• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Sure, you might be conscientious to make sure you pick up the slack around the house or to spend extra quality time with them outside of training. However, consider ways to include friends and family in your training and racing. Ask them if they’d like to support you on a training run or at a race. You’d be surprised at how often your loved ones want to be part of your ultrarunning undertaking. They’ll know that you want to spend time with them even when you are training and racing. In addition, they’ll feel like they are a part of your training and accomplishments. You might even ask active family members to be pacers. (Many a family member has been converted to ultrarunning by way of pacing.) These and other efforts keep your non-running-related relationships happy and healthy, which often creates a feedback loop that funnels positive energy back into your running. As a bonus, you will probably have more fun, too!

Conclusion

Ultramarathons are a personal journey, but sharing that journey with others enhances it. I’ve learned much of the information contained in this book through countless conversations over many years. More recently, I’ve come to spend a good deal of my time sharing with others what I’ve learned about running ultramarathons. It’s through this sharing, including writing this book, that I continue to learn from others about the sport on a continual basis. I encourage you to learn, share, and grow with those around you.

Happy trails, Bryon

AFTERWORD: THE SKY IS NO LIMIT

Meghan M. Hicks

Becoming an ultrarunner is like graduating from superhero school. If you’re certain that mainstream society has amply inquired about your marathon running habits, then wait until you experience their ultrarunning commentary. While compliments from family, friends, or co-workers are inherently uplifting, your champion status runs deeper than their perception. Once you’ve run an ultra-marathon, you really are a superhero.

Running for 5, 12, or 24 hours during an ultramarathon requires an exquisite level of physical and mental fitness. In addition to racing, many runners deploy their wicked athleticism in innumerate other endurance adventures. Adventure runs, endurance snowshoeing, fastpacking, and stage racing are a few avenues to which you may apply your newfound superpowers.

Borrowing a term from road cycling, I call this stuff beyond-category adventuring. In cycling, beyond-category climbs are the toughest in terms of their combination of elevation gain and length. While some of this afterword’s adventures are similarly rigorous, I call them beyond category for the way we use our physical and mental fitness to go beyond, into the infinity of possibility.

Being über-fit just plain feels good, but for me there’s more to it. Said fitness allows me to explore some of our planet’s awesome nooks and crannies. I recently found myself, while on a fastpacking trip through California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, on a 12,000-foot mountain pass. Up that high, it felt as if we were more in the heavens than on earth. That mountain pass is a metaphor for these beyond-category adventures: The sky is not even close to the limit.

Get Yer Adventure On

If you’re like me, you’ve probably found yourself staring at an expanse of landscape, a far-off ridgeline, or a squiggling dirt road and thinking, I want to go there. If so, I have some grand news: As an ultrarunner, you probably can!

Some ultrarunners I know find inspiration for adventure runs in what’s around them in their everyday worlds. Many endurance runners have, for example, laced their shoes and run from their town to the next one, simply because they wondered what it would be like to run a distance they usually drive. Other adventure runs may be big link-ups, connecting a series of ridges or valleys surrounding your hometown so that you can see them all in the course of one day. Some adventure runners I know vacation to a national park, lash food and water to their backs, and undertake