There was a big Backyard Ultra that took place in Brazil and the top four backyarders in the country were all there. Each of them had a breakthrough performance in the past year, pushing the national record up and up. Gr...
Articles by Gary Cantrell
If there is one thing we all think we know, it’s how far we’ve run. Daily, millions of runners look at their map, GPS watch, phone, treadmill monitor or a variety of electronic devices, and carefully record the...
Adventure. Isn’t that what drives us to do these crazy things called ultras? What is an adventure anyway? Some like to say that it is not an adventure if you know how it will turn out. And that is true. But maybe ther...
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend an Australian rules football (ARF) game. The basic rules of the game were not hard to follow, although the finer points eluded me. It was a game where the decided underdog jum...
Howie Stern It was my first ultra that went all night – 24 hours on a quarter-mile track. Having heard all about the hallucinations that runners got during these long races, I was not surprised when I s...
It haunts us. It limits us. It leaves our dreams unrealized and our hopes unmet. It stands between us and limitless possibilities. It is our nemesis, but we seldom recognize it when we see it. Consider this oft given...
There is a lot of information to be found on the topic of training for ultras. You can find advice on everything from the food you eat to the socks you wear. There are guides for every step of training mileage. You ca...
“Why is it that everything you enjoy doing seems to involve an extended period of misery?” At first, the question really made no sense. What misery? Sure, it was about 110-degree heat index and we hadn’t slept in 36 h...
One of the most underrated aspects of an athlete’s performance is closing. Whether the sport is golf or ultrarunning, all the training in the world, the best pacing, the best nutrition—none of that matters if the athl...
They used to call ultrarunning a subculture. But we have grown. As a matter of fact, we have grown so much that now there are subcultures within the subculture. Prominent among these is the aid station subculture. It has...
We used to have a saying about running ultras, “You can only gain minutes, but you can lose hours.” Maybe that old saw is still around. If it isn’t, it should be. It holds a lot of truth as an “either-or” choice. It h...
Sometimes it feels as though ultrarunners have a particularly perverse way of viewing the sport. For some reason, we seem to take pride in our incompetence. I guess that sounds rather harsh, but think about it, how ma...
To cross the continent on foot is a transcendental experience. There is no other way to fully grasp the sheer size or stunning scope of the land. There is infinite time during those eight million steps to really see t...
When I was asked to write something about the 40th year of UltraRunning Magazine I thought, “This will be easy.” After all, I have literally grown up with the magazine. I could not have been more wrong. How do yo...
For more than 30 years I was a drystone mason, building rock walls without mortar. It was a very pleasurable, if somewhat arduous profession. The pace and cadence, visualizing of the outcome, handling of the stones an...
As man evolved, he created the tools necessary for survival. We don’t even have to think in order to breathe. We can consciously control breathing if we need to, but whether we give it any thought or not, we are going to...
We all come to realize, eventually, that the only constant in life is change. And we all know that if you cannot adapt to change, you will become obsolete. Still, it is hard to imagine that some concepts are not immutabl...
I have to admit that I hesitated when Dave Proctor approached me about holding a virtual Backyard Ultra. Backyard Ultras are not that difficult to stage however, they are not well suited for a virtual venue. On top of th...
I have a friend, Phil, who ran a 1:48.01 for 800 meters in college.Aside from being a performance that is beyond the dreams of most people, what does that have to do with running ultras? Actually, that particular perform...