How to Prep for an Ultra Endurance Event
The answer that you don’t want to hear is that it depends.
It depends on your goal. It depends on your experience. It depends on your fitness. It depends on your recovery. It depends on your age. It depends on your environment. It depends on a lot, really - understanding the variable factors of ultra-endurance training is vitally important to your outcome and sense of success as you pursue to take on this challenge.
An ultra-endurance event, by definition, is a sporting activity that lasts more than 6 hours - it’s the pinnacle goal of many endurance athletes and arguably one of the toughest physical and mental challenges that a person could tackle. It’s what the rest of the world calls “crazy.”
But if you’re that type of crazy, we already like you and so we want to help you add some clarity to how to prepare yourself. Here are three simple, practical, vitally important factors to preparing for an ultra-endurance race to maximize the enjoyment of your experience as well as your success:
Learn how to breathe:
Don’t skip this over, it’s first on the list for a reason.
Most people don’t really think about their breathing. It happens naturally, so why would they? The interesting thing about our breath is that it is highly impacted by our subconscious responses to perception and environment so that without realizing it we might under-breathe, over-breathe or stop breathing altogether without ever recognizing it. This has powerful impacts on our sleep, exercise recovery, cognition, digestion and blood pressure, among other factors.
Nasal, diaphragmatic breathing has a direct impact on our parasympathetic nervous system, or the automatic “calming” responses of the body. In a particularly stressful, exhaustive or intense experience such as an ultra-endurance event, maintaining homeostasis of the autonomic nervous system is a key factor to maximizing energy output and minimizing waste - you can go stronger, longer.
There are a lot of articles and resources available to learn about breath awareness, diaphragmatic breathing and how to apply it to your training. For starters, try this:
Start your session with 5 minutes at a pace that allows you to maintain nasal breathing, only (both inhale and exhale). Even if that means dramatically decreasing your pace for now, you will be able to improve your intensity over time by strengthening your diaphragm and parasympathetic tone.
Aim to maintain continuous and rhythmic breaths throughout your training session, in particularly practicing a longer exhale than your inhale. This will allow your heart rate to remain lower. For example, if you are running: breathe in for three steps and breathe out for four.
Relax your neck and shoulders. As your body reaches a higher sympathetic (“fight or flight”) state, you will tend to tense the upper traps, chest and muscles of the neck. Consciously relaxing these muscles and keeping the upper torso loose will be helpful to better mechanisms of breathing.
Learn about yourself:
You need to make a plan - this has a lot to do with the depends factor. The idea of beginner, intermediate and advanced training protocols are usually too vague and susceptible to relativity. and skewed perception. What you need is to be self-aware of where you are at versus where you would like to be - and the discretion to evaluate all of that honestly.
Injury and failure, particularly in sporting events, usually come as the cost of overextension and a lack of properly evaluating one’s own capacity. Although your goal may be, in fact, to truly race your event and not just “to finish,” this is still a key factor to ensuring that you know when to push and when to dial it back. You don’t need to know a program, you need to know yourself.
Take some time to write down your current state, such as how many miles you can comfortably run, your average swimming pace or how many hours you feel able to endure on a bike, for example. Looking back to the value of breathing, a good measure to evaluate these “current conditions” is to consider what you are capable of doing while maintaining nasal breathing (except swimming, this would be an exception). Being honest with yourself about your state of fitness right now is important.
Knowing how many miles you’ll need to be prepared for and setting realistic, but challenging goals on the pace you’d like to maintain, set out a week-to-week plan with the time you’ve got from now until go-time. It’s that simple, and yet it’s that hard. Approach your training with a lens of increasing your understanding of yourself and you’ll dramatically shift your training experience.
Learn about your people:
No one accomplishes an ultra-endurance event truly solo. From coaches to training partners to gear techs to competitors to even event volunteers, the success of a single athlete is the reflection of their environment as much as their resolve. Knowing who “your people” are and recognizing the shared effort of your journey is important.
Who will coach you? Who will you turn to for encouragement? Who will train with you? Who will root you on? Who will give you the best advice about gear? Who will help take care of your body? Who will be at the starting or finishing lines?
Knowing that you are a part of a whole is a key to any of our greatest endeavors. Identifying the “who’s” of your experience is the first step in practicing your participation and your gratitude.
