Tag: From the Editor

The Long View: Create Your Own Adventure

Most ultrarunners are fueled by a desire to push their limits and explore the boundaries of what is possible. They are drawn to training for and completing ultras because they want to challenge themselves and achieve big...

Time to Reflect

This time of year is generally recognized – with reverence and in hushed tones – as the time for looking back on the year and reflecting. But as ultrarunners, we are most often solely focused on what lies ahead – after a...

Destination: Self-Discovery on the Tahoe Rim Trail

After a joyous wedding celebration, Erika Hoagland, UltraRunning Contributing Editor, and I had the bright idea to enjoy our honeymoon by taking on a new adventure together – hiking the 170-mile Tahoe Rim Trail. We had n...

Embracing Our Differences

As Tropical John Medinger astutely observed, ultrarunning is a hard sport for everyone – back of the pack, middle of the pack and those at the front – and it is this shared experience of suffering that brings all ultraru...

Take Care of Your Feet

How many times do we see grisly photos of blistered and battered feet? You know the ones – with huge chunks of skin hanging and dangling, or maybe a balloon-like blister filled with who knows what gnarly fluid. Maybe a t...

Yeah, but It's Still 100 Miles

With the growth of ultrarunning has come the increased popularity of 100 mile races, with 152 different “hundos” in our North American Ultra Calendar for 2016. Everyone seems to be doing them. But in fact, that is hardly...

Racing Ultras

Toeing the line and completing an ultramarathon is a huge accomplishment. But racing an ultra is an entirely different proposition. Both are wonderful and life changing endeavors, but since this is our racing-themed issu...

Defining Moments

If nothing else, ultrarunning constantly presents challenges. This includes the big things like choosing to take on a crazy-long distance. Or to train hard and give one’s all on race day to cover that distance faster...

UltraRunning Race Series: Where Do You Rank?

The UltraRunning Race Series records the race results of every ultrarunner in North America and calculates points for each one based on all relevant factors. It adds up every ultrarunner’s best scores at each of the prim...

It's a Big Tent

Doing ultras is a huge deal, and only driven people and those who dream big are drawn to it. Often, the people having the most fun with it are those who find kindred spirits and form a like-minded and similarly capable g...

Attitude

Late last year, I was pacing the leader of a 100-mile race when we went off course at mile 75. I had joined her at mile 68 and she was naturally tired and feeling a lot of fatigue and pain, but she was still cruising in...

Making the Sausage

We recently had a “strategic planning retreat,” which in our case really meant that four of us got together in a fun setting (Sunriver, Oregon) to do some running, eat good food and hang out with local ultrarunners. Oh,...

Living a Full Life

At age 62, having just completed a grueling 100-mile mountain race in which he finished first in his age group, Fred Brooks died suddenly when his car crashed on an interstate highway just hours after the race was comple...

Race Reports

The race is over. It was an epic day (and possibly night) after months and months of training, planning and preparation. It’s all you can think about and everyone wants to know how it went. Now it’s time for your next ul...

Seven Year Cycles

Recently, during a 100-mile race, I hit rock bottom. At mile 38, when I started to push the pace, my right calf tightened up. The vise grip increased with every step. This same problem occurred at the previous two ultras...

One Hundred Miles and the Marathon

Running Times published an article earlier this year entitled “Is 100 Miles The New Marathon?” That made me smile—so the rest of the running world has finally found our crazy little corner of the running world? Then I co...

On the Trail

Of all the important relationships in life, my relationship with the trails is one of the most complex and profound of all. Some days running the trail is like a magic carpet ride—every step easy and flowing and I’m one...

Fate or Destiny?

When I was facing a huge life decision, my mom encouraged me to choose my destiny over my fate. I really didn’t know what she was talking about and when I looked the words up in the dictionary they were basically synonym...

Everybody Knows

A recent Wall Street Journal article looked at the use of marijuana to mitigate the challenges of ultrarunning and enhance performance. The point was that THC is a banned performance-enhancing drug, so to use it during c...

It's Training Time

Training is the real litmus test for ultrarunners, because you simply can’t do this sport without putting in tons of miles over several months. Progress is measured in slow increments, and you won’t really know if all th...