The world of ultrarunning

I have a new essay on running and the experience of flow out in Sinkhole, an online culture magazine. Check it out!

Little moments in ultrarunning

I'm a PhD student in information science, and some of my research deals with the information behavior of ultrarunners—what information we use and how we use it as part of our running. Sometimes it's a matter of solving a problem (for instance, an injury), sometimes it's about improving our performance or enjoyment, sometimes it's about planning out seasons or finding new races, and sometimes it's just about entertainment. Everything we do involves information of one kind of another.

I conducted some research at a 100 mile race last year, and one of the questions I asked the runners in a pre-race survey was: Tell me about a recent time in training or a race when a specific piece of information came in handy. What I got was a smattering of little moments in ultrarunning. As one participant observed, "Little tips are usually HUGE. Like having a small towel at drop points."

In that spirit, I present here a list of times where runners used information on the run. It gives a nice, kaleidoscopic view into what's involved in running an ultra. Give it a read or a skim, and you might even discover a "little tip" for yourself.

• I read a blog where a guy ran a 100 mile, and he used Ensure. I tried it and it works great!
• In training, experimenting with nutrition used information about fructose and glucose absorbsion pathways
• Pre-running the course or part of the course, practice with the gear I will use and make tweaks
• Dealing with fueling issues based on symptoms that I addressed quickly and moved beyond
• Music is helpful when I'm tired or bored
• Take care of blisters immediately—check! 
• Tailwind can replace GU and save you in the heat—that has worked for the most part
• The personal stories I have heard actually help me through many moments. It's going to be hard.
• I recently was pacing my husband during his 100 miler. It had rained all day and the trail conditions were muddy and washed out, meaning really horrible footing. I recalled an article I read about driving from our hips so I just focused on propelling through the mud using my glutes and hip flexors rather than small muscles in my lower leg. It really seemed to help by just switching my focus on where the effort was coming from.
• Not taking sports drink at aid stations (stomach problems).
• I bought Pop Tarts instead of honey stinger waffles.  They're basically the same thing, but a fraction of the price and they work great!
• Changed hydration system to a vest instead of a belt.
• As I've started doing longer training runs, information about nutrition (especially calories per hour) has come in handy, especially that coming from online interviews with other ultra runners.
• Eat often and intake something sweet and something salty at each aid station. Even when I'm not hungry, every ultra I run I will eat sweet/salty combo at every aid station, and I that keeps me eating and my electrolyte balance in check.
• Listening to your body during a training plan and knowing when to dial back to avoid burnout or injury. Training plans are great, but not tailored to your lifestyle, so modification is necessary, and often.
• Adding layers for the night leg of my last 100, based on the weather forecast.
• I train mostly by heart rate so it's handy to know what it feels like when I'm in certain HR zones and whether or not to push hills, push downhills, etc. During a race, constant weather evaluation, coupled with body signals and time of day, is always good for determining clothing changes to ward off potential disasters, like hypothermia or heat stroke.
• My training plan came in handy because it helped me make sure I was getting the miles I needed and staying on track.
• Usually I find some inspiring ultrarunner's story and use it as motivation!
• My first hundred miler, I sensed that I was chafed and experiencing hot spots around the 25th mile. I adjusted my pace accordingly until I had gotten to the next aid station at mile 30 to thoroughly assess. I found I had blistered up quite intensely, so I modified my strategy with the goal of completing the race hours after my targeted time of sub-24 hours. Understanding the true severity of my challenge and the risk I faced of not completing the remaining 70 miles on blisters with limited resources in the race was very useful.
• Distance to next aid station so I knew how much water and nutrition I need to carry with me.
• I carefully count calories to make sure I do not go over what my stomach has tolerated in the past.
• Lost on a training run, had to refer to map and align with altimeter on watch and GPS track back location to get my bearings.
• I almost never use bug spray, but everyone else was putting it on before a run last weekend, and I had some "hippie" (ie non-chemical, plant based, organic) spray in my bag. I'm glad I used it because I got a few bites, but there were clouds of mosquitoes.
• You can throw up midrace to reset the stomach and continue on in the race.
• During Three Days of Syllamo I was very aware of looking for course markers since I had read in several race reports that previous runners had said it was easy to get lost.
• Self assessment, minor cramping, how to address, selectrolytes, water and slow down some.  
• In my last 50k I know how long each section should take to know if I'm on pace for a PR.
• Getting drenched & becoming hyperthermic.  I realized I needed better rain gear
• Knowing the course helped me be able to plan my race.
• I plan to use an article on heat training from UltraRunning Magazine for a 100 mile event I am doing in July.

What can we learn from running?

Like most (all?) ultrarunners, I find the sport tremendously rewarding.

There's so much that ultrarunning bestows upon its practitioners. There's fitness and weight management. There's the rush of setting a PR. There's the excitement of seeing a new part of the world.

But ultrarunning also offers other rewards that we may not always appreciate. They're simple, subtle, quiet.

I'll always remember one of the first meetings with my supervisor when I began my PhD program. She told me that doing a PhD takes a lot of time, and that I need to protect my time and be careful of how I spend my time and...—she spent an awful long time dancing around the suggestion that I should run less and work more. There's no time to run for two hours a day when research needs researching!

Perhaps needless to say (after all, when do ultrarunners listen to doctors, medical or otherwise, who tell them to stop running?), I didn't stop running. I didn't temper my mileage. And now that I've finished two years of my PhD program, running all the way through, I'm confident enough to say that the proof is in the pudding. And I'd say that I've been successful in my program not despite my running, but because of it.

I recently wrote a paper, now out in the Journal of Information Science, about how ultrarunners build understanding. I was trying to learn about the process of building understanding, and I was looking for how ultrarunners came to understand ultrarunning. But in this work I discovered that ultrarunners, in understanding ultrarunning better, also came to understand themselves better. Indeed, philosophers such as Martin Heidegger have long suggested that all understanding is essentially self-understanding. Long story short, I discerned three factors that go into the building of understanding in ultrarunning.

1. Time. Understanding requires time, and ultrarunners aren't afraid to take the time it takes.
2. Struggle. Understanding doesn't come easily, and ultrarunners aren't afraid to struggle and endure.
3. Perspective. Understanding requires the seeking and reconciliation of multiple perspectives of a thing, and ultrarunners do that, too: In preparing for a race, for example, we'll look for race reports, course descriptions, maps, videos, photos, Strava data and more—all different perspectives of the same thing. 

Looking back, I see how these three factors have contributed to my own understanding of ultrarunning. And this has helped me appreciate a new reward I've reaped from my running experience: practice in understanding. For as so many people have said before, the lessons you learn on the trail can be applied elsewhere. In ultrarunning, taking time, undergoing struggle, and reconciling multiple perspectives have tangible, concrete results—and so we take those skills with us as we walk through life. As an ultrarunner, I don't cower at the blank page. I don't worry about writing my dissertation. I don't get overwhelmed that easily. It's not because I'm some sort of godly specimen—it's because I've practiced. And without ultrarunning, I wouldn't have gotten that practice.

Apparently it's prime time for realizations like this: NYT recently reported on a study that suggests endurance running stimulates a pathway that improves learning and memory, and Time published a manifesto on why exercising is the keystone of a successful career.

Running as information

We're in the heyday of the concept of information. We talk about almost everything these days in terms of information. And this can be a useful perspective sometimes. For instance, a longstanding maxim equated food with fuel; but over the past few years, there's been a shift toward seeing food as information instead. This view helps us see food not simply as uniform calories, but as conglomerations of macronutrients, micronutrients, phytochemicals and zoochemicals. This view also helps us understand food as a political statement, emotional tanner and intimacy substitute.

What if we thought of running as information? What might this perspective help us to see?

In a recent research paper, I did just that. (When I'm not running, I'm a PhD student in information science.) My paper Information on the Run: Experiencing Information During an Ultramarathon, published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Information Research, explores the information processes at play that I experienced while running my first 100-mile race. Here's what I found:

• Though ultrarunning is an individual sport, it has an important social component. Things like trail etiquette and appropriate gear are socially controlled. The ultrarunning community is orally-based, is centered around public performances (races), recognizes a few key information sources (e.g., UltraRunning Magazine, Trail Runner Nation podcast, the ULTRA listserv, Hal Koerner's and Bryan Powell's guides, Garmins, etc.), and above all seems to value perseverance. These shared characteristics offer cohesion to the ultrarunning community, making it much more than an individual pursuit. 
• During an ultra, the key information source is the body. In the research literature, this type of information is known as corporeal information. This includes, for instance, gauging my hunger and thirst, deciding whether I can run through a cramp and detecting blisters. Working with corporal information can be understood as a kind of "literacy" that ultrarunners cultivate as they gain expertise in the sport. Though it may be the case that external technologies can support this process (e.g., some runners set their watch to beep every 30 minutes, cueing them to take a sip of water), much corporeal information management seems to be unconscious and internal. Future research should tease apart these processes more.
• Another key information source is the runner's knowledge base, in which memories of training runs and internalized books, podcasts, advice, plans, etc., coexist and are called up in response to any number of stimuli during a run. For instance, I felt nauseous and disoriented during my first 100-mile run, and I searched my knowledge base for possible solutions. 
• On the run, corporeal information and the knowledge base interface in a feedback system of outcomes and mental states. For example, I might sense some calf pain (corporeal information), which makes me worried (mental state); I recall how it was previously injured but that even so in a recent race I felt this same pain and it ended up being a false alarm (knowledge base), which causes me to keep going despite the pain (outcome), and also makes me feel a little better (mental state). If the pain persists, I might check in again a little later, running through the process again. 

In this way, seeing running as information helped uncover some interesting aspects of ultrarunning: the importance of the social aspect of running, and the processes that help and athlete cope with covering such long distances. And, most importantly, this brings up a number of questions for future study. For me, the most interesting has to do with novices versus experts—how do beginners manage information differently from more experienced ultrarunners, and how can that knowledge help us teach or coach beginner runners?

My future research will continue to explore these questions, and I invite others to join me.