Beginning to Break

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from October 1998.)

My history in ultrarunning is as undistinguished as it is ancient. It includes – all from the early 1970s – one attempt at 100 miles (ended at 70) and two aborted 50s (stopped at 35 and 40). The longest finish was a 50K, in 1970.

My memories of ultras are as good, though, as they are old. Having dabbled in these events, I’ll always appreciate the effort involved for runners who do them often and well. And I’ll always thank an ultrarunner for teaching me to walk.

Tom Osler gave all runners permission to take walking breaks, and showed us how, in his Serious Runners Handbook. I edited this book, but even earlier had experimented with the technique of breaking a big distance into small pieces.

My convincer that run/rest routine worked was a 1971 race in Rocklin, California. The distance was 100 miles, which was farther than I’d ever run in a week, and I now had just one day to finish it.

I didn’t finish but did cover 70 miles. This not only would remain the longest run of my life but also contributed heavily to my biggest week.

This ultra was on a Saturday, and the previous Sunday I’d run a marathon. Token runs on the days in between (I never skipped a day back then) boosted the week’s total 110 miles, or 30 higher than anytime before or since.

Back to the 70-mile day: I wasn’t terribly tired – or sore – at that distance. But I’d already been on the road for 14 hours, it was two o’clock in the morning, no one else was visible, and I didn’t see much point in running more laps on the 2½-mile road course.

When I told the lap-scorer of my impending dropout, he said, “What do you mean you’re quitting? You only have 30 miles to go!”

That 30 would have nearly matched my longest previous run. But even as this abbreviated “100” was a failure in one sense, it was an eye-popper in other ways. Most obviously this was double my longest non-stop distance, plus another six miles.

This longest run ever was also my first use of intentional resting along the way. The term “walk breaks” doesn’t work here, because these were full STOPS that averaged about one minute for each mile run.

In the early 1970s, I still had the misguided idea that running every step was required. So I just milled around for a few minutes during these breaks, then started exactly at the leaving-off point.

Recovery from these 70 miles was quicker than I’d ever known it after conventional runs of less than half this distance. Lost sleep was more of a problem the next day than sore feet and legs.

The running pace had held up much better than it would have in a non-stop run. It averaged about 7:30, or less than a minute per mile slower than my marathon the week before.

This experience made me a lasting believer in breaks. It led eventually, thanks to Tom Osler’s influence, to the run/walks that I now promote and practice at small fractions of ultradistances.

I never tried to clear up the unfinished business of that 100-mile race. Marathons are my upper limit now, and I’m still putting the old lessons to work in these mini-ultras.

UPDATE FROM 2014

Advancing age and declining energy conspired over the years to decrease the length of my run segments and to increase the frequency of my walk breaks. In 2013, as I turned 70, the balance finally tipped from run/walk to walk/run.

That year I took my longest pure walk ever – five hours in a Relay for Life that celebrated five years since prostate-cancer diagnosis and treatment. In 2014, I trained for and completed my first marathon as a (mostly) walker, in 6-1/2 hours.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]