Fast is better than long
By title alone, I must read this. or for free, here.
Never Wipe Your Ass with a Squirrel: A trail running, ultramarathon, and wilderness survival guide for weird folks
2017 Goals: Give up goals; they're stoopid
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm the rest of the night;Set a man afire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
What in the Jehu?
Chasing Muses
Never Wipe... is a great book. Covers alot of topics and is written in a way that is fun to read. As a relatively new trail/ultra runner, there was some good info on managing terrain, running at night, etc.
I'm sure that's good advice.
I've heard over and over that the only really decent all-around book on ultrarunning is Bryon Powell's Relentless Forward Progress (2011), so I finally bought it the other day.
Haven't read the whole thing, but so far I'm rather disappointed that he seems to be toeing the sports-drink industry party line on hydration, electrolytes, and cramping. Drink ahead of thirst, replace all that is lost, performance suffers with only 1-2% dehydration, low electrolytes / dehydration cause cramps, etc. Not even any mention of alternative points of view. Yes, this was before Waterlogged appeared, but even in 2011 "drink ahead of thirst" was pretty passé, and electrolytes-vs-cramps has been hotly debated for many years. I would be tempted to toss the book were it not for the author's running credentials.
I got side-tracked and never got back to RFP, maybe a year or so ago. Much of what I read sounded like a regurgitation / condensation of the ultra-list (probably back when it was one list, the 2nd time round) with all the cool stories removed. Yea, a few pages of posts can be condensed to a sentence or two, but I remember things better with stories. A Step Beyond didn't cover as many things, but it was more first person stories (aka ultralist posts). But that's just me. (I'll have to see if I can find my copy of RFP.)
When I started running / jogging, I hadn't heard the guidelines to drink however much they told you (which I think would have caused me to gag), then the hyponatremia cases seemed to hit in the early 2000s (or at least the ones we heard about) shortly after I started more structured running (2001). So it's been a good 10 yrs since people were aware of hyponatremia and its causes.
old woman w/hobby
I think that the training plans were a bit light too. Not that you bought it for the training plans.
steph
Well I was curious. I still don't think I really know the right way to train for a 100. But yes, they did look a little light to me. The "70 mpw plan" only hit 70 I think twice, and looked to average 50-odd.
Uh oh... now what?
I was thinking (burning smell) about the books I used when this ultramarathon
running thing started for me. They were mostly books about running in general
--a psych help here and there, do it yourself injury recognition and treatment,
but all were about running on pavement of some sort. Almost no mention of any
distances beyond the standard marathon.
There is one book that was good then, is good now, and will be good for a long
time to come... Tom Osler's Serious Runner's Handbook : Answers to Hundreds
of Your Running Questions, 1978, World Publications, Mt. View, CA
Whereas there are a lot of time-range marathon training plans, the widely diverse
venues of trail ultras coupled with the varying distances makes for an almost
impossible widely applicable training plan.
For a 6 - 6½ 50-mile time, do ...
For a 6½ - 7 50-mile time, do ...
If it is in
20ºF-30ºF -- add this...
30ºF-45ºF -- add this...
...
95ºF-110ºF ... why are you out there? Oh, 'cause everyone else is.
Fun to think about the variations of where we run, what we encounter (both internally
and externally), the terrain, the level of effort for the day (and when you decided what
the day was to bring), and other stuff.
rgot
Well that solves that. I was hoping to find a book or training plan with a base of 80-90 MPW topping out around 100 -110. If more I could adjust down. Maybe I'm crazy, but I can't conceive racing 100 miles with a base less than my marathon training plan...
Just find a plan -- doesn't anyone develop their own? -- and then add to the long run
to make up the mileage you think you need. If it doesn't work, revise for the next
attempt. It might take through the first and second year to find what works and then
you tweak it during the third year... after that... piece of cake (all else being equal).
I went back and looked at RFP. It's more of a light-duty training handbook, with some things coming from blogs, whereas A Step Beyond is a collection of articles from Ultrarunning, including a lot of history, which I find interesting. There's some good things in RFP, to be sure.