Ultra running is running, sort of, and that’s not being pejorative. Rather, ultra running involves putting one foot in front of the other for upwards of 40 hours at distances exceeding 100 miles in one go, or over days, and always in inhospitable places, be they deserts or ice-capped mountains.
The elite average 8:30 per mile over tortuous terrain, so even for them, it’s less about speed than endurance and a journey into what ultra-runners dub the Pain Cave – a confluence of psychological doubt and physiological exhaustion that can break the body and soul of a runner. Sound appealing? Seemingly, to hordes of runners, novices and elites alike, it is!
Ultra running’s appeal lies in part in that it has eclipsed what was formerly the recognized limit of human endurance – the marathon and so-called wall. Hardly anybody discusses the wall anymore. For all our alleged sloven lifestyle, newspapers regularly document a Lazarus of the couch phenomenon, as the most unsuspecting characters, the pack-a-day smoker and drinker, the grossly overweight, transform themselves through diet and exercise over the course of some reality TV show.
We are acculturated to seeing such characters toe the line at some marathon, inspiring others, reaching new goals, raising money, so much that there are now qualifying standards and lotteries for all the major metropolis marathons which cap out at 40,000, leaving tens of thousands of disconsolate runners with causes and stories to find races elsewhere. That elsewhere, for many, is ultra running.
Journalist Adharanand Finn, an accomplished marathon runner, explores this phenomenon in The Rise of the Ultra Runners. Over the span of 18 months, he endeavours to run eight ultra marathons across Europe, America, and South Africa in an attempt to qualify for the grail of ultra running, the 105 Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, held in the Alps every September.
The book is an epic everyman account of what starts as a journalistic assignment to cover the ultra phenomenon and becomes a personal journey of struggle and exhaustive deprivation that ultimately results in a triumphant, emotive and moving account of the transformative force of mind over matter.
It’s not all Zen! The book begins in medias res, in the gallows of exhaustion, during day five of The Oman Desert Marathon, a 100 mile (165km) run across baking sand: Finn’s first ultra. We find him “slumped on the ground . . . back against a mound of sand, staring out through smudged, yellow sunglasses”. It’s a post-apocalyptic spectre of interminable collapse into an abyss of self-doubt, a submission to a voice in the head that demands reasons to continue. There’s a protective survivalist instinct that the body holds in reserve for a last gasp struggle against predation. This is where ultra running is not running, where, for a time it devolves to a somnambulant crawl, or one simply collapses as the body caves and the mind submits. How one reckons with this collapse determines not just the outcome of a race, but one’s sense of self.
For those who followed, ultra running became a way of life
This sense of self-journey morphed into ultra running in the seventies in America with certain free spirits who found solace in a perennial Thoreau-like connection with nature. They were barefoot minimalists with beards, mostly vegans, who took an alternative lifestyle into America’s western states, forsaking the clamour of modern life. For those who followed, ultra running became a way of life.
Beyond Finn’s own compelling accounts of his ultras, the book finds its range in his visits with this eclectic American ultra-community, a cadre of characters who offer up the sort of redemptive stories only Americans willingly open up about to complete strangers. On the eve of a snowstorm, Finn describes a six-mile drive into the mountains and a trek through impending darkness to visit a runner who lives in a wooden hut in the Colorado mountains. The aesthetic minimalism of the life described has a pathos that transcends ultra running. There are decisions and life choices made in the pursuit of goals. We are outside the realm of sports endorsements, or the money is so little that the motivation lies elsewhere. One smells the pine, the clean air, the blue skies, the allure of simply existing.
This is a running book, but not a how-to manual. There are no training plans to successfully complete an ultra, no dietary tips, no recommendations on gear. Rather, in its speculative reach, in the places and people Finn meets, his journey elevates and transcends running as he pushes toward existential questions. For many, ultra running is secular pilgrimage, a way back to a primordial genetic memory, to the awakening of survival instincts and metabolic pathways long lost. In the log of training miles, and the meditative reach of hallucinations, those who take up this sport will quite literally sit alone on a mountain and ask why?
What might be asked of us is answered in this stirring and quietly moving genre-blurring book
In reading Finn’s account, one feels an intimate connection with a cultish community, a band of survivalists, a prescient vanguard who augur what might befall us all if, in the crash of modernity, the source of our genetic memory needs awakening, if we had to begin again. What might be asked of us is answered in this stirring and quietly moving genre-blurring book.
Michael Collins is a Booker-shortlisted author and ultra runner. In 2010 he captained the Irish National 100km team at the IAU World Championships and earned a bronze medal
