There is probably nothing in sport less appreciated than finishing. Not finishing the way we usually think of it in ultrarunning—the act of crossing the finish line—but “finishing” meaning to close out a performance. The...
Articles by Gary Cantrell
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...
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...
Failure has a unique place in our lives. We do not want to fail. It is painful. It is embarrassing. And it is absolutely necessary if we are to accomplish great things. It stands between us and limitless possibilities.
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...
You have to feel sorry for the ultrarunners of my generation. We came into the sport when the concentration was about one ultrarunner to every 100 square miles. And that was in the hotbeds. There were no books, magazines...
A Race For the Ages is an ultra of a different colour. Technically, it is an age-handicapped time race. Held on a one-mile loop in Deadman Park (lovingly known as the Deadman Mile) in Manchester, Tennessee, runners are a...
We cannot all have the talents of elite runners, but there is nothing that prevents us from approaching the sport with the same professionalism. You will leave your footprint on ultrarunning, one way or another. Leave the footprint you want those who follow to see.
When you line up at your next ultra, you can take comfort in the fact that you are already likely in the top half of all the entrants. Between the opening of entry and the final field stepping to the line, about half the...
There are certain issues that every ultrarunner will face at some point or another during their running career. By the time an ultrarunner has reached the level of a veteran, they have learned how to prevent or repair ev...
Nobody really knows who came up with it, but the quote, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics,” is a part of American culture. There is a good reason for the ubiquity of this quote. Data and st...
If a runner knows one thing coming into the Barkley, it’s that they know nothing. The starting time, the exact route, the conditions they’ll face – even many of their opponents – all of these are mysteries to be revealed...
I knew there were problems. I could see whispered conversations taking place just out of earshot. Awkward silences would ensue when I reached my crew members. The handy schedules of upcoming crews had stopped appearing o...
The secrets to completing the Barkley, or your Barkley, are not about diet, equipment or your crew. You must learn as much as possible about the course you are facing and prepare yourself to eliminate wasted time. Most importantly, you must maintain the effort even when success doesn’t seem possible.
Over the past 30 years, I have been privileged to witness some absolutely astounding performances at the Barkley Marathons. Every finish has been the result of a nearly perfect race, by a supremely prepared athlete. With...
We should have known better… The 13 starters were indicative of what would transpire. The fact that Barry Barkley, the race’s namesake, had to work and missed the event. The failure of the temperature to reach above freezing during the race – both the weekends, before and after, it had reached into the 70’s. Most of all, just knowing the nature of the Boundary Trail, we shouldn’t have even tried. But we did.
The calendar was my first running “tool.” When I began seriously training, a simple wall calendar provided a handy place to record what I had done. These days, the old running calendar has become a part of social media. I think the value still distills down to the same essential ingredients: the numbers and the compulsion to improve them.
How we had come to be sharing the intimate moments of a collapsing transcontinental run attempt was quite a story in and of itself. A month earlier, when he began this run in California, Robert Young and his transcon were not even a blip on my radar.
while i was plugging along down the road, today, i was thinking about the time period you have entered. This time immediately before the big race. these are the days of nerves.
No one watches the long-range weather forecast like an ultrarunner. Whether we are planning some long training run or preparing for an event, nothing weighs as heavily on us as the forecast. Of course, it really makes little difference if we are headed to a race. Having invested our children’s inheritance in the entry fee, we’re going to go no matter the weather.
The first good advice that most of us receive, regarding the running of an ultramarathon, is to “break it down” into manageable pieces. And good advice it is. Once the…
With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, but, just as there are Americans, and Southerners, there are runners, and ultrarunners, and:
What am I doing here? And why did I decide that this was the race to “go for it?” Now I just wish I were at home between my own sheets with hyperactive bladder and bowels and cold sweaty feet and hands. Most of all, I wish that tomorrow held something other than an early rise and a day of exceedingly painful effort. Ah, well. close the eyes, breath deeply, and please, please, go to sleep.
Your great victories seldom make entertaining stories. What people want to hear about are your appalling errors and grievous miscalculations.
As best I can tell, the GPS mile is somewhere between eight and nine tenths of a mile as measured by a steel tape, a wheel, a surveyor or even a laser beam. Even at a race held on a paved, certified, one-mile loop, the race director was accosted by runners during the event, swearing that the loop distance was far more than a mile… their GPS measurements proved it.
From the greenest novice, to the most seasoned veteran, as ultrarunners, each of us has an ambition of reaching our potential. Whether our goal is to simply achieve a finish…
It is the number one answer to the number one question we get as ultrarunners… “Why do you do it?” “For the challenge!” The answer sounds so glib that it might come across as a throwaway line. But the truth is, there are many nuances to the challenge of running ultras.
There really is no big secret to improve our results as ultrarunners. For all the time and energy we expend on nutrition, gear, cross training, and other peripheral aspects of the sport; in the end our results are a direct reflection of our training mileage. And the biggest obstacle to accumulating the mileage necessary to achieve the results we desire is inconsistency.