I tried to run an Ultra Marathon...without training for it.

this is stupid why do you really want to do this this is nuts there's no one here just in a [Music] field the plan was never to make one of those rather silly videos where you celebrate the fact that you didn't bother preparing for whatever it is that you then did my plan was to prepare 100 kilometers is 200 bit marathons that's over 60 miles it's not going to take lightly and i had every intention of making sure i was ready to give it my best but things don't always go the way you want and so in a bid to rescue some sort of point from the event given that a performance consistent with being ready wasn't going to be it this video is hopefully an interesting insight into what with a little bit of underlying fitness the human body can do when asked and what sort of a mess does it get left in afterwards so let me quickly cover the events that led to me being on the start of the thames path 100 kilometer challenge about 12 weeks ago i started an eight week fat loss journey that was designed to end on the day of my wedding that wedding took place three weeks ago end of august and what was supposed to be happening now in the weeks that followed were a series of running events which would be absolutely perfect preparation for some obstacle course races that i've got coming up later this month and in october but then those runs got cancelled due to coronavirus my worry was that after eight weeks of dieting and nothing in the diary immediately following my wedding i would slip back into some pretty poor eating habits and then just turn up for those obstacle course races too heavy so i looked online to find a couple of runs to replace the cancelled ones with and the first thing that popped up was the thames path ultra challenge 100 kilometers from putney bridge in london to henley on thames not far from where i am you could run the first second third or fourth quarter or you could do half of it but i've never done 100k run and this seemed like a good one to try flat localish well organized i signed up and i did so with every expectation that i would ramp up my running training dramatically but i overlooked too many things mainly the impact that running that eight week calorie deficit was having on my energy levels and then also the amount of time that i was putting into preparation for the wedding and then one week before my wedding i did my longest training run and literally passed out at 40k bottom line saturday 11th of september 7 30 a.m as i set off over putney bridge i was grossly under prepared now some people will say hang on this video's title suggests that you did no training but you are clearly training all the time so let me describe the running that i have done that would be described as constructive towards this event firstly the furthest i've ever run is 50k and i've done that twice the last time was in december 2019 in august 2019 i did my first ever 50k and during that run achieved my first ever marathon so i don't have a history of distance events in 2020 i ran a few runs over 20k and a couple of marathons in training i've never actually run an organized marathon ever and this year i've gotten a little bit carried away with riding on the bike and doing zwift in here so running has been a bit light going back over my garmin diary this was the race itself just to 5 and 3k in the days before to try and stay fresh an 8 of 4 and an 8 the week prior to that august had a 10k race and a 12k run home from that so that was a good 22k day also did a 5 a 9 a 10 and a 3 that week zero the week before my wedding week then there's that 40k where i passed out and then it gets a bit sporadic an eight a nine a twenty a seven just a seven the week before six twelve four seven five seven six seven fourteen five thirty seven that was a race i did down in cornwall i only ran five times in total in june so i'm someone that can happily go out and jog for 10k and if i need to do an event up to a marathon distance 42k i can get it done but i'd only gone over 20k five times the whole of this year i think it's therefore pretty fair to say that my running is not suggestive of someone looking to achieve much more than an okay 10k and all right half marathon or just about get a full marathon done and if you think yeah but if you can run 40 odd k you can run 100 that is not how it works okay so just gone through 10k in one hour one minute and that felt pretty comfortable heart rate 1 29. which is great so no surprise the first 10k was easier fast 10 for me is around 42 minutes so that's a 4 minute 30 kilometer pace so this 10 at one hour that's a six minute kilometer pace felt nice the easy pace kept my heart rate down so less energy expenditure less need for food an event like this one of the biggest challenges is eating and hydrating enough to keep you going but not so much so that you then feel ill my garment was also set to beep every time i went through 400 calories so i'd have a bit to eat then and also it beeped at 15 minutes to remind me to drink i also had it set to alert me to any pulse over 135 which basically meant slow down a bit okay coming up to the first rest stop at 14k i still feel good i've settled into a slightly slower pace than i thought i would have done this early in the run i'm sort of running to 6 35 for the last kilometer but it feels very comfortable okay here we go these stops had toilets and first aid seating areas hot and cold food and water they scanned you in so your supporters could look on their app and see how far you'd gone in real time all very good stops were at 14k 28k 37k and 50k and then 62k 78k and 88k now i blew through this first stop a little bit too quick and you'll see why later on i just quickly stuck some anti-shave cream on the inside of my thighs and my arm was rubbing on my pack i had look over the snacks i had so i knew what i could grab a bit later on if i was hungry for something other than what i was carrying myself and i then left right so i'm one kilometer outside of that last rest stop so just a 15k settled back into a nice rhythm everything feels good mentally i've got three next steps the first to be 20k because i'm ticking off the 10ks then 25k because that's a quarter of the whole thing and then 28k which is the next rest stop this process of constantly working out the next bit coming up was pretty much the way that i kept going there was always something in my head no more than 5k away that i had something to fixate on and tick off rather than just spend all day worrying about the finish line and it worked to an extent just gone through 20k in about one hour 10 so as i thought pace has dropped off but um but this current pace feels at the moment fairly sustainable my problem was that i didn't know what a realistic target for the whole thing was i knew that i'd run a 50k in five and a half hours roughly but that was when i trained for it properly in 2019 much better than this time so i figured maybe six hours for the 50 and then a dream come true would have been 12 hours for the whole thing as i sit here now that was rather optimistic thinking even for a dream 14 hours chatting with other runners that had done plenty of these sort of events before that seemed to be the time that suggested to people that you could run to put it in comparative terms a bit like doing a park run in 21 22 minutes you're not going to scare the people that win park run but you can't be a complete newbie and just turn up and do that 15 hours was then deemed to be not bad under 16 was okay and over 16 you're sort of into jog walk territory still no easy thing to do and the cutoff was 37 hours so some people taking their time but again though don't think that makes it straightforward 37 hours of moving at any speed is heckin of achievement arguably as great as someone just blasting out in 12 hours and feeling pretty fine afterwards okay that's 25k just over 2 hours 45 which is um pretty on track for a sub 12 finish if i can maintain this place which i can't i'll say hope everything's going okay actually quarters away um got another rest stock cut up in 3k which i'm gonna use to change socks shorts and uh also pop a neurofen as well the only i've got still a hip flexor pain so 25k coming up pace felt fine but actually way too quick in reality and yeah i had some stiffness in my hip flexors developing which is a bit odd an unusual one for me two weeks ago though i pulled my lower back dead lifting in the gym the hip flexors attached to the top of the thighs go through the pelvis and then hook up to the lumbar spine so i was wondering if it was just some sort of residual tightness left over from that injury either way i took some painkillers i was carrying to see if that would help and in terms of gear that i was carrying as i said there i had some spare socks and shorts i had a little first aid kit a couple of different lubricants for feet and thighs two and a half liters of water a bunch of energy bars and gels then my iphone my earphones the camera obviously spare battery my pack probably weighed about five kilograms with full water bladders at the start of the race i was 98 kilos so i was running it well over 100 kilos with the kit okay so just left the 28k stop which actually was nearly 29k next stop is 37k i think actually not too far and then halfway after that feeling right sun's out it's a little bit annoying i could do that going away now this was the first issue that cropped up the sun came out and it had not been forecast i don't do well in the heat i've explained this before but basically as something gets more volumous its surface area does not increase in proportion hence big animals that need to shed heat tend to just move slowly or develop big ears extra surface area an elephant does both i just struggle or faint okay 30k update 3 hours 32 minutes feel right actually feel uh feel very good need to be slightly careful i don't start picking the pace up um there is a long way to go yet so 30k and that seven minute pace is too fast really it's odd when i run slowly normally at home like going out for a recovery run or just going for a jog with jenna or something a six minute kilometer pace feels uncomfortably slow so this seven felt like i was just taking it too easy but i'd have been better actually backing it off even further or even adding in some walking to bring it down okay minor disaster just hit 37k and uh the path stopped looked on the watch and gone the wrong way there was a river crossing that i missed i don't know how far back i'm trying to work out on the map how far back i'm going to go just over 2k the signposting on this whole route was brilliant they even had glow sticks on the signs that you needed after dark i just wasn't paying attention at that point and my watch would have even been beeping away at me because my garmin fenix had the gpx route on it i just assumed at the time that it was beeping to say have a drink or eat some food and so i ignored it i ran past the go over this bridge sign sucking on a gel thinking all as well now as you can see on the map where i should have been was literally just the other side of the river so it was actually very very tempting especially in the heat just to swim across but i knew that there was a check-in point before that point so i had to get back anyway to that so no swimming that day scientist 35k i've got uh come on 39.4k so yeah 4k annoying it was annoying if for no other reason and all my head sums that i was doing for where i had to be at what certain point in time they were now all out of sync what a dog inside you're never done don't stop when you're tired stop when you're done probably good good what sort of wants to run 100k 104 104k that's a proper distance you'd probably say something rubbish like that stay okay let's get on so i then got myself to the 37k checkpoint okay it's a 37k stop or 41k by my stupidity uh no time to make that in here after that mess up get in reapply lube a little stretch refill my water bottles push on for 50k i then had the pleasure of running past the point on the other side of the river where i'd been half hour before been there just gone through 43k so we are now past marathon distance we are officially on an ultra marathon uh five hours 22 it's the slowest marathon ever run the biggest problem right now is my toes um i should have stopped sooner and tightened up my shoes my feet were moving around them a bit and by the time i did stop and tighten them up just a few hundred yards back my toes have been bashed against the end of the trainer a bit too often for their liking so they're now sore put a bit of vaseline on them let's see here we go the trouble is not so much the sore toes but because they're sore i'm running badly i'm trying to avoid landing on my midfoot which i should be doing but it makes my toes hurt when i do that so i can feel my left foot i'm heal striking it's okay at the moment but i won't get away of doing that for another 60k my achilles will go so yeah not ideal so this was the next issue my toes the muscular pains they sort of came and went but the toe problem hung around that very first rest stop that i blew through i should have taken 30 seconds there to tighten up my laces to keep my foot still inside the shoe i just sort of thought i'll do them later and never did and this pain was nasty actually really nasty i literally had visions of having to run barefoot okay 50k on the garmin that's a good time for a walk obviously 4k to go to the halfway point on the race but uh pretty good time to see where i'm at 50k six hours 16. it's the slowest 50k i've ever run aerobically i feel fine in fact because my legs hurt i'm having to go quite a slow pace and therefore obviously i'm no problems at all heart rate's around 125. so yeah just leg ache so 50k the wrong side of six hours but with hindsight if i'd been even slower there things might actually have been a bit better later on and that sun was a real pain but only 4k to the halfway point on the full route so felt pretty positive okay halfway point just squeezing under seven hours i think yeah six hours 57 okay so what i can do here is pick up my bag that they'll brought here from the start and reload my rug sack and change clothes forever baggage [Music] when the baggage guy came over to me and asked my bag number to get my kit i just said mate it's that big black one over there with above average written on it i could not have sounded more sam jackson if i tried i want you to go in that bag and find my wallet in my head it was very very cool anyway so at this stop i changed my socks my shorts my shirt i reapplied my lube i filled up my water bottle stashed some fresh socks in my bag i refilled my little lube pots i have these little silicon travel pots that i just top up from the main pots that were in my rucksack grabbed my head torch i would need later on i restocked up on food and then out into the sun and that was the hottest part of the day as well setting off into that heat was grim round two worth noting as well that seven hour time it took to get to that stop ignoring the fact that i'd run an extra half hour seven hours to that point would actually have been okay if i'd got there at a consistent pace but having gone off quick and then slowed down i'd arrived in more of a mess than i'd really have liked and obviously left therefore in a bit of a mess as well which is not really the way to start a 50k run okay so i've just gone through 42 kilometers to go which is a marathon and that's interesting because i know i can run a marathon so i'm now guaranteed to finish that's a sports science right there i'm no longer focusing on how far i've gone because i was getting bogged down in how far i thought i'd done versus how far they had me doing because of the 4k mistake i'm now just focused on how far to go and expect a time to finish which is looking like it could be potentially under 15 hours which would be amazing so that's all i'm focusing on now how far to go coming under 15. um that's my focus i'm also fantasizing heavily about a 300 meter sprint to the finish at the end um in reality they might need a wheelchair to get me across the line but in my head right now it's going to be epic uh it's going to be goosebumps just thinking about it which is all i need right now it's just some positivity uh it doesn't have to be realistic just has to make me feel good okay okay let's get on so 15 hours new target and at this point it was now a target built on reality and possibility more than just complete guesswork okay i can see the 63k stop just under a kilometer to go for that i suppose everything aches because this is a beautiful time to run it's coming from five o'clock in the evening sun's gone down it's cool because of the pain in my legs though at least it means i'm not going at a fast pace enough to sweat excessively so i'm not going through too much water actually my shorts are dry after that 63k stop the next one was at 78 so that was the longest section of the day between stops 30k to go um in 8k there's a stop which is an annoyingly long way away but it does mean that i get there there'll only be 22k left after that which is basically just over a half marathon um oh everything hurts my pace is pants every now and again i think actually i'm jogging along okay i come to a slight gradient not even a gradient just a gentle rolling uphill section i can't grind to a hole nothing i can do this was mentally odd the pain in my legs was not severe in the sense that i'm not rolling around on the floor screaming for an ambulance or anything it's more that they just won't do what i ask them to do i physically could not move my legs any quicker than they were going so aerobically i'm okay i just can't shift across the ground as quick as i'd like it was basically constant mind games with myself to keep myself running if running is even the word for what i was doing at least the area was nice i'm not sure where i am but i know i can't afford to live here i was brave i didn't know around i definitely can't afford to live here so stop at 78k left 22k to go the sun was going down and i could easily visualize what was left because i know what 22k is at least i know what the distance is what i didn't really know was what that would be like to run after already doing about 80k okay i blew through that last stop 22k to go and i have a plan and the plan is to stop acting like a big baby the only things that hurt are things that are not going to kill me my toes calves i mean they they're uncomfortable that's all so i'm gonna pick this pace up stop running like a child and get home next stop is in 10k and then 12k to the finish so i was feeling good sort of i had this hope that if i just motivated myself i could pick up the pace and it would be as easy as that i did about three tracks the rocky iv soundtrack and then suddenly realized that my legs were just having none of it and then it got dark and then my will to live departed completely okay quick 18k to go update this is really hard like ridiculously hard like i'm never doing this again this is stupid why do you want to do this this is nuts there's no one here anywhere just in a field everything hurts okay it won't put a gate here [Music] stupid stupid place for a gate um okay end of 18k to go update stupid torch back on my stupid head 18k to go was definitely a low point there's still a long way left and the path now was basically just going through fields so i'm stumbling around all over the place just really feeling pretty miserable i then wanted a break from listening to rocky so i put on a sam harris podcast listened to his thoughts on terrorism 20 years on from 9 11. so that didn't really cheer me up either okay you can't see me because it's dark harm 500 meters from the final stop which is then 12k to the end i'm just done legs are shot can't physically move them any faster than a trot vest and also annoyingly worryingly light-headed taking lots of water lots of food uh electrolytes but if i it sounds ridiculous before i walk straight forward nice and steady i'm okay if i start looking behind me or or even just basically moving my head around i feel light-headed real quick now this was the only time i was a little bit worried as i've said before a few weeks back i passed out on a run so i know what it feels like to go from tired to woozy to coming around wondering why everything tastes of blood i did not fancy that in the middle of nowhere in the pitch black there's nothing i could do i'd taken plenty of electrolytes had as much food as my system could take lots of fluids were on board i was just getting to the point where i was i guess the best way to describe it as i was bumping into my physical limit which with hindsight is a nice thing it's nice thing to know that you went to the edge but at that time i was just worried about the edge of the riverbank and not passing out into it anyway at the rest i had a super fast cup of tea with about 18 sugars in it i sent jen a photo of that and a message to say i was 12k from her she was waiting for me at the finish line and then i set off for home with two objectives one get to 100k on the garmin so still 4k from the actual end of the race before 15 hours i knew i could not get the race done in sub 15 but i could get that 100k point before 15 it just meant doing about eight minute 45k pace for next six kilometers which sounds slow but it was faster than walking so that was plenty fast enough and objective number two don't let on to the marshall as i leave and run off into the darkness that i am this close from passing out 10 meters got it 14 hours 58 minutes 100k oh my god oh my god i got it sub 15 for my first ever 100 kilometers is that a great time no but at that moment in that field in the dark alone apart from the odd cow maybe i couldn't see them i was pretty pleased just over 4k left i called jen told her i was close and i then just started focusing on that sprint finish and this is it i know henley on thames pretty well i know exactly where i'm going i am two minutes from the end i start running zero pain rain is very odd i just felt fine i felt like i was running away quicker than it was garmin had me peak at about four minute kilometer pace in my head here i am flat out sprinting but it was quick enough to get the guy on the mic to acknowledge that i was actually sprinting to the finish line there we go very well done so results and aftermath 104.8 kilometers in 15 hours 45 minutes for a 9.01 minute kilometer pace and about 9 000 calories nine minutes per kilometer pace is exactly a 15 hour 100k so my actual 100 kilometer time of 14 hours 58 just inside that pace weight afterwards 95 kilos so down a few kilos despite eating and drinking all day long not a massive drop actually that low heart rate kept energy expenditure low relatively speaking results for the event 709 starters 543 finished so 166 dropped out and more than half of those did sir at the 50k point i guess the heat would have been a contributing factor for a lot of those and i was 96 had i not gone wrong and arrived inside the 15 hours i'd have been 86 so i only lost 10 places in the end because that that could have been worse now here is where you can see where it went badly this is my pace as you can see it slows massively over the first 30 kilometers and then stays there there is no clearer example of that being a daft way to do it than the position metric i was in seventh place at checkpoint one before dropping to 109th now even allowing for the 10 places lost going wrong that is still a bunch of people that started slower than me and then came past me during the day to end up 96 i got some of them back but still not a balanced run so physical impact it was interesting actually i went from that sprint over the line to within maybe three minutes not being able to walk i staggered the hundred yards to the car 15 minute drive home 10 minutes to get from the car into the house being pretty much carried by my 120 pound wife collapsed on the living room floor that was around midnight jen threw a blanket over me and then went to bed at around 2 a.m i'd been more passed out than sleeping but i felt ready to go and have a shower i was covered in dried salt from sweating all day to about an hour to go from starting to get off the floor upstairs shower into bed about three till five am i just lay there in pain then i realized i was starving just went downstairs for breakfast at five i then collapsed on the sofa and i spent all day hobbling around so i ate about four and a half thousand pretty clean calories a lot of protein did some massage gum work on my legs some stretching and by the evening felt better monday was quicker down the stairs in the morning again did no training about 3 000 clean calories more stretching and today back to a normal day it's midday tuesday now as i film this i've got an upper body gym session coming up this afternoon an easy bike ride in here on zwift tonight and then a sauna diet is two and a half thousand calories today back to normal i feel achy but not too bad really i feel like i ran a regular marathon yesterday that's the best way to describe how worn out i feel and that impact on my body also reflected in my garmin body battery picture so the thursday and friday before the race very low stress levels that kept the battery level above 50 on thursday and it hardly dipped at all on friday during the race it then crashed down to just under 20 which actually is not that low but i think that's representative for the fact that my heart rate wasn't massively elevated so i don't think garmin realized quite how screwed up i was sunday early hours while crawling upstairs for a shower the battery carried on down and then basically flatlined the whole of sunday with huge stress levels being recorded that is primarily heart rate variability being measured monday a better stress score but still no overnight recovery and nothing during the day either 48 hours after finishing the run though start to see some consistently low body stress and a rise in battery overnight that has carried on this morning and today depending on when i get this edited together i'll stick up the very last body battery reading so you can see how far up it gets my expectation is that overnight tonight it might get close up to full level so when i wake up tomorrow wednesday morning it'll hopefully be almost normal fingers crossed so what do i take away from all of it first of all it is nice to know that i have an underlying degree of fitness that lets me do stuff like that it wasn't quick but i'd guess if you took a random bunch of people and asked them all to just have a go at running 100k it would be above average the preparation that i did do worked all the kit i put together the stuff i carried my food supplies were all spot on but that aside there's actually some stuff that i could have done even with my lack of training that would have seen a better performance one don't go wrong doing an extra almost five kilometers was just stupid two i should have run much slower at the start much slower maybe even a run walk type of approach as i said i averaged nine minute kilometers overall if i'd averaged around eight and a half that's close to 14 hours so allowing for stops i could have run high sevens from the beginning not sixes that first 10k i did in an hour that should have been closer to an hour 20. that's a huge difference in energy expenditure and three lastly foot care or rather foot thought the second my laces felt loose i should have stopped and adjusted them not thought i'll do it when i stop at a rest point ultimately correcting those three things and training right next year i will go under 14 guaranteed interesting i hope so i don't advise your approach long distance running ill prepared if you are thinking of running further than you are used to whatever that distance may be for you train properly and have a much more satisfying experience but if you do want to push yourself a little bit outside your comfort zone and have a couple of days in which you can then recuperate my experience suggests you might just get away with it a big thanks to the guys around the event it was brilliantly done i highly recommend them they do stuff all over the place i'll put a link to them down below thanks to all the runners as well that just said encouraging stuff as we passed each other at rest stops and out on the trail and obviously big thanks to my wife for getting me to the start collecting me from the finish and helping me get dressed the last couple of days and let me just finish with this because this sums up ultra running for me at about 75 80k i ran past a runner she was sat on the side of the path i said are you okay she said not really so i stopped i said you need anything i've got water i've got food first aid phone she said no i've got everything i need i just need to get up and keep moving and so i sort of shrugged my shoulders and she shrugged hers and i said good luck and we then just went our separate ways and i hope she did get up and finish because she was right running slowly for a long time is not complicated really you just have to find the motivation somewhere to keep moving whether you did that race in sub 10 or just inside the 37 hour cut off everybody would have had to do just that same thing just ignore what a large part of their brain is telling them to do and instead do what they know they need to do and just keep moving and in a world where picking the easy option which is not normally the best one for you is so easy overcoming that impulse that's just pretty cool [Music] you

Channel: Mark Lewis

Views: 54,792

Rating: 4.9362469 out of 5

Keywords: triathlon, ironman, gym, running, health and fitness, ultra marathon, triathlon (sport), ultra running, triathlon training, trail running, global triathlon network, 100km, 100 miles, Ultra running, long distance running, long distance running motivation, long distance running tips, 100k run, half marathon, long distance running training, iron man, ultra marathon motivation, ultra marathon documentary, ultra marathon training, ultra marathon running documentary

Id: bn7IjgD8gPo

Length: 34min 49sec (2089 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021