In Praise of (Ultrarunning) Experience

[Editor’s Note: In October, iRunFar’s own founding editor Bryon Powell won the 2024 Ultra Gobi 250 Mile in a new course record time of 68 hours and 59 minutes. His next couple of monthly articles will likely focus on his experience at this event. Congratulations, Bryon!]

While you’ll be hearing about my run at the 2024 Ultra Gobi 250 Mile in the future with a full race report, I write now in praise of experience. What I would consider three masterful days of running on my part at this race were more than three decades in the making. In large part, I attribute that success to what myself and some of my middle-aged iRunFar team members would jokingly refer to as “old man strength” (with no gender limitation implied). So what might be some of the basis for the old man strength among normal runners, or continued success from the likes of Ludovic Pommeret and Jeff Browning as they moved into their middle or later 40s? Without pulling out any scientific papers, let’s dive into some anecdotal hypotheses.

First, a quick note to generalize this article’s applicability. I feel the benefits of endurance running experience show themselves from very early on in one’s running. Indeed, the stockpiling of experience and its benefits is fastest in the early years of one’s running. So, even if you’re a relatively new runner, think of how your experience to date already makes you a better runner … and think about the experiential gains to be had in the decades to come.

Incredible Aerobic Base

Aside from a few injury spells and a couple of seasons spent as a collegiate sprinter, I’ve been training as an endurance runner for over three decades. There have been ebbs and flows in that training over all sorts of time spans, but having watched countless endurance runners over these decades, at least low-end endurance basis tends to be quite persistent.

Surely, as one’s later 40s roll around, one’s speed is less than what it was a decade or two earlier, but, dang, that diesel locomotive sure can keep on rolling. Heck, on a few recent occasions, I’ve even surprised myself in running 5ks at paces many minutes per mile faster than anything I ever run in training. Simply, a well-laid base is an incredible foundation for continued strong running.

Using decades of aerobic base while running a high altitude road in the middle of the 2024 Ultra Gobi. Photo: Ultra Gobi

Accelerated Training Capacity

If you’ve been endurance running for a while, chances are you know the 10% rule, under which you generally shouldn’t increase your training load by roughly 10% week over week. After decades of training, its easy enough to throw that caution to the wind. Now, I’m not advocating for reckless training, but suggesting there might be a few factors that allow more experienced runners to either generally increase their training load more quickly, or more safely make huge surges in training, as I might under a Powell Push or on my recent summer vacation.

I’d put a large share of the ability to make larger leaps in training capacity down to accumulated physical adaptation. That could be structural adaptation in the form of strengthened bones, musculature, and other soft tissue. (To be sure, we also accumulate issues and injuries that could limit any ramping up in our training, too!) Then there’s that accumulated aerobic and even metabolic base that, perhaps, lets us ramp with less fatigue and form breakdown, thereby lowering the chance of injury along the way.

Lizard Head Pass after a brutal thunderstorm on Day 5 of my big late August 2024 training surge. Photo: iRunFar/Bryon Powell

Collection of Knowledge

Whether learned through personal experience or from others, we can’t help but gain knowledge over time. Here, I’m talking about discrete pieces of decision making. What, how much, and how often do you eat during a race of a certain length or under certain conditions. The same knowledge about your personal hydration. When and where do you walk versus run. How do you manage yourself in heat, cold, rain, and other external conditions. What are your personal chafe- or blister-prone points and how do you prevent, minimize, or treat those issues. What apparel systems and shoes work for you. I could go on, as these are the basic how-tos of trail running and ultrarunning, and plenty has been written about them through the years. Still, we all need to build our own reference databases over time in order to put them to use.

Good foot care … including taking off my shoes for 15 to 20 water crossings in roughly 10 kilometers, kept my feet (mostly) happy for 250 miles. Photo: iRunFar/Bryon Powell

Collection of Wisdom

Although semantic, I put wisdom on a level above knowledge. It’s strategies for accessing and implementing knowledge. It’s learning when to rely on accumulated knowledge, and when to ignore it. It’s fine tuning your balance of patience versus urgent action. It’s recognizing that you can only run your own best race, no matter what others are doing. It’s knowing that you can only run the course one section at a time. It’s recognizing that what happened earlier — whether five seconds or five hours ago — is in the past and can’t be changed. It’s feeling the entirety of the course to have a sense of trying to maintain an even effort throughout. It’s honestly assessing your current strengths and weaknesses and running in accordance with them. It’s having patience to let things unfold as they will, whether that’s in full accordance with the plan or in complete opposition.

While partially built on knowledge, when thinking of old man strength, 40-something iRunFar gear reviewer Tom Caughlan highlights “the ability to pivot when plans go awry. Missed crews and drop bags, fancy nutrition replaced with grilled cheese and bacon. Radically accepting thoughts like, ‘I’m going to be out here all night,’ and knowing, from practice, that it never keeps getting worse.” To me, this all feels like wisdom. They’re all part of the framework of putting things together on race day, especially when things go awry. Be astute. Stay calm. Be flexible. Adapt. Move on. Perhaps wisdom is strategy and knowledge is tactics. I digress.

Like knowledge noted above, wisdom factors into decision making, but there’s more sensing, feeling, and intuiting. I feel like it takes a lot longer to collect, assess, and deploy wisdom, but, at this point in my running, it feels very much like the special sauce.

I puked at Rest Point 8 … and was marveling at the sunset 15 or 30 minutes later. No need to dwell. Photo: iRunFar/Bryon Powell

Deference to Wisdom

Any runner can get caught up in racing too aggressively. They might very well know better and have even formulated a practical pre-race plan, but that can all too easily be left behind at the starting line.

From my own experience, I was eager to defer to wisdom that I’ve gained over the decades of running ultras. Go out slow. Eat early and often. Maximize enjoyment. Avoid racing early. Run your own run. Take breaks. Find friends. Solve problems. All these lessons towered over any urges to run faster, move up a position, or aim for a time until extremely late in the race.

But deference to wisdom is even broader than that. It’s trusting the process in terms of addressing hydration and fueling; preventing and addressing blisters, chafing, and sunburn; and listening acutely to your body’s feedback on niggles, energy, fatigue, and sleepiness.

Me after the race finish and probably talking about how I always looked at the 2024 Ultra Gobi as its small sections or how I didn’t race until the very end. Photo: Ultra Gobi

Mental Strategies

While certainly a subset of wisdom, accumulating mental strategies over the years is huge. Those can be strategies for getting out the door on a training run, or working through a difficult patch during a race.

For instance, while I very intentionally held music in reserve during Ultra Gobi. I played it for 30 to 40 minutes while battling sleep monsters during the final few miles to my only sleep during the race. After a rough stretch on afternoon 3, I shook it off with a brief Taylor Swift session. Finally, I pulled out music again as I tried to run my way through the last runnable stretch of the race from kilometers 345 to 371 when I realized there was no reason to conserve this tool. This was the time. I kept the tunes rolling as I passed time and kilometers during the final 25-kilometer hike up to the finish.

Over the decades, I’ve come to realize that I often need a “why” during my longer ultras. In retrospect, I had pondered my why ahead of this year’s Ultra Gobi, but maybe I’d not let them crystalize as much as I’d want in the future. Fortunately, that let me coax my why along the way. Indeed, as I sat in an aid station chair a bit defeated after that mentally frustrating part on afternoon 3, I questioned, not defeatistly but genuinely, why am I doing this. Within moments it came to me. I’m running Ultra Gobi to have an adventure. If I wanted easy, I could have stayed home and gone out on daily evening runs. I wanted to experience different conditions and different challenges. Those tough 60 or 90 minutes. They WERE adventure. They were why I was there as much or more than the easy bits along the way. I thought, “bring on more adventure!” as I headed up the hill toward the next section of the waiting-for-adventure course.

What I’ll henceforth call Shake It Off Hill. Photo: iRunFar/Bryon Powell

Knowing What You Need (Training-Wise)

I’ve always been a fan of training specificity for trail ultramarathons. Not the run on the course every day sort of specificity, but the making sure you’re prepared for the various course-specific challenges a particular race presents, be that terrain, footing, climate, or something else.

In the past, I may have overdone some aspects of the specificity training, like that time I logged a week with more than 50,000 feet of climbing before the Hardrock 100. In recent years, I feel like I’ve allowed non-specific training to become more of the norm, with merely enough training addressing specific areas to tick that particular box.

For instance, before the 2023 Hardrock 100, I got a late start on my training, with my vert training lagging even more due to a late snowpack. No problem, I knew what relatively minor amount of mountainous training would make my downhill legs bombproof, did that, and had no issues during the race.

Then, ahead of this year’s Ultra Gobi, I ran much less with a race weight or heavier pack than planned through late spring and the first half of summer. I ticked that box with a cautiously risky (read as aggressive with acceptance of the option to bail) two-week stretch that included nearly 300 miles with a 13- to 18-pound pack in my home San Juan Mountains. In all of nine days work, I knew my legs and core would be strong enough for Ultra Gobi. Sure, I ran with my lighter, race-weight pack on many of my September runs, but that felt like no effort maintenance.