Lockdown has inspired many people to start running. With the gyms closed, no team sports allowed, and lots of sunshine, many people took to their feet. Running is one of the most accessible and affordable sports out there. All you needs is a pair of shoes (not even these in some cultures) and to walk out your door.
One of the members of my local gym, Matt, used to spin with me but during lockdown, he started lifting more weights at home and invested in a Peloton bike (but that is another blog post). He also started running. Even before lockdown, Matt had started watching YouTube videos about ultras and learned the names of all the big runners (see below). I kept joking with him that he was going to run an ultra soon, and he always denied it was going to happen.
And then it did.
Over the next three weeks, read about Matt’s first race experience- a 4x4x48 challenge. He voluntarily ran four miles every four hours for 48 hours, totally 48 miles (he didn’t even want a medal for it). In this series, Matt explains how he trained, and what happened on Day 1 and Day 2.
Prep work- 6 weeks out
For a couple of years, me and my friend Ben have been growing more inspired by endurance athletes. I am in awe of what some people can achieve; whether it’s Courtney Dauwalter winning the Moab 240 (238 mile race through the Moab desert), beating all of the men, or Jim Walmsley breaking the Western States 100 course record two years in a row or Zach Bitter running 100m in 11 hrs 19m (that’s an average pace of 6.48 per mile /4.14 per km).
Another who falls into that category is David Goggins; an ex-Navy seal, Delta Force, US ranger and ultra runner who has a reputation for being a savage. I have listened to several podcasts in which he talks about his approach to callusing his mind and pushing through pain – he is genuinely so inspiring. When the world entered lockdown due to Covid-19, he set everyone a challenge: run 4 miles, every 4 hours for 48 hours!
Ben immediately asked me if I wanted to give it a go, but on first thought I dismissed it straight away as being crazy. However, over the next two weeks I thought about it a bit more and started to convince myself that it could be doable. I was running four 5km runs per week and had been focusing more on trying to run fast but figured with 4.5 weeks training I could up the mileage a bit and give it a good go. So we took the plunge and set a date, 25 – 27 June.
Training
4.5 weeks didn’t feel that long to prepare and it was difficult to know the best way to approach it. There isn’t a lot of advice out there on how to train for such a specific challenge, so I decided to go with a combination of increased mileage (to prepare my legs for the total distance) and multiple shorter runs (to replicate the need to run every 4 hours). Broadly this was structured as 2 weeks of 10-12k runs, a week of 2 a day 6.5k runs, a triple and then just less than a week of rest.
Going from approximately 20k per week to almost 45k per week was probably too much, too quickly and as I trained for the challenge I started to feel a recurring soreness in my right hip. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was but it could have been some tendinitis. Regardless of what it was, I just hoped that when I rested for several days then it would sort itself out (which luckily it did).
I enjoyed the training and having something to train for made a really nice change to just exercising for the sake of it. Doing 2 a day 6.5k runs was not particularly difficult and even the day I ran three times wasn’t too difficult. What I learned was that it was going to be important to warm up properly and stretch to avoid injury.
Thanks again to Matt for sharing some of his story. Check back next week for how Day 1 went.
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