Sometimes it’s worth sitting back and reflecting on what a wonderful community we are lucky to be a part of. If you’ve already been running trails and ultras for many years then you might be easily nodding your head in a...
Articles by Ellie Greenwood
For more experienced veterans of our sport a local 50k might seem like a walk in the park and something they could knock off without much prior planning and specific training, but for the majority of us taking part in an...
There are many aspects of the ultrarunning community that I love, and one of the most important is the fact that at 99% of races 99% of the folks out there helping the runners are volunteers. It’s easy to take this for g...
As a kid I remember by mum having a packing list for our annual camping vacations to Europe. This was a seemingly huge list of all the essentials from tents to clothes to food that we would bring in our trailer for a fun...
I’ve had my fair share of running injuries. I (un)fortunately feel rather like an expert on the subject – in fact, when a local run club asked me to come talk to their members, and I asked what they’d like me to talk abo...
I’m willing to bet that many of you spend far more hours at a desk in front of a computer screen than you do on the trails. We rarely stop to think what effect all that sitting in a fixed position might have on our healt...
“Uh, excuse me, I thought that this was UltraRunning?” Well, that might be your initial reaction as you read this piece as I extoll the virtues of running sub-ultra-distance races. Now, don’t get me wrong: I am a diehard...
In this issue, I wanted to write about gender and its impact on ultrarunning. While I had my own thoughts, I knew they were very much based on personal experience, so a quick online survey would be a good way to see if m...
When signing up for a race that’s quite a few months ahead, it’s easy to be overly optimistic about what sort of training and preparation we will be able to do. Whether this is due to simply having an enthusiastic nature...
As ultrarunners, we are often forced to plan out our race calendar many months, and sometimes a year or more, in advance. This can be because we are trying to get into races which require qualifiers or enter races which...
“What’s your next race?” “What are you training for?” “Sorry your race didn’t go as planned.” “Are you happy with your result?” So often in our sport, it’s racing – performing at our best on one particular day – that is...
For me, and I know I am far from alone, one of the big lures of trail and ultrarunning is escaping the busyness of daily life. We live in cities where traffic roars through our streets, where we never really see a starre...
I distinctly remember the finisher shirt I got at my very first marathon in Victoria, British Columbia. I remember it because it was a bit of a dilemma – I’d just run a marathon, a whole 26.2 miles, so I sure as anything...
What do you mean, “Where’s Ellie?” Surely a good guess would be that I’m on a North Vancouver trail somewhere, or maybe run-commuting to downtown Vancouver or hitting up the treadmill. But with the World Anti-Doping Asso...
Ultrarunning is, by definition, running or racing for a distance further than 26.2 miles. There are a myriad of reasons why many of us gravitate towards a sport that celebrates endurance and being out on the trail for th...
It’s an odd thing, but there have been occasions when I have spent many months training with single-minded focus for a goal race, and yet in the middle of the actual race, I have struggled to remember all the hard work t...
The 100-mile distance holds a huge allure for many an ultrarunner. Whilst I’m not saying that 50k or 50 miles are easy distances, without a doubt, covering 100 miles is rightly still seen as the ultimate challenge for ma...
If you ask ultrarunners why they got into the sport in the first place, you will hear a range of answers—for health, for a love for the outdoors, for a personal challenge, for an escape from the stresses of work. But I c...
Injury is a dreaded condition that every runner fears, but there is a certain inevitability about it: the more we run, the more likely we are to suffer some sort of running-related injury. Depending on its severity, we m...
If you train with a group of friends or a running club, you likely know runners whose physical fitness you can compare to yours on a regular basis. I know where I sit in the pack with my running club teammates—who is fas...