I Guess I’m Ready

Am I Ready?

I’m attempting to run my first 100-mile ultra marathon on Saturday (and Sunday, too!) and in the past few days, I have been asked if I was ready several times. I don’t think that I have given the same answer each time it was asked. I really don’t know if I’m ready. Maybe. I guess so. Nope. Yup. We’ll see – have been the typical responses based on how I felt that day.  

Running one hundred miles is something I have never done before. I honestly have no idea how it’s going to go for me. I have set goals of just being able to finish, to finish under 24-hours and also 20-hours, and also to not die while doing it, as dying would upset my wife. I have recruited my wife to be my crew chief, and if I were to croak on top of making her suffer through this dumb idea I don’t think it would go over well.  

But am I really ready? To be honest, I never directly followed a 100-mile ultra training plan in preparation for this race. The Covid pandemic tossed around a couple of races that I had planned to do in 2020 and they got moved to 2021. The Big Hill Bonk race ended up being in August instead of April, and Ironman Louisville, originally scheduled for October 2020, became Ironman Chattanooga in September 2021. That meant that I was planning to run what would become my first ultra-distance event and Ironman in late summer/early fall of 2021. At that point, I figured “why not take advantage of the training I was doing and attempt my first 100-miler?” So I signed up for Tunnel Hill 100, a mid-November race in which a handful of local friends were also running. They are bad influences.  

My goal was to run 40-50 miles at the Big Hill Bonk, but I “bonked” at 33 miles. I hadn’t followed a specific ultra-running plan for that race either. I just used what run training I was doing while training for my Ironman. That got me over 50K and I officially became an ultra runner, but it also taught me that running 33 miles was hard and therefore, 100-miles might be super-duper hard.  

I quickly put that race behind me and focused on following my training plan for my Ironman. Ironman Chattanooga went off without a hitch and I notched the 2nd-quickest time of the five I have completed. That left me about 6-weeks to do just long, slow running. And guess what? I found that I liked long, slow running.

I’ve always been about speed. I’ve qualified for the Boston Marathon three times, and that required me to push myself pretty hard. But training for an ultra required something else – a slow pace, one that you can maintain for a day. Or at least a pace at which medical aid won’t likely be required when finished. Been there, done that. I found that when I slowed down, I actually enjoyed running. The miles went by quickly enough, and before I knew it I was four hours into a training run and still felt pretty good.  

I had found an online 100-mile ultra training plan on a website called Relentless Forward Commotion, which is an awesome ultra-running resource. I loosely based what little time I had left to train on what that plan had called for, but I didn’t follow it exactly. The plan had called for a 50K (which I did!) and a 50-mile run (which I didn’t do!) leading up to the race. But I had done an Ironman, so that has to count for something, right? I say it does.

After Ironman Chattanooga, which included 26.2 miles of some of the toughest hills I have ever run (okay, walked) for a marathon, I put together long runs of 21, 26, 16, 21, 22, and 16, leaving me with some time to taper down until race day. So when you take into account that I did run a 50K, an Ironman, and six weeks of some of the highest weekly mile totals that I have ever done, I think that I did do an adequate job of training for running 100 miles without actually directly training for running 100 miles. We shall see.

On Monday, I ran five miles and did the same on Tuesday. After that, I said that’s it. I’m as ready as I can be at this point. Another three or four-mile run isn’t going to make me any more prepared, and my legs and feet can use the rest as I focus on packing the junk that I will need for this dumb idea.  

Am I ready? I’m definitely ready to get this over with. The stress is killing me.

Author: Ironman Chris

Family, running, triathlon and drumming are my things. View all posts by Ironman Chris