Episode 475: Are Multiday Ultramarathons Soft?

The sport of ultramarathon is growing! With that, we have much more exposure to the wide range of events that fall within the ultra category. With growth, we see increased competitive pressure, but not always in a uniform manner. Let’s discuss what this means for the different disciplines within ultramarathon, and what we will likely see in the coming years.

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Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro Clip

0:01:10 Podcast Intro + Listener Raffle, Coaching, and Sponsor Deals

0:02:40 Today’s Topic: Competitive Pressure in Ultra Running

0:03:49 From 2010 to Now: Ultra Running’s Media Boom & Identity Shift

0:07:08 Defining Competitive Pressure (and Why It Speeds Everyone Up)

0:07:46 Signs of a Mature Sport: Best Practices Get Clearer

0:10:17 Tighter Error Margins & Closer Finishes (Western States Example)

0:12:38 Pacing Evolves: Winning Strategies Trend Toward Even Splits

0:14:12 No More “One Superpower”: You Must Be Good at Every Key Variable

0:15:41 Resources: How the Pros Create Better Playbooks for All

0:18:41 The Ultra “Umbrella”: Why Comparing 50Ks to 200s Gets Messy

0:20:53 Case Study—Kilian’s 200-Mile Trailblazing & the Respect Factor

0:25:52 Speed Goggles, Sleep Deprivation, and Durability in Multi-Day Events

0:29:16 Where the Sport Is Headed: From Big Leaps to Marginal Gains + Wrap-Up

0:30:55 Final Thanks, Subscribe/Share, and Sponsor Mentions

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Alright everyone. Welcome back to another episode for this one. I have a topic based solo episode for you, and this is one I've been thinking about quite a bit the last couple months and it keeps getting reignited in my mind when I see different topics and conversations occur online around ultra running around the media and social media and things like that.

And the topic is centered around competitive pressure. And what competitive pressure means for the sport, what it looks like in the sport, and what we as runners can learn from the competitive pressure as it occurs to help us get to the finish line quicker, more efficiently even if we're not trying to compete at the front of the pack.

So I think there's a lot of interesting learning points and accelerators within a sport when you apply competitive pressure that applies to everyone, whether they're. Finishing in the front of fields, the middle of fields or the back of fields. So I think this is an important one to stay on top of over the [00:01:00] next few years as the sport continues to grow and continues to offer these things for us.

But with it comes a lot of interesting conversation points and. It's actually funny to me because when I first remember getting into ultra running my first ultras back in 2010, so at this point I'm basically ancient within the modern ultra running growth spurt, but back then it was a lot of people in the sport striving for recognition within the running sport.

At least still on the top end of the field where it was like, we've got this sport that's still running. But it's different enough from the road running and the Olympic distance stuff that people, I don't know if they really knew what to do with it. I think there was probably a sense within ultra running to some degree, it's these, these marathoners quote unquote think that we're lesser than, or that we're like a spot you land after you've fully explored the marathon and things like that.

Fast forward to today, and we have people not only bypassing marathon [00:02:00] careers or. Jumping out of what were otherwise very successful marathon careers while they're still in their peak and doing ultra marathons. So we've got this climate now where we've got our own media, multiple forms of media within the sport.

So we're not relying upon the greater running media to cover us. We have our own kind of personalities and brands within the sport that are specific to ultra running and really make that their priority, which just gives us a little bit more of a. Of a community of our own that is independent, or self can be self-reliant, self-sufficient when it comes to all the things that go into offering people opportunities to follow the sport, be a fan of the sport, compete in the sport, all the resources that are required for people to treat the sport as a profession, whether that be as an athlete or as a media personality or something like that.

And. I think that just what ends up doing is it ends up creating an environment where now we're not having [00:03:00] these like discussion points about or we're not having as many of these discussion points about what would happen if these Olympic athletes would come into ultra running. We're actually asking ourselves what would happen if the best a hundred milers in the world would move into the 200 milers, or if the fastest people in the sport from a, just an efficiency standpoint, like high Vo O2 max.

Incredible paces at the thresholds and things like that would start doing things like the backyard ultras instead of 50 ks, 50 milers, a hundred milers, and things like that. And I think those are all interesting questions to ask, but I also think they are things that we wanna make sure we're mindful of as we go through them.

Because as a sport grows, there's also layers that we are stacking on top of each other that require us to recognize that in order for some of those top layers. That is currently being built within the sport. There are also these base layers of trailblazers that did a lot of learning, a lot of trial and error, made a lot of mistakes in their best races in order to give us [00:04:00] information that we have today to not make those same mistakes be more efficient on race day and get to the finish line quicker despite us not necessarily maybe being quote unquote, a better athlete or better at that specific discipline.

We just have better resources, better information, better practices and things like that. And I think that's all. Can be explained more specifically or digested more, more cleanly when we see these conversations. If we think of it through the lens of competitive pressure. So first I just want to jump in to what competitive pressure really actually means for a sport, and share some signs of what that looks like.

So competitive pressure is pretty self-explanatory in the sense that it's okay, we've got. Way more people in this sport. And because we have way more people in the sport, we've got just higher numbers of talent. And that higher numbers of talent when put together are going to compete amongst each other, and that competition is gonna yield the [00:05:00] best available options, strategies, and the fastest potential outcome over time.

So signs of that sort of process, getting closer to the point where we're not. Taking big chunks off of records anymore, but we're looking at marginal improvements is things like less uncertainty about best practices. So what I mean by that is when you think of a new sport or a sport that's been unexplored.

There's sometimes not even a position statement on best practice because we have really no data that we can specifically apply to it. Or if there is a lot of it's extrapolated forward from a different sport into our, into that new sport because there's some variables that make sense in our comparable, but as a sport grows and gets its own research, its own interest, it's the enough money and resources pushed in to try to solve this problem.

We end up with less uncertainty about what the best approach is in a certain [00:06:00] situation, and a lot of that is teased out through competitive pressure. And the way I like to describe this is if we have someone winning the best race, the most competitive race in the world for say a hundred mile distance by 45 minutes, that person, the number of mistakes they may have made before that becomes consequential is pretty large actually, versus a scenario where.

The expectation is if I win this race, it's gonna be by a couple minutes. If that's the case, it's a lot harder for us to look at that and think of it through the lens of, okay, they made compromises here and they just got away with it. They probably didn't. When we start getting these really competitively pressurized events where 20, 30 people could potentially win or end up on the podium, out of that.

What ends up often determining the top people, the people who executed the best and leveraged the best practices, the most efficiently, the most successfully. So the cream of the crop or [00:07:00] the cream rises to the top, so to speak, with competitive pressure when it comes to best practices.

And with a sport like ultra marathon where there's tons of variables that can influence whether you finish within a certain timeframe or another, or where you end up landing in the field. Having more certainty around what to do around these variables becomes really important because it's just gonna yield fewer mistakes on race day, and those fewer mistakes are gonna result in faster times across the board.

So that's one sign to start looking for, like more clarity amongst best practice, less debate and argument around what is best in this certain situation. Another's error margins become very tight, the way I like to look at this one is similar to what I was talking about before. If we have a race and there's a person in that field who we all know is head and shoulders above everyone else, that person might not, might have a lot of errors, there might be a lot of opportunities to make a mistake, learn from it, and adapt.

And it becomes the rhetoric around these types of sports [00:08:00] oftentimes are like. They were really good at problem solving or they solved their problem and didn't give up, and they found that solution. So what that tells me is there's a lot of trial and error still going on, which there's a lot of lack of best practice oftentimes in those cases because if there was, it would, we just probably wouldn't be seeing those stories on the top of the field.

And then the error margin becomes big. So if you do make a mistake, if something does happen, it's not so and so won Western states, and they had to do it while tolerating this big gut issue from mile 70 to mile 80. You won't see that because if you have a big gut issue from 70 to 80, you're not winning the race any longer because there's gonna be somebody who's executed on all the other variables, including that one to a high enough degree, where now they're gonna be on the top of that podium for that particular race because of that.

So we see these air margins becoming very tight, or mistakes essentially becoming more consequential. Another one that kind of feeds into that is the finishes are very tight. So we just don't see those situations where big iconic [00:09:00] events or fixture point events are finished with large margins of victory or big spreads amongst the top, the podium or the top 10 and things like that.

And a good example of this, this process occurring right in front of us right now is Western states where. This last year, I think the top three men were within 12 minutes of one another. And we've seen that top 10 over the last few years start to consolidate into a tighter window of time.

There's still plenty of growth left at Western states for that to continue to a degree where I think when we hit peak competitive pressure on an event like Western States, assuming it remains near the top of the races, where the elites tend to go for a hundred mile distance.

I think we see scenarios where we've got the top 10 people finishing within 20 minutes or something like that. Or the top three people all within minutes of one another coming through that last aid station. So it really just gets something where those finishing margins are super tight at the end.

So that's another sign as we see those things heading that way. Another one is the winning [00:10:00] paces skew closer to even. So this is a conversation that's been around ultra running for as long as I can remember, and it was this idea of, okay, these are long races. There's a certain amount of fatigue that's inevitable, so you should bank some time and assume a positive split, like the best possible performance for you is gonna be some version of a positive split.

I don't think that's the case. I think you can probably run your best race and have a positive split, but I think the margin is gonna be really tight. I think we're talking about a couple percentage points on either side of even is optimal. When we start seeing more competitive pressure, or competitive pressure starting to peak, we're gonna see winning paces skewing closer to even.

We're not gonna see these scenarios where someone has a 10% positive split and still won the big race. We'll probably all see that in lesser competitive events and things like that. But if you're talking about the big ones like Western states, UTMB even when we get into other things like world records or.

Stuff like that. National championships, [00:11:00] world championships, I think at that point we're gonna start seeing like that in, in order to win the race, the blueprint on your pacing is gonna be a couple percentage points on either side of even. And it's gonna be less likely that there's someone who can assume the problems that occur from going out too fast.

And I think that's just been something we've seen in pretty much every endurance event outside of ultra marathoning. So I think it'd be odd for us to assume that would be unique to this sport. Versus it being something that just will correct itself over time as we get more competitive pressure into the sport itself.

So watch for that. Another thing is that important variables cannot be easily outweighed by the strengths of others. So the way I like to describe this one is if we took, say, a specific ultra marathon, let's just say like the 200 milers, and we came up with the five most important variables that you need to be really good at in order to be successful at it.

As we see more competitive pressure enter those, we're gonna see less variance amongst how those [00:12:00] things were, how those important variables are executed. And we're also gonna see less ability to be bad at one of them is maybe the easiest way to say it. You're gonna have to be relatively strong at all of them.

And if you have one that is noticeably weak. Then you won't be able to overcome it by being exceptionally strong in the other ones or in one of the other ones. And that's just gonna be because your competition isn't gonna have a big enough weakness for you to overshadow some of those other important variables by being really strong in one and weaken others.

So if you think of it through the lens of maybe like a video game character or something like that where they have these like. These bars are like different abilities and you can over time max them out and you won't have a scenario where you can max out one of those areas and leave the others low and be successful.

You're gonna have to be reasonably good at all of them in order to be successful and win these races. So that's like the competitive pressure [00:13:00] sign of things. And the reason why this is all important is because in order for us. To get to that point and continue to grow. At this point, the way we've seen in some of the more competitive parts of the sport is you really just need a lot of resources applied.

To the sport itself. So we have the opportunities to learn these thoroughly. And the best way we're gonna learn these thoroughly is by giving the professionals in these disciplines the opportunities to really learn and explore through it, which oftentimes comes through the professionalization 'cause now they're gonna have access to more time to train, more time to recover, more time to actually explore these topics versus doing the best they can and maybe leaving something on the table.

More opportunities to work with other professionals that are. It contributes to some of these important areas like coaching, nutrition, hydration recovery and things like that. So you dump all that resources and all that, that the opportunity on these top tier runners in these [00:14:00] disciplines, it pushes fast forward on that learning process with respect to how powerful different approaches are or what compromises different approaches are gonna maybe present and we get a more clear answer.

Like less disputable best practices, and that helps everybody because then if you're somebody new to the sport or you're just someone who's been in the sport and you're trying to learn more and you're trying to finish, say, somewhere in the middle of the pack, and you want to figure out like what should I do here?

It's gonna be less of there's this option, that option, this option. You just play it around and figure out what works best for you. It's gonna be more like. Here's the best starting point. The only reason we debate from this is if we see this, that and the other thing, and then it's just a lot more actionable.

It's a lot more quick, it's a lot more direct, and people are doing less trial and error or trial and error and they're doing less individual self-exploration too. Have to or to get to where they're trying to get with that stuff. So I think that feeds into the success for everybody. In terms of just having us having a stronger learning base essentially, [00:15:00] or education base in order to lean on.

So where I think this oftentimes becomes a point of tension within the ultra world now, or in the media circle and things like that, is since the sport has this massive umbrella over it, where we have this thing where we've got like 50 Ks and then we've got these massive projects that can expand to his granddad.

Something like Pete Knick running across the country for 3000 miles and 42 days. And then everything in between. So as the sport grows, there's just compared to other sports, a really wide range of things within it. And since that's wide, we have skewed the different variables and their importance.

An example of this would be like, let's just take running efficiency. Running efficiency is, there's a very high bar that you need to clear with running efficiency to be competitive on the marathon circuit because that [00:16:00] variable is so important. You have to be near the very, very tip of the spear just to get your foot in the door.

And then once you get your foot in the door, you also have to be good at other things in order to compete with the best in the world. With ultra running, I do think we still see that. But we see it a lot more on those shorter events that don't have sleep deprivation variables or the nutrition variable is there, but not as consequential because it's not spanning over multiple days.

Durability isn't as big of an issue. It's still an issue, but it's not as big of an issue. 'cause even someone who's maybe a little shaky on durability can probably find a way to get to the finish line of a race that takes half a day versus, a race that maybe takes five, six days. We've got this massive umbrella covering these events, and we have these variables that are probably important for most of them.

The one that maybe stands out the most as not being important for all of them is the sleep deprivation side of one. So that's maybe a unique one that skews towards the multi-day that is just really not that present within the [00:17:00] single day ultra side of things. But we have this sort of thing where it's easy to pick one of those variables and fixate on it and then think okay.

Some person has this attribute, we could apply them to any other spot of the sport and it's just, boom, they're dominating. So some examples of this one of my favorite stories from last year is Killian Kuth. So The Killing Kith was on the podcast recently, I think it was episode 4 62, if I'm not mistaken.

The reason killing is so interesting to me is because at this time last year. He was very unrecognized, unrecognized in the sport, like people just the greater sport, the media cycle and things. They weren't talking about Killian, and that's nothing against Killian. He just hadn't been dominating the sport the way he did last year in a way where they, he was gonna get on a lot of their radars.

Killian was still a very incredible resource at the time, but like a lot of resources, if there's not a spotlight on them, they don't get distributed to as many people. This is one of the reasons why I think killing is so [00:18:00] fascinating because part of who he is this person who is a problem solver.

He is a real, authentic individual in the sense that he sees these 200 miles as a passion that is innate to him, that he really wants to solve and he really wants to optimize for, and the fame and the money and the, that side, the professionalization side of the sport. It came second to him with respect to where he put his energies.

And we saw that I think last year when he went from doing those things basically out of pocket where I'm sure whatever killing that was spending last year to do all three of the Triple Crown 200 milers and win them and break that record, probably cost him a lot more money than he made doing it.

And then when you look at the opportunity cost of what it probably took for him to be able to. Do those things with a job and kind of a career and everything that goes into just making it through life. I'm sure it was a net loss [00:19:00] financially for him to do that. But because these 200 milers have now gotten a lot more attention from live streaming, brand building within the sport, 'cause we've got these really unique characters inside the 200 milers that have opened up the door essentially to them.

Their experience with it. And then we got a lot of people who are interested in doing it themselves. So they're looking at these people as trailblazers or people to learn from. So we get, like the Mike McKnights, the worlds, the Rachel Kins, the Killing Courts they're all like doing a lot of this trailblazing and putting this first layer of problem solving down so that over the next few years we can put more layers on top of what they learned.

What we can and can't do and what we should and shouldn't do. And then another layer on that, another layer on that. And then once we start stacking those layers, that's how we get the competitive pressure to the degree where these problems are a lot more easy to answer. So the conversation point then becomes killing one, all these 200 milers, [00:20:00] he's the triple crown of two hundreds now he's signing brand deals.

Now he. Has his own personal brand. His social media has blown up. He's got a successful coaching business now. He's very much a professional within the sport, whereas at this point last year, that probably wasn't an option for him. And I think it's easy for us to think these 200 milers, they're not as competitive, they're not as deep as, say the hundred milers, the western states of the world, the Utm Bs of the world.

Or we ask this question like Killian wouldn't do well at Western States, or Killian wouldn't do well at UTMB, therefore those runners are better than him. And there is this little echo of jealousy or maybe just Hey, why are we giving this guy attention?

Just wait till the big guns come to that. And I think it's one of those things where we can't fault someone like Killian, someone like Rachel King or Mike McKnight for being trailblazers. Because for one, they're taking a tremendous amount of risk to do the [00:21:00] hard learning, to do the trial and error learning and lay that first foundation that we're gonna build off of.

So I have no doubt that in 10 years, when we look at the finishing times of all the 200 milers that guys like Killian are currently setting course records at, those will be overshadowed by a large margin. But it's not necessarily gonna be because Killian isn't as good as them, or Killian is a lesser athlete than them.

It's gonna be, a lot of it will be because we've layered more and more learnings on top of what those guys, first guys, and gals first blazed into, to that process. And if we look at it from another lens of just okay, what if the best a hundred milers in the world just. Overnight went into these 200 milers, would they dominate it?

And that's a fun hypothetical question, but I also think we need to be careful when we have that conversation too, not to be disrespectful to the guys and the gals who are doing really well on those days. Because even if we did take the top hundred milers in the world and put them [00:22:00] into these 200 milers and they ended up dominating, they'd still be learning to a large degree.

What. Guys like Killian, Rachel Rakin, Mike McKnight have taught us over the last few years as that discipline's gotten popular enough for them to even care about it. I think there's a lot of that. And there's also what I was talking about before where we gotta be careful not to wear our speed goggles.

I'll call 'em those speed goggles with respect to some of these multi days because I think that will be an important variable. I think we'll eventually find a spot where there's a point where if you're not above this, you probably won't compete 'cause you're. That skillset isn't developed enough to be able to account for all the other variables, or the other variables aren't strong enough to account for a deficit there.

But I do think as we get further along, that number comes down, say like a 50 mile or a hundred mile, that speed is a little bit higher because of the shorter nature of that event. Whereas in some of these multi-day. [00:23:00] I think it's still gonna be important, but it's probably not gonna be as important as it is in those other ones.

'cause now all of a sudden we have other variables that are catching up in weight and also a lowering of what is actually required to still keep up for the paces that the human body are able to tolerate for these multi-day type things. And then you also have who knows what other variables will pop up as being really powerful within that side of the sport too, where it could be something where we have people.

Who just gets by with no problem, no immediate problems anyway, on four or five hours of sleep per night. Whereas if you applied that to me, I would be done in a couple of weeks. Like I would be out of training in a couple of weeks if I had to go off four to five hours of sleep per night. And so maybe that means that I have a relative weakness these past few days. Someone who can get away with four to five hours of sleep per night would have a relative strength over me.

And because of that, now all of a sudden they're able to get through this multi-day event with much less sleep than I am and still stay [00:24:00] moving. And they have a better pace. So even though maybe I would be faster than them, I would be slower than them in these longer races because that variable of sleep deprivation would be powerful enough in favor of them, where they're just out there moving more frequently than I am.

I think things like that are worth considering. Another interesting one is durability. Durability, I think is gonna become more of an important variable, and I don't mean durability in the sense that how well can you tolerate the sore legs from miles 80 to a hundred and a hundred miles? I'm talking about when you're in a race, like a backyard Ultra, and we're coming up on the current world record of nearly five days or nearly 500 miles, is your body even workable at that point?

Have you shattered your ankle to such a degree where you could be a sub 13 minute 5K guy and you'd be rendered useless because you can't even put weight on that body part any longer. That's another variable I think is gonna get more and [00:25:00] more interesting for these really long ones that are just not a variable we really consider with the shorter side of ultra marathon.

It's definitely part of it, but it's not something that is. I think a unique attribute to such a large degree can't be overcome by the majority of the top talent. I think that one might be something where we see it inside the best of that discipline. They've got this predisposition to being really able to not break down and not acquire too many injuries that are really problematic to the degree where they can't make it around that loop again in under an hour.

And that's gonna stand out as a limiter for other people that otherwise would maybe be really good at that event. So again, when we get more competitive pressure, continue to see more competitive pressure with these multi-day, I think we start. Getting more clarity around how important those variables are, and we start getting a little bit less guessing as to what's gonna work best in certain situations, similar to what we see with the marathon today, or the Tour de France, or all these Olympic [00:26:00] sports.

Really in those sports at this point, unless there's some new innovation like a new invention, like the super shoes. Or something like maybe bicarb or something like that, or the vehicle in which bicarb is delivered, which is the new part of that. Or just learning better practices with gut training in order to be able to tolerate higher amounts of carbohydrate per hour.

I think outside of innovations like that, we just don't see that those sports make drastic jumps forward any longer because we've really identified the physiological components. Of what's required to be like top tier humans, I guess inside those sports. And now it's all about all the things that kind of go into it.

Like the pro, the best training protocol, the best nutrition protocol and everything that can come along that's new that will move the sport forward and things like that. So we're not there yet in ultra running, even in the most competitive side of the sport. So it'll be fun for us to continue to have new people come into it, people coming in with unique skill sets and things that kind of stand out in terms of.

[00:27:00] Performance attributes and push the sport forward. But eventually we'll get to that same point like that the marathon is, the Tour de France is. A lot of these Olympic sports are where it's more about us just fine tuning proper execution and what's the next great thing that kind of comes in and moves the sport forward, independent of the actual individuals within it.

That's what I got for this one. If you have any questions about this, any feedback or anything like that, please feel free to shoot me a note. I would love to hear from you. And if you've got any ideas about future episodes you'd like me to cover from a topic based standpoint, feel free to send me those as well.

And also, if you enjoyed this episode, please go ahead, subscribe, share it with your friends and followers and things like that. It really helps me continue to grow the podcast and lets me know that you're out there enjoying it. So thank you.