Finishing any ultra at any age is already an amazing human achievement and is far beyond what most people will ever be capable of. The fact that you’re still at it, well, that’s just icing on the cake.
Articles by Gary Dudney
Ultrarunning is a sport you can continue to enjoy and benefit from into your twilight years. Making the right physical adjustments for training and racing are important as you grow older, but as always, a lot of your suc...
Completing one hundred 100-mile races is an enormous goal and requires a serious devotion to ultrarunning, a mega-dose of patience and determination, a not inconsequential amount of resources and a very, very long time....
Ultrarunners have never had it so good. You can run 50ks ‘til the cows come home, and 50-milers and 100ks abound as well. Not only do you have over 250 100-mile races to choose from, but the latest craze for the very dif...
We all struggle with the moment in a race when the wheels come off and the pain and suffering seem unbearable. As the saying goes, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” I don’t really buy that suffering is optional in the sense that you can escape it altogether, but how well you manage the suffering and your reaction to it are certainly things that you have control over.
Imagine you’re on the couch watching snow flurries out the window or maybe a very cold, uninviting rain. Every fiber of your being is telling you to skip your training run and wait for bett...
The training/race cycle goes on and on, and can easily lead to burnout, overtraining or wilting into staleness. The all-important positive attitude about running that supplies so much of the motivation to get out the...
Let’s stipulate that aging into the masters category and beyond isn’t exactly a bed of roses. But there is a silver lining. The adjustments you need to make in your running in order to stay healthy and extend your running well into the future can actually lead you to find running more enjoyable and rewarding.
One great aspect of ultrarunning is that, for the most part, it happens outdoors on trails, along country roads or across leafy suburban streets. We get the exercise and cardiovascular blast that long-distance running...
The Grandmaster Ultras would be business as usual as far as most ultra events are concerned except, and apologies to younger runners here, you are required to have lived at least half a century in order to participate. Grandmaster, in other words, is where the older generation gets to feel young again and pursue their ultra dreams without all those pesky young runners gumming up the works.
If you have experience in ultrarunning, I’m sure you’re familiar with the “pain cave.” It’s that bad mental place you go when you’re pushing through a tough workout or the last half of a difficult race. In the pain ca...
I love the idea of doing a 100-mile race on the anniversary of 9/11. It will give me a chance to do something special and positive on that day, and it will also give me a wonderful backdrop for reflecting on these las...
Alaska is fabulous. The Resurrection Pass Ultras showcase the Resurrection Pass area of the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage between the towns of Hope in the north and Cooper Landing in the south, which comprises just one tiny corner of the vast miracle that is the state of Alaska. Running the Resurrection Pass 100 was one of the greatest adventures I’ve had in 25 years of ultrarunning.
ABC’s Wide World of Sports crushed its weekend time slot for 37 years on network television from 1961 to 1998. The premise was simple: people would love to watch sports coverage that went beyond standard baseball, footba...
The Pulse Endurance Runs held in Eagle Island State Park just west of Boise, Idaho, in late May reminded me why I love running 100 miles on a short loop course. Much of the aggravation that comes with running an unfamiliar point-to-point course is stripped away and you can concentrate fully on the distance and on the joy of pure running.
If you’ve ever used the word “pleasant” to describe a 100-mile race, it’s likely going to be the C&O Canal 100 near Knoxville, Maryland. Forget about tripping down technical trails, battling brutal heat or sub-freezing temps and facing quad-burning elevation. Instead, imagine banks of wildflowers, a wide river flowing nearby and a running surface free of rocks, ruts and anything that would require your attention.
Faking it until you make it doesn’t seem like it would work in the sport of ultrarunning. After all, what could be more impervious to fakery or trickery, than slamming down a gnarly trail for hours on end? How do you...
The race directors seemed pleased as punch about the prospect of putting runners through the wringer. This Kentucky course promises below-freezing temperatures at night, rugged and rocky trails, numerous steep climbs...
Race Director Bryant Baker worked hard at making the inaugural running of the Rim to River 100 Mile, West Virginia’s first-ever hundred-mile race, something special. At packet pick-up, he mentioned that the course visits every spot in the area he would want his best friend to see if they were out on a run together.
The Mines of Spain 100 makes excellent use of the area’s colorful history, and the beauty and variety of habitats of the natural world there. Add to that, stellar race organization, great volunteers and exceptional runner support, and it all adds up to a cool event that is likely to become a fixture in Midwest ultrarunning.
It’s the perennial question for ultrarunners: “Why in the world do you want to run so far?” The question is usually meant rhetorically, as if it is self-evident that no reward could justify such pain and suffering. The a...
About two hours into the Maah Daah Hey Trail 100, I paused to take stock. Since the race began, we’d been riding roller coaster, twisting single track through the classic badlands terrain of western North Dakota, surroun...
There is a dynamic that runs through an ultrarunning career: the process of searching for the perfect clothes, equipment, food/drink and other products to use for racing. This includes things like ideal running shoes, ju...
Were it not for the circumstances of the pandemic, I would never have been shopping around for a race, but fate brought me together with the Strawberry Fields Forever 30 Hours in North Bonneville, Washington, near the Columbia River. It turned out to be a wonderfully well run and satisfying ultra with just 3,200 feet of elevation gain.
At last, I found a race held in the shadow of the COVID-19 lockdown, and there was no series of ominous email warnings followed by a reluctant cancellation notice. The Loco Challenge race series held in parts of the Lassen National Forest on June 6 in north central California.
The most remarkable thing about our sport is the sheer distance we cover during an ultra event. Yet it doesn’t take much ultrarunning experience to realize that your focus during a race is almost never on the entire dist...
Fort Ord Trail runs take place in Monterey, California, on the first weekend of February each year. It’s just a short drive south from San Francisco and runners can choose from a 100K, 50K, 25K or 10K, or run your ultra and let the rest of the family run the shorter distances.
Runners love Pinhoti. It seemed like everybody I talked to at packet pickup was either returning to run this race in Alabama because they couldn’t get enough of it or they were out to avenge a DNF. Pinhoti is like a flame in the night – drawing in moths, but also, ready to burn them into oblivion.
Runners experience a wonderland of rugged forest, waterfalls, natural arches, streams and river while tackling this demanding 100-mile tour of the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area that begins in southern Kentucky and drops into Tennessee.
Burning River has always been a race with a heart of irony. The race celebrates health, strength, vitality, natural beauty and of course, the Cuyahoga River. Yet 50 years ago, the actual events that led to the Cuyahoga earning the name “burning river” were tragic and ugly.