Forums >General Running>General Discussion about various 24-Hour Races. What are your favorites?
Finding a good crew is hard. Crewing is hard. If you find a good crew person - Treat them really good, specially before and after the race, because during the race you might be an asshole - It happens. Generally family does not make great crews - This is because when it looks like you are doing permanent damage or may die if you continue a good crew keeps pushing you - Playing mind games to trick you or push the right buttons to get you to continue. They are also excellent problem solvers and supper attentive.
Finding a good crew is hard. Crewing is hard. If you find a good crew person - Treat them really good, specially before and after the race, because during the race you might be an asshole - It happens.
Generally family does not make great crews - This is because when it looks like you are doing permanent damage or may die if you continue a good crew keeps pushing you - Playing mind games to trick you or push the right buttons to get you to continue. They are also excellent problem solvers and supper attentive.
I will agree that crew made all the difference for me in my first. Mandy and Susie saved me a ton of time having food and drinks ready, finding things in my bag, checking on my miles, helping me change shoes ... And since the Equalizer allows you to have people run with you, having her keeping me moving in the night when I was hurting was huge. She just kept walking and talking, so I did the same. And having someone else to help gather up all the stuff and drive at the end of something like that is also a blessing.
20,000 miles behind me, the world still to see.
Uh oh... now what?
The course can have a major effect on how well you like, or dislike, a time event.
The standard 400m track is completely different from
a) 1.327-mile trail,
b) 5-mile around-the-block,
c) 1-mile loops in the park,
d) 5.375-miles of trail,
e) and others?
The distance (venue) can play with your head and really screw
up walk/run (run/walk?) tactics.
If you try one time event and end up not liking it, don't give up. Try
another one at a different place or a 6-hour or 12-hour for practice.
My (and my wife's) first time event was on a 400m track--[bleah... I counted
her laps, five months later she counted mine] but by half way home, we
were already planning how to do it the next time.
rgot
True dat
The 400 meter track sucks for certain reasons, but you are never more than 399 meters away from your crew and stuff. I like the 2.42 mile loop at FANS24 - around the lake, but your crew better be spot on, because another 2.42 miles without what you wanted will have an impact ... and it get hard to be spot on in the middle of the night when you are tired and you cannot tell your runner is coming until they are on top of you.
Long dead ... But my stench lingers !
I run 24 for max distance, so 24 hours of Leadville would be out.
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I am considering the Peanut Island-24, and also I have put the North Coast-24 Fall race on my schedule. Other races I have looked at are the Dumass events races (24 hours of HOSTELity and the Merrill Mile 24-hour race in GA).
I ran 41 miles in 9 hours at Merrill's Mile 24 Hour Race this past September, but dropped out due to severe shin splints. It was a fun event, but I definitely recommend wearing gaiters to prevent those rocks on the flat track from going into your shoes.
I am friends with the RD of the Dumass races, and he always puts on amazing events. I am signed up for 24 Hours of HOSTELity in January, and I cannot wait.
I have never been happy with my performance at 24-hour fixed-time events, but I still keep signing up for them somehow. It's a mind game that I ultimately would like to conquer.
My 24-hour races have ranged from acceptable (100K at Black Mountain Monster 24 Hour) to embarrassing (15.5 miles at Woods Ferry 24 after I suffered heat sickness and dropped out at three hours). At Merrill's Mile, I was confident in my ability to hit 90 miles or so, but the shin splints got in my way. Each race is vastly different, since some are 5K loops, some are 1-mile loops, and so on. Woods Ferry 24, my heat sickness race, was unique, because the RD started the race at 4:00 PM on a day with 93-degree temperatures, and the race course was a 7.5-mile loop.
I trained for my pavement marathons using the Galloway method, so I sometimes utilize run/walk intervals during the flat 24-hour events. If the loop has hills, then I use the hills for walk breaks. I start out slowly with a 12:00/mile pace or something comparable, and try to see how long I can stick to that.
In the past, I have always screwed up my hydration/electrolyte balance at 24-hour events. Being so close to an aid station all of the time is not easy for me, and I usually overhydrate or overeat. I finally found a way to work through this at Merrill's Mile 24 by treating the race as though it were a point-to-point event and only visiting the aid station every five miles or so.
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Imminent Catastrophe
Jason, Hostelity is tough, it's ALL hill, virtually no level. But it's a great event. I'm volunteering.
"Able to function despite imminent catastrophe"
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"The most common question from potential entrants is 'I do not know if I can do this' to which I usually answer, 'that's the whole point'.--Paul Charteris, Tarawera Ultramarathon RD.
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A couple comments: 1) In my first 24, I drank about 4 big bottles of gatorade in the 11 or 12 hours I was running before I stopped, so my weight stayed consistent every time I checked on the scale they have there.(stayed hydrated). But my hands + fingers got swollen and puffy to where I could not even bend them. Anyone know if this was likely electrolyte related, or if maybe I took in too much gatorade, or not enough electrolytes, or too much electrolytes, or... (I really don't know. I am not certain what caused all that swelling, and not sure what to change to help prevent that next time).
Also, JFK-50 miler is on my "Must do" list of races, likely in 2014 or 2015. ---How many miles should I be able to achieve in 12 hours in a practice run or half-way through a 24 hour event before I should consider myself trained enough on mileage to complete the JFK-50? ((I think I am not that far off, but taking into acc't that I have no experience on trails, and there is the 13 mile opening section of the JFK-50 that is on the appalachian trail that would take more energy/effort to cover than just running 50 on a flat course in 12 hrs?
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This is exactly the sort of thing that I was talking about when I wrote above that I have a propensity to lose control of my hydration/electrolyte balance. My hands started to swell at Merrill's Mile 24, so I simply stopped drinking or eating altogether for a few miles. Eventually, the swelling started to go down. After that, I started to eat and drink on a schedule (until I dropped out due to shin splints).
This is probably not the wisest course of action to take under such circumstances, but it made sense to me at the time, because I did not know if the swelling was a result of too much hydration or from water retention as a result of too many electrolytes or sodium.
On On
Why do you make any correlation between your weight and your hydration?
It appears to me with out any more info that you may have had to much to drink but with out knowing more of the particulars I'd only be guessing.
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Why do you make any correlation between your weight and your hydration? It appears to me with out any more info that you may have had to much to drink but with out knowing more of the particulars I'd only be guessing.
I can relate to what he's talking about, because I have experienced swelling after I took S-Caps or ingested a lot of sodium, because my body simply retains whatever amount of water I am drinking, regardless of whether or not I am drinking just by thirst. Sometimes, taking in more sodium or electrolytes causes the swelling to become worse, so it's easy to get confused about how to remedy the problem. That is why I tend to stop eating or drinking altogether for a short while and let my body figure itself out.
I assumed that weight staying constant would be at least a close guess that I was still hydrating well because of no weight loss. Sometimes I do a 15-mile run in the summertime and I drop 5 pounds during that practice run because I drink and eat nothing during those distance runs. Also, during the 24-hour, they stated that was the reason for putting the scale out there, to make sure your weight didn't drop way off, indicating you may be headed for dehydration....I am very new to this with only one of these 24's under my belt, so there is much that people take for granted that I don't even know about yet :-)
---Jason and OnOn, I am thinking you guys may be right with best guess being that I was drinking too much. 4 bottles of Gatorade at 32 ounces a bottle, might have put too much into me and I am thinking the best solution if I start getting swelling next time in a similar scenario is to do what was mentioned and slow down on the liquid intake for a while and let things go back to normal if that happens again.
---- Man, I can't wait till April and having my second go at the Hampton 24 hr race! :-)
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Weight and hydration are not necissarly linked absolutely. In a good 24 hour race, I tend to lose weight the 1st 12 hours as I burn glycogen and dehydrate some, then I gain weight the next 12 and end up the same weight.
Swollen hands have 3 culprits
1) Lots of walking with hand handing can cause the hands to swell.
2) Too much salt
3) Too little salr
Because of 2 and 3 being contridicting - It can get hard to diagsose
If all you do is drink too much you should be peeing like a race horse. I drink 30 ounces an hour and if its cool I pee a lot, if its hot, I pee about once every 4-6 hours.
Just some other thoughts. If my hands are swelling, I may just raise them to the sky (or at least to shoulders) and shake them for a bit. Sometimes that fixes things. (I used to get swollen hands when backpacking sometimes.) If that doesn't work, I may pop an Scap or two over the next couple hours. For *me* in the conditions of my races, that usually works - so far.
But to look at a more general comparison of symptoms and how to fix them, browse this water / electrolyte table . Note that there's overlap of symptoms. This is why it's so hard to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it - even for medical folks without having lab-type data (sodium concentration). Some larger races (marathons) now have such equipment to be able to properly diagnose runner's symptoms.
Here's a few journal articles from WS100 that provide some information also.
You can read a lot, but you really need to find out what works for you. Some people rarely have problems; others almost always have problems.
This is why long long runs (near 8 hrs, at least 4+hrs) can be really helpful to sort out some of these issues and find out what works for you. Ideally, some of these should be in weather similar to what you may be racing in. IOW, an 8-hr run for me in March in the snow and maybe 0-20F temperatures really doesn't help me much for that aspect of training for a July race with temps near 60-70F (which is hot for us).
Enjoy the journey.