For a couple of years now I have in the back of my head had the goal of running a sub 24 hour 100 mile race. The other part of that goal was for it to be on the trail, and be moderately hilly too.
Fitting the race into my schedule
Around 8 weeks ago I was browsing races in the UK and suddenly the Winter Downs 100 mile race stood out to me. It was not too far away, and had the perfect elevation profile to suit my goal (around 3000 meters, or 9850 ft).
After achilles trouble earlier this year, and then IT band syndrome in both legs post race at the Rollin’ 100 in July, followed closely by the TMB in August, I had just began getting some consistency back in my running. It was good timing – I was regaining my confidence, sitting on a on a daily run-streak, and was also completing my rehab and prehab exercises most nights.
The stars were kind of aligned, or at least as much as I thought they could be, so I threw my entry into the pot with the race already showing as at 97% capacity.
Rehab, Prehab, and Strength Work
I’m still struggling on and off with achilles tendon flare-ups, but they’re manageable and not painful. As long as there is no pain and I back off the load if I get them, my physio says this is OK.
My IT band problems were far worse for pain in running though. After early August I didn’t run for a couple of weeks, and couldn’t run much more than 13km without the pain down the side of my knees turning up.
Fixing my IT band problems and improving my achilles tendon
I found a great YouTube video of a through-hiker explaining similiar symptoms and showing an exercise that helped him. It’s basically doing a bunch of side leg raises on each leg with the toes pointing downward.
Every night I did 30 to 35 slow and controlled on each leg till exhaustion. In a matter of 4-6 weeks I was surpassing my previous running distance limit with no pain.
The same with my achilles works, but I also introduced a weekly gym session with a sports performance specialist here in Pembrokeshire. (The catalyst was winning 3 x free sessions through a competition!) After that, I paid for a bunch more, and worked with Matt on various plyometric and running strength related exercises to help with my achilles issues as well as to improve my running.
Muscular endurance
Lastly, around 8 weeks before my race, I introduced a muscular endurance gym session into my weekly schedule. Thanks go out to my good mate George (who was part of our TMB group) for pointing me toward Evoke Endurance’s Scott Johnston who has championed this protocol for the past 20 years.
The session itself is around 45 minutes long, and progressively gets harder. To start I did 6 sets of 4 different exercises, from jumping split squats, to box step ups, and others. After the first two sessions, you add up to 10% of your body weight (I held a weighted plate) while doing the exercises. You also reduce rest time and add more exercises further down the line as you progress.
Here is a link to Scott’s blog post all about muscular endurance (ME): https://evokeendurance.com/resources/muscular-endurance-all-you-need-to-know/
The sessions would absolutely decimate my leg muscles every week. Even doing them on Wednesdays, I would have residual DOMS on Saturday/Sunday for my long run! After 4 or 5 weeks the DOMS got slightly better, but it really hit hard and made for some uncomfortable long runs.
I’m pretty convinced these really helped me though. I didn’t get the ideal amount of time to stop and taper off from these sessions, but I certainly feel stronger in the legs now.
Planning my sub 24 hour 100 miler
Next were the questions of pacing and race strategy. How was I going to run this race without crew? (I didn’t want to drag my family across to England in Winter to scoot around trying to meet me on the course!)
Pacing a sub-24 hour 100 miler
I developed my ultra pace calculator tool specifically for my own use, but its free to use online for anyone.
I used a linear progressive pacing strategy of 20% to reach an elapsed time goal of 24 hours for 100 miles. This essentially means ‘Start off 20% faster than target average pace, finishing 20% slower than target average pace (-20% to +20%)’
The calculator then shows you a table of your splits (miles or kilometers) along with the exact times you need to complete each split. I also added a feature to add aid station stops at any point, with a planned amount of time to stop for each.
The tool accounts for these and shows you the split times needed to reach your goal time. It can also give you the exact race day time of day you need to look out for each split.
The tool has lots of customisation options to change pacing strategies or goals accordingly.
Food and Water
There are 3 x aid stations on the Winter Downs 100 course. Roughly at miles 30, 50, and 80. Those are the only official water and food stops, so I had to use some online crowd-sourced resources to locate water taps on the route.
I edited my GPX file for navigation to mark down the water taps. Most of them were on the sides of farm buildings or churches we would pass, and in a few cases there were towns to run through with potential stops if you hit them at the right times.
Food I would carry on me (home made gels, and a few assorted bars), and refill at aid stations.
Gear and Mandatory Kit
There was a slightly bigger list of mandatory gear than what I’m used to for the Winter Downs 100, but expected since the weather could be potentially very cold and/or wet.
I got my pack weight down to around 4.2kg with 1 liter of water, which I was happy with. Some new items I needed were: waterproof gloves in addition to 2 x warm pairs of gloves, mid layer, base layer, and long tights, kept separate and dry in my pack for emergencies, and a red flashing LED light for the back of my pack.
Executing the sub 24 hour 100 miler plan on the Winter Downs 100
Training went fairly well. I got a solid 8-10 weeks of consistent running in, along with all the strength work. I averaged around 85km a week of running, or roughly 9-10 hours of work. I had one small achilles flare up 2 weeks before the race.
My long runs were mostly around 30-40km, with my peak being a 50km trail run along the Pembrokeshire coast path.
I kept the average elevation ratio of my long runs roughly at or slightly above that of the race’s.
During the build (and even post race!) I have kept my personal daily run streak going, which is now sitting at 120 days or so. This might have to be a short blog post in itself!
Race info and the start
The race starts in Amberley, in the South of England, and finishes further north at ‘Juniper Hall’ which is nearby the town of Dorking, following two main national trails, the South Downs Way and North Downs Way.
I stayed the night before at a local hotel in Amberley, which meant I could have a relaxed start to the day, with the race only commencing at 2pm.
Registration was a breeze, and I dropped off my 3 x drop bags for the aid stations, and had my tracker fitted.
I met up with a bunch of friends and running acquaintences just after registration, which meant we could all chat and enjoy eachother’s company before starting.
Pacing
Soon enough we were off. I held back on pace and ran exactly to plan. Running 7 minute-ish kilometers feels extremely slow and unnatural to me, but it was totally the right thing to do for me.
My heart rate stayed controlled, which means that I delayed the inevitable ‘HR drift’ as much as possible. I managed to run 67% of the race in my Z2 / zone2 range, which was ideal.
Looking back at the data, I was staying about 20-60 minutes ahead of all my checkpoint time goals as the race went on.
16 hours of darkness, trails, sticky mud farm fields, and hard work
After 2 hours the sun disappeared and we were shrouded in darkness for the next 16 hours. Just before this, I was treated to a spectacular sunset, which looked like a bright fireball burning behind the woods I was running through.
Aid station 1 – Sustainability Center
The first checkpoint for me was the ‘Sustainability Center’ at around 48 kilometers into the race. I arrived around 5 hours and 40 minutes into the race. My stop was meant to be 15 minutes max, but I wasted a lot of time getting comfy. I did have some vegan lasagne, precision hydration chews, a can of coke, some friendly chats with volunteers, and got to refill my water though. 25-30 minutes wasted!
Off I went, back into the night. Head torch swapped out for a better option (I previously tried using my own chest-mounted rig, but found it was bouncing around too much).
The next section was around 30km of trail. The farm fields we ran through were so muddy. And the worst kind of mud too. The kind that sticks your feet to the ground and causes you to slip and slide around. It made for extra work since you got little to no elastic rebound from your feet hitting the ground since they were just ‘sticky’.
Aid station 2 – Bishops Sutton
After 10 hours of running I arrived at the second checkpoint (80km, or 50 miles about).
This time I got my ‘mandatory’ paper cup out for some soup (I forgot a cup and had to find a paper coffee cup at race registration!)
I had a tomato soup in that, and a small plate of pasta with a tomato sauce topping. The pasta was terrible in my opinion. About 10 minutes over-cooked past ‘Al Dente’ and flavourless. But everything else was amazing, and so were the volunteers!
Unfortunately the soup caused a hole to form in my cup, so I spent a few minutes cleaning up my mess and trying to salvage the soup.
More coke, random pickings of food, and a bit of a rest, had me spending another 30 minute here! I grabbed 2 x precision 30g gels on my way out. My bars I was carrying were not going down well. I just didn’t fancy them at all, but the gels were good.
Yo-yo-ing, music, cold, and generous crews
From 80 km on, I found myself yo-yo-ing with a few other runners. One of them was Ben, another Louise. We kept getting ahead or falling behind one-another.
For the times I was on my own I listened to music which really helped me to focus on ticking over the legs and sticking to my pace plan.
As I passed the 100th kilometer, I noticed my IT band pain that started around this point in my last 100 miler in July hadn’t returned yet. Also, I noticed I was still running fairly consistently. Another win! My pace was dropping off, and it was doing so around about the same rate as my planned 20% linear progressive strategy. Perfect!
It was a struggle to force myself to keep running though. And there were short sections where I did some hiking.
The temperature reached a low of 2 degrees celsius, so I was wearing two layers of gloves. I stayed in my running shorts though. With the constant running/shuffling my legs were not getting cold, only my finger tips and nose.
Louise and I ended up running a stretch for quite a while, and I was getting worried about where I would find my next water. Thankfully her crew helped me out as we passed through the town of Alton at around 3am. I also got a hotcross bun and a mince pie (the former I ate, the latter I couldn’t stomach).
Nutrition issues
At this point I was really struggling to eat anything. The hotcross bun felt like a chore to eat, and I just didn’t want to touch anything else solid. I started battling with acid reflux on and off. Every 10 minutes I would have a very uncomfortable wave of this, which lasted all the way to the end.
I managed to keep pushing on by using the homemade and PH gels I was still carrying.
Passing through the town of Alton (or maybe Farham?) I stopped to snicker at an amusing street name I saw.
Daylight
At some point I lost Louise. She was running very consistently. It was very impressive. I wasn’t upset to lose the company though, since I am perfectly happy running on my own. I enjoyed a bit more music and tried to ingore the bouts of acid reflux I was experiencing.
Getting to aid station 3 (Puttenham)
Soon the sun’s light barely started to illuminate things around me. I found myself in the midst of a vast series of vineyards. We had a sort of cloud inversion too. Clear skies and mist settled in the valleys and wine farms all around.
I was running consistently now and managed to catch-up and pick off a few people that had been ahead of me.
The aid station was a bit of a scene. Tired, broken, and weary runners slumped in chairs. I joined them, but slightly upbeat as there was ‘only’ another 32km to go.
I managed a hot, sugary coffee and some snacking here. A chance to catch up on my fuelling which was way behind where it should have been.
My aid station bag for this one was small, but I had 2 x secret weapons packed.
- A 330ml can of red bull
- My trekking poles
I pulled both out feeling quite smug about myself and the strategically placed items 20 miles before the finish.
However, I still wasted a good 30 minutes at the aid station instead of the planned 15 minutes. The warm room and soft chair were just too tempting.
Toward the finish
Eventually I kicked myself out of the aid station. A couple of runners had arrived after me, but set off before I had, which smacked some sense into me.
It turns out they were a bit more broken than I was though, because I overtook them again in the next hour of running.
The course here followed a bunch of hills and was a little more interesting than the previous section. The sun was up now, but I didn’t feel like stopping to take my merino wool layer off. With around 15km to go, I opened my red bull and gulped it down. The caffeine got to work quickly and found it easier to move a bit faster. Eventually I caught up with Louise again!
Together we formed a run squad, our presences each motivating one another to keep running, which we did. In face we did not stop until the final ‘sting in the tail’ which was Box Hill, only a few km to the finish line. This was a steep climb up the final hill, with many hundreds of steps to ascend.
To my absolute surprise (and confusion), a work colleague of mine appeared half way up Box Hill. He’s a great distance runner and also enjoys these long races. In my sleep deprived state it took me around 5 seconds to register who he was when he greeted me! (Thanks for the boost Sandy!)
On we went to the top of Box Hill, and then back down the other side again. The final 500 meters or so included a steep descent. Louise insisted I run on ahead since I was more confident down hill.
I crossed the finish line in 23 hours and 11 minutes. Nicely ahead of my goal time, even with about 1 hour total wasted dwell time in aid stations!
Shortly after Louise crossed the line too, earning an impressive 1st place for her V50 age category!
I’m now happy to have achieved my sub 24 hour 100 mile goal, and satisfied I didn’t take an easier, flat route to get it done either.
This was my first Centurion Running event. The organisers and volunteers were great. Everything went smoothly from registration, to aid-stations, the finish line. Pre and post race communications were excellent too. Nothing to fault them on really – if I get the chance to do more races in England, I’ll certainly look at booking more of their events.