Forums >Running 101>50 Miler
Hello everyone. I have the Chicago Lakefront 50/50 coming up October 30th. 6 years ago I had a DNF at this. It was my only DNF and my only Ultra Marathon attempt. I was just curious what kind of training you do for a 50 miler. How you plan out your race. Nutrition, pace, etc. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm determined not to DNF again. I have to finish in under 11 hours as that is the cutoff time.
First off, you're asking the training question way way way too late. Peeking at your log summary page your last week looks solid but your previous 5 months looks like you signed up for this on a whim or were injured. Your HM Saturday / Marathon Sunday is rather impressive considering your low mileage (it looks like you schedule a lot of xtraining but don't log it here so that should help). If I had to pull a suggestion out of my behind ~13 min/mile on the 50 miler is probably what I'd recommend you shoot for. At this point my big suggestion is to recover from the marathon, then log however many miles you can before doing a 10day - 2 week taper for the ultra. Don't worry about pace, just build that endurance.
More generally I would run it at slower than your easy pace. I'm personally a fan of scheduled walk breaks starting from mile 1 where you can focus on getting your nutrition in during the walk. 9 min easy run / 3 min power walk or 5 / 2 seems to work well on flat courses for the ultra runners I know who aren't fit enough to run the whole thing. Start practicing your nutrition immediately, especially on any longer runs. Wear whatever pack/hydration setup you plan to use and get used to it.
p.s. I've only ever done a 9 hour ultra on a 1 mile looped course so logistics were much easier and went 42 miles so 50 is further than I've ever gone. The big thing I learned is that you can feel crappy at hour 3 and feel much better at hour 8 if you properly rehydrate, get your salts and your fuel. Walk when you need to but keep moving forward. Chat with people, listen to music whatever makes you happy. FWIW I did that on a whim and my training was basically 50 mile weeks roughly following this schedule:
M: ~80min hilly run
T: tempo run
W: easy 40 min
Th: 90-120 min trail run
F: 40 min easy
S: track workout
Sun: off
with a couple of short 30 minute doubles thrown in for good measure and a tiny bit of bicycle commuting and swimming for variety. The point isn't this particular schedule, it's more that it's just it's just normal training for distance races (shorter than a marathon). If I were to do it over the main thing I would do is make the long run longer, at least 2.5 hours.
1600 - 5:23 (2018), 5k - 19:33 (2018), 10k - 41:20 (2021), half - 1:38:57 (2018), Marathon - 3:37:17 (2018)
I think zebano gives some pretty solid advice. The only race I ever won was the only 50 mile race I ever ran, which was the last long run before a 100 mile race, a training run. I did win the 50 mile race, technically. I was the only one who finished. However, I wasn't the only one who started the event. I just needed to finish the thing, and I think that speaks to zebano's advice about not worrying too much about pace, The 13 minute per mile target is probably a pretty good one.
I was focused on 100 miles, but part of what I did was take a 50K plan and add a couple of back to back long runs and one 8 hour run leading up to the 50 miler. The 50 miler was what I figured to be one a 12 hour run, and it was about that long, 11 hours, 50 minutes.
Also, for the 50 mile run, I drank Tailwind and ate half an orange. For the subsequent 100 mile run, I drank Tailwind, ate 2 cheeseburgers at mile 41. I also ate a burrito at mile 70, which was a bad idea. But it all worked out.
Good luck.
LB2
Thanks for the advice I greatly appreciate it. I originally planned to use that marathon as time on my feet. I was going to run it in 5-6 hours. But then the heat played a factor and they were talking about cancelling the race so I had to change my plan.