The Flat Life

My usual training involves heaps and gobs of climbing. This fall has been starkly different. Recovery went well post-UTMB, so I enacted my “maybe this is a dumb idea but the UTMB-then-Javelina-double sounds awesome” plan. I was so fascinated at what it would be like to mold mountain legs into flat, fast, desert 100 miler legs. So here we are!

The switch from mountain running (aka power hiking with poles) to flatter trail and road running proved to be a strikingly enjoyable and effective training stimulus. My easy run pace rapidly got faster as my body adjusted to moving on flat ground. Doing workouts mostly on flat ground was a fascinating and novel task that I quite enjoyed. My heart is in the mountains, but making my brain and body figure out this new task was an absolute blast!  

I really enjoyed mixing it up from training almost all on Mt. Sentinel to exploring some local dirt roads and flatter routes. I’d practically forgotten they were there. I essentially became a gravel biker but without a bike. I also had a few weeks of travel this fall, and training for a flatter race worked very well given the topographic restraints I would have.

The biggest change I noticed was the huge drop in training time. My biggest week in this short build was 122 miles in 14:48. That is a massive difference from 120-mile weeks in 24 hours. There may be 30-35,000 feet “missing” in the training I just did, but it is fun to see how I can truly feel that difference, mostly mentally. Ten fewer hours of running a week makes it feel like I am hardly training. For instance, I’ve had time to embark on several ill-fated but enjoyable home improvement projects. I am well aware that the 14-15 hour weeks I am doing now are still quite large and are still considered higher volume training. But I just absolutely love massive weeks in the mountains, and it is remarkable to me to have a 120-mile week feel “short”. I am so appreciative of the big weeks I did this summer. Not only because they were an absolute joy, but because of the mental strength they provided me. Reflecting on this, that is a hidden benefit of the big volume. Never did I think it would be easy to wrap my head around a 120 mile as something “casually” attainable. Fun to look back at how my perception has changed over the last decade of training. I wouldn’t recommend what I do to most, but golly do I find it to be a blast.

Really looking forward to racing Javelina in just a few days! If I remember correctly, I haven’t run a “flat” ultra since Way Too Cool 50k in 2019. I am so excited about the challenge of a totally new type of 100 miler. I guess we’ll find out how I like running lap courses, too :P