More de ja vu. I feel like I've read this before.

Nice job, Bob. As I said on FB, the part about forgetting the mental training seminar is classic.

I've done one 48 hour, and learned a ton about myself.  Sleep deprivation and accumulated muscle fatigue were, for me, more than twice as bad as a 24hr.

One of my big problem is I don't fall asleep easily, so if I try to get a short cat nap, I feel like I'm just wasting time and don't fall asleep.  I have to wait for total fatigue so I can fall asleep, and be far away from AS or Start/Finish area noise.

Congrats and great RR!  There's a lot to take away and digest as a newbie.  Thanks for sharing.

I enjoyed the report.  One critical takeaway for me is the technique of combining walking with running at your natural pace to achieve a desired overall pace.  Do you use this technique in trail 100-mile races, or are those not long enough to need it?  Or the terrain to varied to be able to apply it?

In 100-mile races I basically walk the hills and run the flats and downhills, like everyone else. But of course there is the question of what is a hill. Often I will be walking early "up" something that really does not look or feel like a hill.

For Spartathlon, a 153-mile road race with hills (and a mountain trail 100 miles in), I plan splits for each of the 75 checkpoints and carry a pace chart. That's probably overkill. But you can't pace that evenly. And again I am often walking early to go slow enough, on anything I can even remotely call a hill.

Thanks. I try to maintain a keto diet, generally 20-30 g / day, to maximize fat burning adaptation. The goal is to need fewer in-race calories, to minimize GI issues.

For quite a while I still did a mini-carb load before an ultra, though, thinking that a day or so of carbs would not mess up months of adaptation, and why not start with a full tank of more efficient fuel? But gradually I realized that this correlated well with bonking hard 9-10 hours into the race. I would have a rough hour, and then I'd recover and run strong the rest of the way, still on low calories. After working with a sports nutritionist I got an explanation. When the liver has plenty of glycogen, it inhibits (via the vagus nerve) fat mobilization. This take some time to reset when it gets depleted. This is a new discovery as of a few years ago.

So actually my goal going into a race is to be very low on glycogen. I burn body fat and 100-150 cal. / hour of ingested carbs. I've had no bonks in the several long races I've done this way. The liver does make some carbs with gluconeogenesis, but these mostly go to fuel the brain. Unfortunately there is no test for muscle glycogen level other than a biopsy, so it is hard to really know. If I'm inactive and don't eat carbs, is there enough extra glucose produced to gradually refill glycogen stores? I expect so. That's one reason I make sure to not taper to zero before a race.

Great race report, chock full of information that even a slowpoke like me can use for my next 24 hour run attempt (the first one went very poorly).

Great question. Hoka changed their insoles around the time the Clayton 2 came out. Now they are thin and flat. Before they were more shaped and had a heel cup. I am using the older insoles from old Claytons. Without those my heels slide around. Also with heel lifts; I need more than 5mm drop.

But additional padding... no, not really. I guess the older insoles do have slightly more padding. But really the cushion comes from the midsole.