These 3 Shifts Helped Me Move from Casual Runner to Ultramarathoner
This post was written for and published by The Cairn Project to support my 2024 Adventure Fundraiser.
Trail “running” includes plenty of hiking!
Fatigue. Stress fractures. Hunger. Lack of motivation.
I’ve been running consistently for over half my life, and I’ve experienced it all.
It’s no wonder that many people associate running with pain, boredom, or even punishment!
Ironically, it wasn’t until I started running ultramarathons that I found myself in my happiest, healthiest running state.
At 28, I ran my first ultramarathon, and there was no looking back. I knew that endurance challenges would be a pillar in my lifestyle from then on.
As I approach my first 100 mile race as an Adventure Fundraiser for The Cairn Project, people often ask me: “How is running that much possible?”
Here are the key shifts I made in my running practices to become an ultrarunner who enjoys the entire training process.
1. Focusing more on effort, and less on pace, with the 80/20 method.
Running often feels hard to people because they’re making it harder than it has to be to get the benefits.
Do a search online and you’ll find a few schools of thought around training for races.
Some people figure if you want to run faster, then you should run less distance and focus on speed instead. Some prescribe run-walk minute ratios. Some plans merely spit out distances of training runs leading up to a race, with no pace or effort metric attached.
After dabbling in a few different methods, I found myself in the same spot: uninspired at best, and injured at worst.
So when I came across the 80/20 method of endurance training, I was intrigued, but didn’t have the highest expectations.
80/20 training in basic terms is spending 80% of your running workouts at an easy effort, and only 20% at moderate to high efforts.
In other words, 80% of your minutes running feel like a pace you could hold all day.
It seems hard to believe at first: How could spending most of your training at a conversational effort lead to crossing finish lines of difficult races?
Turns out, lots of research shows that 80/20 training is ideal for most endurance athletes.
When you dedicate 80% of your training to lower intensity workouts, your body will have enough time to truly build its aerobic capacity AND achieve full recovery. The remaining 20% is then reserved for moderate to high intensity workouts, which is just enough to push yourself to make gains without over-stressing the tissues.
This changed everything for me.
Before 80/20, I’d never followed a running plan without dread, injury, or burnout. I’d run too much, push too hard, or miss the intention of a training run.
Now, every single run on my calendar has a strategic purpose, and I can literally and figuratively breathe easy knowing that most of my time will be at a relaxed effort.
It’s a lot easier to get out the door when you don’t have to worry about pushing yourself to the max and instead look forward to an easy, joyful period of movement.
Big smiles in the middle of my first ultra in 2022!
2. Strengthening my weaker muscles and prioritizing strength training.
Without proper strength training education, I played a guessing game for years both at the gym and at home.
I followed arbitrary YouTube exercises, usually skipped heavier weights, and ignored plenty of muscles that would’ve helped me cross finish lines strong.
When I moved to my home in Washington State, nearly all my runs became super hilly.
My legs felt weak trying to tackle this new terrain, and I continued to struggle with IT Band Syndrome and other ailments.
My sports chiropractor noticed that I had very weak hips and glutes, and immediately assigned me a program of exercises to start strengthening them.
After a few months of adding these at-home exercises into my routines, I started to notice that hiking or running on steeper hills felt way more manageable.
I could finally feel my glutes firing on the uphills, and my hips stopped tiring out partway through runs.
For years now, I’ve prioritized strength training sessions 2-3 times per week, focusing on exercises that specifically help running form and muscle activation (for example, single leg movements, which also help build balance).
All of this can be done at home, without a gym membership. I have a modest pile of used dumbbells and they’ve gotten every job done.
The wildest part? My IT Band Syndrome finally went away, after years of pain.
In fact, I haven’t had a nagging running or overuse injury since I realized that strength training is a part of run training.
Pro tip: End your run at a cold creek to get an ice bath in while cleaning off the dirt!
3. Making sure I eat enough food and calories, especially carbs.
More than anything, my wish for female athletes is that we’d all reject the toxic messaging the media gives us around our bodies.
Women have been conditioned to stay “small.” They say we shouldn’t have big muscles, but be “toned.” That we should minimize carbs and track macros. That skipping periods is a sign of fitness.
I’ll never stop screaming this from the mountaintops: We need adequate nourishment to live our happiest, healthiest, most adventurous lives.
My college years were spent being paranoid about my body and trying to make it perfect. I experienced orthorexic tendencies which pulled me away from all the fun parts of life. (Orthorexia is a type of disordered eating characterized by an obsession with health that ironically leads to malnutrition due to avoidance of certain foods.)
After under-nourishing my active body for too long, I found myself exhausted, missing my menstrual cycle (which is a vital sign), and with a terrible stress fracture: classic signs of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports (RED-S, formerly known as the Female Athlete Triad).
It took years of unconditioning to reframe my mindset around food. Trail running was a big help with that.
When I started training for ultras, I realized how much my body needed more calories, more carbs, even more convenience foods. My body demanded nourishment in order to produce miles and miles of movement, and, finally, I let my body lead the way.
Now, I shudder to think of the relationship I had with food a decade ago and the bland, repetitive behaviors around it that got me nowhere. These days, I eat a lot of food, and my body requires a lot of carbs– certainly more than a tabloid magazine would say.
This is a busy season of life for me, so I’ve begun to deeply embrace convenience foods. Shelf-stable chocolate milk, frozen pizza, and packaged trail snack bars are always in my cupboard, among the fresh veggies and grains I love to batch cook with tasty spices.
I’ve never felt healthier in my body, never felt faster on the trails, and never felt so much joy around sharing food with other athletes.
Rejecting societal conditioning around what a woman “should” act like or look like made me the strongest version of myself yet– and it’s just beginning.
Chocolate milk is even better when ordered at the fancy mountaintop bar.
Our bodies all deserve care and respect.
If you’re planning a big endurance adventure, you need to be even more mindful of the way you treat your body.
My 20 year old self would be in awe of the resilience I honed over the following decade.
By embracing easy running, strength training, and smart fueling, I went from perfectionistic to joyfully realistic, from confused to intentional, and from starving to strong AF. I became an ultramarathoner.
My mission is to help girls and women reimagine what’s possible for them in a world that often excludes and underestimates them.
Whether that’s signing up for your first 50k, summiting a mountain, or taking up ski touring, I hope you can learn from my own experiences so you can focus on kicking butt in your adventures, without the BS the magazines spread.
If you want to share the stoke, please donate $10 to my Adventure Fundraiser!
I’m running a 100 mile race in August 2024 to raise grant money for The Cairn Project to funnel into missions that help more girls experience the wild.