The Subtle Art of Pacing, Active Recovery, and Sitting With Pain
Life is not a sprint. Life is an ultra-marathon. Here’s what I learned from running races of 60 miles and more.
In a recent (not yet published) interview for the “School for Good Living” podcast, Brilliant Miller asked me to complete the sentence “Life is like…” with anything other than “a box of chocolates.”
My response: Life is like an ultra-marathon.
I’m sure you’ve heard the adage that life is a marathon, not a sprint. A reminder to take things slow and steady.
And most people, including me, would agree: Life is indeed not a sprint. But in contrast to the proverb, I would argue that it also isn’t a marathon.
Let me elaborate.
An ultra-marathon is a running event longer than a marathon’s traditional 42.2 kilometers with common distances being 100 kilometers and 100 miles. But even longer races are held.
Almost as long as I have been running — and certainly ever since reading Christopher McDougall’s “Born to Run” — I have been fascinated by ultra-endurance events and wanted to put myself to the challenge.
So in my mid-20s, after having run a single marathon (in a not spectacular time of just under four hours), I decided that I’m done with marathon distances and should graduate to ultras.
I started ramping up my training distances and getting more serious about running. Foolishly, I also decided to give barefoot running a try at the same time and ended up with a metatarsal stress fracture — which meant three months without any running at all.
Despite that “minor” setback I eventually signed up for my first 60-mile race, the T60 Night Race, a fully self-supported run — all food and other supplies had to be carried — through the English countryside along the River Thames from just outside Oxford all the way to its source at Thames Head.
On the evening of May 10, 2014, I lined up at the start with maybe around 70 other runners and set off into the sunset.
A photo of me before the start of an ultra-marathon in 2015. It’s the same race I describe in this article, but the following year.
Here is what this race, as well as the others that were to follow it, taught me about running — and about life.
Pace Yourself for the Long Haul
Pacing is critical in any form of distance running. But for marathons and shorter events, this mainly means finding your ideal pace and running as steady as possible — maybe with a short dash toward the finish line if you can still find that energy somewhere.
If you mess up your pace, you probably won’t have a great result, but unless you get it completely wrong, you can still push through to the end and finish the race. While pacing is important in marathons, they are ultimately about raw speed.
This is not the case for ultras. If you mess up your pace, go too fast too soon, and don’t listen to your body, you are almost guaranteed to utterly crash and drop out of the race.
At the beginning of most races, I always fell back to the very end of the field. But from about halfway, past the marathon point, I’d start reeling people back in.
There is something extremely crushing about suffering and crawling along after many hours of running and suddenly having a seemingly much fresher runner come out of nowhere and overtake you. Playing these mind games was a favorite of mine, and my deliberate pacing allowed me to do that.
Most ultra events have several checkpoints along the way that have to be reached in certain split times, and these are where runners get assessed as to whether they are still physically and mentally fit enough to continue. These checkpoints also often feature hot drinks and warming blankets for those who decide to drop out. And by the time I’d make it through many checkpoints, they were often already littered with crestfallen runners whose broken bodies and spirits gave in to these temptations and made them quit.
Many of these runners had either overestimated their pace or not listened to their body and their environment, failing to adjust when circumstances changed.
As a result, they burned out and dropped out.
Life Lesson #1: Pace yourself. Don’t rush ahead just because everyone around you seems to be going faster than you. Adjust to how you feel and what the changing circumstances require. Trust in the fact that a slow pace that you can sustain indefinitely will eventually get you as far as you want to go. But go too fast, and you’ll crash and end your journey prematurely.
Embrace Cycles of Effort and Recovery
We all want to do everything fast and immediate. We’re all busy all the time — and if we aren’t we feel like we are doing something wrong, missing out on life’s opportunities. But over the long term — the distance of an ultra-marathon or the duration of a lifetime — the best way to get things fast is to approach them slowly.
However, there is more to pacing than simply not going too fast.
Marathon runners often aim for a steady pace and try to sustain this throughout a race. I also aimed for a steady hourly pace during my ultras, but at the micro-level, I approached pacing in cycles.
From the very beginning of any race, I followed a very regular 30-minute rhythm: 25 minutes of running followed by five minutes of walking.
In this way, I would consciously build-in recovery long before I felt any need to recover.
This is key to ultra-running.
The goal is sustainability.
In a marathon, you are constantly depleting your stored energy hoping to come to the finish as close to empty as possible. But your body simply can’t store enough energy to last for ultra distances.
As an ultra runner, you have to learn to recover on the go, aiming to build in cycles of rest and replenishment that allow you to sustain the effort almost indefinitely.
Life Lesson #2: Embrace cycles of effort and recovery. Make sure you schedule enough time off to keep a comfortable balance that’s sustainable indefinitely. Complement and balance your work ethic with an equally strong rest ethic.Don’t wait to rest until you feel like you need it. By that time it might be too late.
Develop a Keen Awareness of How You Feel
Good ultra runners know that if you feel hungry, thirsty, or in too much pain, you probably already waited way too long to take action. You need to constantly listen to your body and anticipate and prioritize your well-being before problems manifest. You might sacrifice a bit of time in the short-term, but you’ll more than make up for it in the long run.
My five minutes of walking in every cycle were not only a way to give my muscles a regular break—I also used them to make sure I’d eat and drink and to check in with my body (and mind) and see if there were any early warning signals of something potentially causing trouble in the near future.
In a marathon, you can push through depletion. That same approach will fail miserably in an ultra.
You have to take care of yourself before problems really manifest, or you won’t finish.
Life Lesson #3: Develop a keen awareness of how you feel and address problems early on before they spiral out of control — ideally before they appear at all. Focusing on mental and physical wellbeing should not be done as a fix but as a constant process of introspection and preemptive self-care.
Leave Some Energy Reserves
Especially in 2020, anxiety and burnout have taken the spotlight. But burnout doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s a process, and it has clear warning signals. Unfortunately, we are often too busy and lack the awareness to notice them and take action before the real problems start to develop.
Many of us operate too close to our breaking points. Add to that any number of inevitable unforeseen events and things can quickly get out of hand.
That first race I ran was a night race and we had to use maps to navigate. You’d think it would be pretty easy to just run along a river, but as you get closer to the source of the Thames, it becomes less and less obvious where the river actually is and where you should be running.
About two thirds into the race, probably at around 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., with my body screaming and my mind depleted, I made a mistake. I came to a fork in the path and chose the wrong direction.
Well over 30 minutes of running (and walking) later, another runner came toward me. I was confident and told them they were going the wrong way. But my confidence turned into confusion as I looked around me, letting the beam of my headlamp illuminate my surroundings. I realized I had been there before.
Turns out I had run a loop and was now heading back in the opposite direction. After the race I would realize from the logs on my running watch that I had run an extra nine miles, turning my first ultra into a 69-mile race…
I mentioned above that ultras tend to have cutoff times at their checkpoints. I quickly realized that, given my mistake, I wouldn’t make it to the next checkpoint in time if I stuck with my pre-planned pace and would be disqualified.
What ensued was a mad dash for the next hour or so.
I was worried about burning out and crashing even if I made it to the checkpoint in time, but luckily I had left enough energy reserves to not only get there in time, but also continue on and finish the race — still making it to 13th place in a time of 14 hours and 33 min (I would return the following year to make up for the mistake, cut two hours off my time, and finish in fifth place).
Life Lesson #4: Leave some energy reserves. Shit will eventually happen, and when it does, you better not already be at 100% capacity, or it will break you.
Mental Health Is As Important as Physical Health
Having a strong mind and good self-awareness is critical for this.
The winner of a marathon is usually the runner who is physically in the best shape. The peak age tends to be around 30, and men perform considerably better than women.
But in ultras, the playing field is leveled. Women compete almost equally with men, and the average age of participants—as well as of race winners—is considerably higher.
You do need a minimum fitness level to finish an ultra, but what really determines races is mental toughness and keeping your thoughts and feelings under control.
When I learned that I had taken a wrong turn, I could have given up — and I was certainly contemplating that idea. I was tired, I was angry, I was in pain.
But I pushed through. Not because I felt physically strong, but because my mind was strong and set on the goal.
Life Lesson #5: Mental health is at least as important as physical health.Physical exercise and working with a trainer is not only common but celebrated. But talking about mental health or admitting to seeing a coach, counselor, or therapist, unfortunately for many people still has a stigma associated with it. But if the mind is in disorder, our physical shape can be as good as we want, and we’ll still be miserable. Peak performance starts from taking care of our mind.
Become Comfortable with Pain
It is hard to convey the extreme range of emotions you go through when running an ultra marathon. The highs are high, and the lows are very, very low.
Especially running at night, pushing through mental and physical fatigue can be brutal. Our worst demons come out, and we start to question our entire existence. The YouTube video “Darkness: how ultrarunning can strip away our emotional barriers” — which I’ve watched many times in anticipation of races or long training runs — talks about this with wonderful eloquence.
My counselor has told me on many occasions to sit with any uncomfortable feeling and examine its physical sensations. As I write this, I realize that never (except maybe under the influence of certain substances) have I done this more than during the long hours of ultra running.
When you are out there by yourself for many hours with nothing to distract your mind from looking inward, a lot of the defenses we usually build up within ourselves just fall away, and everything that’s hidden underneath comes rushing to the surface.
It can be painful, but it leads to growth. Or — if ignored — to disaster.
Similarly, you are pretty much guaranteed to suffer from physical pain during an ultra. Some runners jokingly call Ibuprofen “Vitamin I” and gobble it up like gummy bears during a race.
There are times for this, and I’ve certainly been guilty of going through a fair amount of painkillers myself, but if you can embrace the pain early on, rather than ignore it, you can also address it.
Bad ultra runners suppress the pain and suffering and let it subconsciously drain and destroy them. Good ultra runners embrace it and use it as fuel.
Life Lesson #6: Become comfortable with pain, and sit with it. We often suppress emotional pain and ignore physical pain, but in many cases that just makes them worse. Checking in with our true feelings and actually allowing ourselves to experience them is the only way to fix the underlying issue.
Don’t Always Go at Things by Yourself
Pain also gets easier to handle if you share it with others.
When I got lost in my first ultra, I actually wasn’t alone. At that stage of the race, I had teamed up with two other runners who shared a similar pace. And we all made the same mistake.
Had I been alone when the detour became apparent, there’s a good chance I would have just decided to quit. But the support of the group, the motivation we gave each other, made us push onward and recover from our mistake.
Also, while ultra running is mostly a very solitary pursuit, most longer ultras actually allow for support teams and pacers — other runners that accompany the competitor for a portion of the race.
Pacers motivate you with positive feedback, make sure you don’t forget to eat and stay hydrated, and — especially during the later stages of a long race — act as the runner’s brain as they slip into mental fatigue, hallucinations, and delirium.
Without the support of others — whether a personal support team or fellow runners in the race — ultras would be A LOT harder.
Life Lesson #7: Don’t always go at things by yourself. Build a support team. Let others catch and motivate you when things go bad, and celebrate together when things go well.
Photo of me at the finish of an ultra-marathon in 2015. Extremely tired after almost 13 hours of running, but also extremely happy, enjoying the moment with two fellow runners.
While I currently don’t run ultra distances anymore — partly because I started aiming for a more balanced exercise routine, partly because I got lazy — the lessons I learned from training for and running ultras are still with me today.
Even if you are not a runner, I hope you can find them applicable in your own life as well.
Just remember: Life is not a sprint. Life is an ultra-marathon.