Sharing a few lessons I learned along the way.
- Don’t get injured. I have seen many friends and colleagues training for a race but somewhere along the training getting injured, leaving them either unable to compete or complete the race. This happened to me when I was preparing for the MT Tam ultramarathon in 2022, which prevented me from training for a few weeks. Whatever you do, take extreme precautions to not get injured during the training.
- Remember rule #1.
- Take care of nutrition and hydration and everything else will take care of itself. Electrolytes, gels, and aid stations during the run are your friends. Stop at each of them even if you don’t want to and eat some food.
- Remove unknown unknowns. The real purpose of training is not just to train the body and the mind, but to remove all the unknown unknowns that can occur during the race. You may drop the nutrition gel on the route, run out of water, may get injured, or go off route due to vandalism on the marked trail (happened to me at Berkeley).
- Overtrain. This might seem contrary but I dread the DNF (Did Not Finish) so much that I overtrain for all races to ensure that whatever may happen, I’ll still be able to complete the race. If I sign up for a race, there’s no doubt that I’ll complete it no matter what because I already trained and overtrained for all the scenarios.
- Focus on overall body training. Incorporate strength training, HIIT, jump rope, yoga, foam rolling, and other aspects of training into your plan. Try moving your hands back and forth for 5 mins and see if it pains. Now remember you have to do it for 6+ hours.
- Experiment with multiple gears and invest in really good ones. I ran the first 50K trail run in Nike Lunarglide 8 thinking running on the trail is similar to running on concrete. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Similarly, I didn’t pay much attention to other running gear such as top, shorts, shoes, socks, earbuds, hydration bag, etc., and all this made the race miserable. I improved on each in the subsequent races and it was such a massive plus in training and the actual race.
- There are 5 pillars of physical fitness – Endurance, Flexibility, Agility, Strength, and Speed. Train for each. It’s no fun pulling a hamstring or suffering from shin splits during the run.
- Find a partner and recruit them to either run with you or hold you accountable. When I started the running journey, I was fortunate to train with my wife for shorter distances; she graduated to do her long-distance runs later. But this was such a key part of the entire fitness journey over the last few years.
- Find out what you like to do during the runs – is it listening to songs, or podcasts, or audiobooks? You will be on the trails for long durations of time all alone, sometimes more than 5 hours. If you are into team sports, then long-distance running will be excruciating. Also, I highly recommend not starting long-distance runs with songs as they tend to change the cadence, tempo, and ultimately the running plan making you run either too fast or too slow (both are not ideal).
- Know that it’s an individual sport. Don’t try to outrun someone else or run faster than you trained for. Every time I tried to “ego-run”, I was either disappointed or hurt.
- Last but not least – find your why. I get asked this question all the time. Why do you run? What’s in it to run long distances? And for the longest time, I tried to deflect by saying it makes me feel good or I like running. Although, both of these are partially true I later realized that my real why is I believe it is my moral responsibility to be the fittest I can be for my family so I can best take care of them, and running long distances is the avenue to ascertain that moral responsibility. So, find your why for running long distances. If you don’t know now, don’t worry, you eventually will.
This post reminds me of a conversation I had with Dimple after the Mt Tam run. I wasn’t fully prepared, the race went miserable and I jokingly told her that I was never going to run again let alone participate in an ultramarathon until I hear the trails themselves call me back. Well, they certainly do!
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