two, but I gave it
a try. It took about six months to adapt
to it, but once I did, I found I could run a marathon and feel just as good the
day after a race as I did the day before.
Marathons became my long training runs.
The more often I ran them, the less they took out of me.
The notion that
you can only run one or two marathons a year is a reality for most people, but
only because of the way they train. It’s
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I know some people
will say I can do this, but they never could.
I ran faster than the other people who completed all 20 marathon, but
it’s worth noting that I was also one of the youngest runners. In fact, of the eight runners who finished
marathons every day, only Trisha was younger, and she ran every race carrying an
American flag for 26.2 miles.
I think I’m also
at the Goldilocks age. I’m old enough to
have a lot of experience, and I’m retired, which allows
me to devote more time to training.
Still, I’m young enough that I don’t have any major health problems. I've slowed down some with age, but I haven't slowed down dramatically.
