100-Mile Fear & Loathing
Fear is one hell of a drug.
It can heighten our senses and increase performance. It can paralyze us and warp our perceptions. Fear can ensure that peak weeks of training get scheduled and completed. And fear can cause us to lose perspective; to neglect effective ways of preparing for the 100-mile footrace.
How Fear Can Mess With Our Race
Fear-informed training. Fear-informed training takes many shapes, most of which are disruptive to steady physical advancement. Most commonly, fear messes with our understanding of proper dosage. If we have recurring thoughts of doubt and fear about our ability to cover 100 miles, we may try to quell that fear by applying novel training methods during our final weeks of preparation. This could look like overtraining, undertraining or unproductive training architecture. If we were running for 8-9 hours each week in prior training blocks, we might decide to double that weekly total with massive weekend adventures—holding the volume there for the last 3 weeks of training before tapering. The other side of the coin might be true. Under the pressures of fear and expectation, we might self-sabotage by becoming inconsistent in our training. Inconsistency then forces us into a more casual demeanor in regards to our racing. If our goals are no longer a perceived possibility, we have released pressure and fear associated with the race. Another example of fear-informed training is fiddling with the density of the training architecture. An athlete might try to run hard or long for consecutive days followed by a few days of recovery (or not-so-recovery) runs. While a strategic injection of super-dense training can definitely spur growth, doing so chronically or without structure during the final weeks of training can lead to mixed results both physically and mentally.
Siloing training from racing. Fear can produce a kind of monomania, or tunnel vision. In some ways, this is powerfully useful. In other ways, it can make us lose sight of the bigger picture. If we are not trialing specific race demands and mental strategies in training and instead are keeping our noses forever to the grindstone, we may convince ourselves that the training will run the race for us. At best, our physical training merely manipulates sustainable locomotion. But our mindset, our perceptions and experiences within the race, are forged in the fires of mental preparation alone.
Devaluing tactical preparation. A good race plan is worth its weight in performance-enhancing drugs. This might be an off-color joke, but it's actually extremely accurate. A well-formulated and well-executed peak block of 100-mile training might increase our fitness by a couple percentage points. But if we spend even just an extra 30 minutes in aid stations over the course of 100 miles due to inefficiencies, we are giving back our peak month of training. Why? Because we were not tactically prepared. Spending the final block of training and tapering finalizing nutrition, hydration, wardrobe, traveling efficiently, aid station etiquette etc….tactical preparation is essential to illustrating our fitness on race day. It is also this sometimes-tedious, anxiety-producing tactical preparation that mysteriously gets pushed back until the week of the race.
How Fear Can Serve Race Preparation
Increased motivation to stick to the plan. We all understand fear to be a motivator. The more subtle balance to strike is to let fear enhance our motivation but not our effort. Even with textbook recovery protocols, we all have a cap on how much physical exercise we can absorb each week. Human physiology is unimpressed by our 100-mile dream or by the fact that it is our peak training block. We should establish a clear Peaking and Tapering plan months in advance. Absolutely, we can incorporate acute moments of overreaching in the form of long-long runs or back-to-backs, but we would do well to space them out and to support these efforts with multiple extra-easy recovery runs before and afterwards. We only need a handful of “overdose” efforts to be prepared for a 100-miler. Of course, we gotta get the work in, but we need to do so with an awareness of the true recovery cost. Fear can often inhibit our capacity to read recovery costs. A back-to-back long run weekend in the mountains will take a long time to recover from. Despite our anxieties of being underprepared, we optimize big weekends if we schedule 2-4 days of gentler, briefer running afterwards to maximize absorption of such exceptional strategies. Mental and physical freshness must be given the opportunity to be fully realized before race day.
Time trialing and “systems check” runs in training. Instead of compartmentalizing our training from our upcoming race, our final blocks are full-on simulations of race-specific demands. Our big efforts give us rare opportunities to develop the requisite ultra-distance skills. Running a 25k-50k tune-up race will shed light on where our fitness is at. Do we need more endurance? More economy? More work on the downhills? Did we struggle to eat or drink enough? Were we nimble about retrieving things from our vest while running over singletrack? It cannot be stressed enough; the miles are less important than the systems. Of course the miles are important. But high dosage-levels are implied in the self-education of efficient travel. If our primary aim is to meticulously remove ambiguity from our systems (nutrition, hydration, gear, aid station etiquette, pacing) then we will achieve healthy, effective peak training volumes. But if we allow fear to hop in the driver’ seat and we become a little compulsive—volume for volume’s sake—this is when we can show up on the starting line burnout or overtrained and tactically unprepared.
Create a crystal clear crew and race plan. We say we will get to it but we put it off. We may not think fear has a role in this procrastination but it does in part. Tactical preparation forces us into the mindset of race day. This may bring about some anxiety at first, but the anxiety of putting off tactical preparation is much greater.
Maybe we are in peak training so we think that we will get to it during the 2-week taper. So the first week of the taper comes and we are super tired from training. It is too much to deal with in this depleted state. Then race week comes around and it is time to learn all there is about the race, aid stations, crew, pacing, pacers, all of it. Yikes.
There is another way. We learn the course before peak training begins. What features does the course offer and at what points in the race do they occur? How many aid stations are there and what foods and drinks do they offer? Will we eat from the tables or supply our own nutrition? This question in particular is crucial to gut training during peak blocks. It is very common for athletes to put tons of work into their nutrition plan only to run out of stuff between crew access aid stations and not know what to do at the tables. Have a nutrition plan in place that fully translates to the course.
Writing an aid station-by-aid station crew cheat sheet is immensely effective at minimizing stopped time and maximizing fun for all involved. Your drivers will always have the directions in one reliable place, your crew will have a checklist to read to you at every stop, you will be given the care and info you need to continue to execute in alignment with your values. This single document, while it might take a few hours to compile, will not only make you one of the most prepared and low-key groups at the aid stations, but it will spur visualization of the race. Our tactical preparations are essential to our mental preparations. By the time we are fully prepared for the tactical elements of the race, we will have an intimate understanding of what is demanded of us in order to complete the distance.
Fear is a double-edged sword. When it comes to the 100-mile distance, especially if it is our first 100-miler, fear can pretty much be a single-edged sword. Outside of cultivating a healthy respect for the distance, fear has the potential to erode healthy training during the most important blocks. It can postpone information gathering essential to performance. It can skew perceptions of capacity and self-worth. Fear can make us buy, and pack, a whole bunch of shit we probably don’t need all while making us overlook vital elements and material within our plan.
By no means is this article saying, “suck it up and stop worrying!” The fear is real and it is useful and realistically, it can only be redirected to a certain degree. Running 100 miles is very scary, especially when it has never been done before. But what this article is doing is offering clear targets to direct the fear.
Use fear’s motivating effects to adhere to the preconceived plan. Use the heightened attention that fear gives us to flesh out our systems in no uncertain terms. Dispel fear, not through dissociation or procrastination, but by unpacking the puzzle of the race: do the research, create the documents, purchase the necessary rations and gear, learn about the wilderness area you will travel through. Control the controllables.
Perhaps it is not a romantic bravery but rather an equanimous clarity that is the antidote to 100-mile fear and loathing.