Here are a few pieces of advice that might not be so obvious to those who are new to the sport of trail and ultrarunning.
Articles by Sarah Lavender Smith
The aid station at mile 31 of Western States (Robinson Flat) includes a plethora of fuel options, as well as a large number of volunteers to help runners. Jesse Ellis | Let's Wander Photography This spring, I’ll be send...
Fifteen years doesn’t seem like such a long time, but in terms of how athletes, events, gear and media have evolved, 15 feels more like 50 years in the sport of ultrarunning.Rewind back to 2009 (“rewind” being a term tha...
I approached my last 100-mile race, the 2023 Run Rabbit Run, with a whole list of aspirational but achievable goals. I always write down goals, which often read like dos and don’ts, in preparation for an ultra because go...
Our sport, like most, has a burgeoning class of celebrities and influencers. But the best big names and legends in ultrarunning are different than the notable names in more mainstream sports. The most inspiring—who keep...
Our once-fringe-now-mainstream sport used to be its own cozy niche, but over the decades, it has split into many niches loosely defined by geography, age, distance of trail routes, clubs and teams and more. Want to find your niche in ultrarunning? Here are some ideas.
Twenty years ago, I wrote my first story for this magazine and ran my first trail race. People sometimes wonder how I and others got into this sport, and how it has changed. Let me rewind to the late 1990s and early 200...
On a trip to Boulder, I didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew on my morning run. But when I transitioned to hiking up the steep rock steps of the Mount Sanitas Trail, I recognized the dyed-blue hair of the guy who pass...
It’s summer in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, and I’m running one of the gentler trails in the region, the old Groundhog Stock Trail where cowboys used to herd cattle and sheep to load onto rail cars. T...
Success at ultras depends in part on striking an appropriate mental balance between ambivalence and obsession, between not caring enough and too much. You should feel invested in the race and stoke a desire to finish as best you can, but also realize that it’s just one day of your life and it does not define you, nor will it negate all the worthwhile months of training leading to the big event.
Training independently—doing things your way, free of charge—is appealing. You can train more intuitively, like Courtney Dauwalter (who isn’t coached), less beholden to a coach’s workouts that might not fit with your life and all of its stressors. If you decide to coach yourself, here are some suggestions to help you make the most of your training.
We tend to think of “off season” as a winter break in training before gearing up for a new training block when the hours of daylight lengthen and summer ultras beckon. I’d like to suggest thinking of the off season anoth...
I started running trails and graduated to ultras in the mid-2000s before Facebook, Strava, iRunFar, Instagram, Ultrasignup and Born to Run. I had a habit of leaving a note in the kitchen describing my route for...
Unless you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, the end of the calendar year brings colder temps, shorter days, rain and perhaps snow. Between Thanksgiving and January, I tend to run less and sleep and eat more. But wait—I have one last ultra of the year on the calendar to get my rear into gear. One last hurrah to challenge my legs and lungs to run hard before taking a holiday-oriented break.
Unless you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, the end of the calendar year brings colder temps, shorter days, rain and perhaps snow. Between Thanksgiving and January, I tend to run less and sleep and eat more, as if trans...
I live at 9,000 feet on a mesa surrounded by mountains that rise sharply to 13,000-foot peaks. Sometimes I get introduced as “the runner,” which makes the person I’m meeting look at me with a mix of admiration and ske...
Like many runners, my life’s timeline cleaves distinctly into two periods: before I became a runner and after. I can’t say this about any other profession or hobby I’ve taken up over the decades. Only parenting – beco...
Every summer, countless trail runners make a pilgrimage to the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado to experience mountain running. Most nurture a desire to run parts of the Hardrock 100 course, which forms a gian...
After my first long run of the new year, I could barely walk downstairs due to quad and knee soreness. I had only run 21 miles, but it was the first time I had run longer than three hours in two months. I had told m...
While running the 40-mile Telluride Mountain Run in late August—an extremely tough high-altitude ultra that circumnavigates the town and crosses four mountain passes—I felt a bit glum that I didn’t recognize any of the fresh-faced runners sharing the trail. Imagine my delight, therefore, when I spotted a blonde woman with legendary status as she approached me on a switchback above tree line.
Around mile 28 of the High Lonesome 100, when thunder rumbled overhead from slate-gray clouds to the west, a man ahead of me turned back to ask, “What do you think, is it safe to keep going?”
“I’m just going to run it for fun.” I hear that phrase all the time, and I understand the sentiment behind it. It’s expressed partly to lower expectations and self-pressure, and partly to give oneself permission to participate in a race with relatively easy effort and save one’s real effort for a later race. It sounds like a harmless approach to an enjoyable training run. And sometimes, it is.
The wild weather at Whiskey Basin Trail Runs in Prescott, Arizona, added to a palpable feeling of high energy, and though I couldn’t see others’ expressions due to masks and being distanced for COVID-19 precautions, everyone seemed to be in a good mood judging by the elbow-bumps. While it was a dark and stormy morning, we all needed to run.
“Anything can happen in the mountains,” I tell my 19-year-old son, Kyle, as I show him how to use the SOS button on my GPS tracking device. When I hand him a windbreaker, he looks at me as if I’m insane, because we’re living through a heat wave and the sky is cloudless.
When the pandemic erased the motivator of ultras from our calendars, we had to reconnect with deeper reasons why we run long. Personally, I desperately needed to re-establish and fortify my bread-and-butter weekly running routine for reasons that have little to do with preparing for ultras.
Ultrarunner Jared Campbell started the Running Up for Air timed event at Grandeur Peak (Outside of Salt Lake City) to raise awareness and money to fight air pollution in his hometown region. He saw and felt the effects of the winter inversion layer firsthand on daily training runs up Grandeur Peak.
When my son, Kyle, proudly grasped his diploma and pumped his fist in triumph during his high school graduation this past June, I cheered loudly while infused with feelings of relief, happiness and love. As odd as it might be to think of ultrarunning during that emotional milestone as a parent, the “golden hour” of the Western States finish line flashed through my mind.
As I considered the apples-to-oranges comparison between road marathons and mountain ultras, I wondered. What if, instead of trying to be the marathon runner I used to be, I embraced the tougher, heavier, more truck-like ultrarunner I’ve become?
A decade ago, at 42, Kami Semick reached the pinnacle of ultrarunning. She won every race she entered in 2009, including two world championship events in the 100K and 50K, and earned UltraRunning’s Ultrarunner of the Year title for the second year in a row. But five years later, she called it quits and disappeared from the sport.