My path to 'ultra'

I'm conducting an experiment. On 8 December 2018 I plan to run 50km, and I want to see if I can do it in under 6 hours.  If I'm being honest, I don't think it will be that difficult a goal to achieve, but I don't think I'm setting the bar low either. After all, if all goes to plan, it will be my first 'ultra'.

I didn't want to keep this a secret this time (see my previous post, 'My Secret Marathon'), but at the same time, I probably wouldn't have been able to keep it a secret even if I tried! Because all my runs are posted to Strava, and clearly something's up when you start doing 20 mile runs on Sundays!

My plan is to incorporate both walking and eating into the race itself, which will be one of those repetitive-segment-along-the-river-style races put on by Saturn (the last one I did was a Phoenix event). The way Saturn sets it up is that they give you six hours to run back and forth just over 5km per segment, repeated 8 times for a total of 42.4km by the end.

But they let you keep running for whatever distance you want up until a 6-hour cutoff. I will go for 31miles/50km which means I need to do another couple of segments (i.e. at least one more back-and-forth). If I incorporate a walking break after every back&forth section (or after every individual section later in the race), and if I continually provide my body with nutrition through the whole time, especially from early in the race to its mid-way point, this, as mentioned above, is a very achievable goal.

And if I'm successful what will it prove? It will prove to myself that I can do it; it will prove to myself that I don't have to hit a 'wall' if I don't want to; it will prove that bigger things are possible, and that I can keep pushing myself towards big goals that don't kill me, but make me much stronger, both physically and mentally.

This is part of my continued strategy of reading into the literature (my mental game as I described in my previous post) as deeply as possible to develop theories that I can then test on myself in the field.  I will be 49 years old in a month, and I want to see what I can do now, and what I can do in the next decade.  There will clearly be a trade-off between continued improvements in fitness against the erosions of age, and for now I think the former will be winning.

The 'ultra' may be just the solution as well, as I've noticed lots of books out there on runners taking on big long-distance challenges, and some these athletes' age does not seem to be a limiting factor; on the contrary it might make the crucial factor accounting, in some cases, for both taking the initiative in the first place (because time is running out) and for ultimate 'ultra' success.

This points to a larger, long-term theory to test (in part on myself of course): that hard-won lessons of age might account for some of the mental fortitude required to see through multiple day/week/month-long 'ultra' running challenges. My hypothesis is that for a certain fraction of the population the fact of age introduces an imperative to the idea of a long running challenge, because not only is time running out, but also because hard-won life experience can be put to the test.