The Road to Ultras for a Normal Guy

by David Decker

My running path started just like most people that I know.

Back in 2000 I looked at my body and decided I needed to lose some weight and the best way to do that was to run…and start small. Running 3 miles on the treadmill was a big deal.

Years before, I visited the New York City Marathon when my father was running so it was perfectly normal to be around people who ran long distances.  My father had 3 marathons to his credit but it wasn’t really anything that I aspired to.  It was just (for lack of a better word) normal.

To people that don’t run, running really looks like a waste of time.  I know that.  So, what I did was surround myself with people who love to run or bike or swim.  I couldn’t do that easily here in the Lehigh Valley (most triathletes seem to live in San Diego) so I made “virtual” friends.  I signed up for the tri-drs list.  Basically it is a group of a couple hundred triathletes from around the world who answer questions and write race reports.  And they would also get together for races around the country.

Not everyone on The Tri List aspires to be an Ironman but it happens to be the major goal for the vast majority of them.  And when you hear person after person talk about this race or that Ironman day after day…it just becomes “normal”.

It took me two years of running and training just to get to the point where I could START training for the Ironman.  In those first couple of years I did a couple marathons…not fast, but I did them.

What I found I was really good at was racing for many hours.  The longer the race, the better I did.

I was getting daily emails from the triathlon list and several people would talk about this other group…the Ultra list.  Around town I was known to my friends as that crazy guy who does all that running and biking.  Fifteen seconds on the Ultra List quickly showed me that there is always someone farther out on the bell curve…someone farther out on the Lunatic Fringe.

I joined the Ultra email list.  Same concept as the triathlon list but instead of a couple hundred members from around the world…there were a couple thousand.

These people think nothing at all about heading out for a 37 mile run with a group of friends on a random Saturday.  They think nothing at all about putting on races in the most bizarre locations (Badwater comes to mind) and think nothing of creating the very hardest races that can be imagined (the Barkley Marathons has had only 9 finishers since the race was started in the mid 80′s).

After a couple months of hearing these stories, you realize that these people really are just everyday normal people with an extraordinary talent for being on their feet for very long periods of time.

Not everyone from the Ultra list races 100 milers during their year…or their career.  But most of them do.

I decided to do my first 50 miler…the Vermont 50 mile race to be exact.  But I needed some intermediate steps first.  I ran a 50k race out on Long Island and I ran a trail marathon in the Reading area.

The 50 mile race was a blast.  My father paced me from miles 30 to 42 and another friend paced me to the finish.  It was just shy of 12 hours but I was done.

No fanfare at the end of the race.  No medal.  Just a t-shirt and a hand shake from the race director and a hot shower before getting in the car and driving back to Pennsylvania.

It did offer something very special though.  It offered me the ability to be out in the mountains, out on the trails, it offered me a way to test what I have inside and to see if I can move forward when it shouldn’t be humanly possible to move forward anymore.  Let me tell you…there were some very sore parts of my body at the end of that race (some parts that shouldn’t ever be sore or discussed in mixed company) but somehow I finished.

It has been 4 years since I ran that race and now I’m finally back to a place where I can start training for my first hundred.  The Umstead 100 miler to be exact, next spring.

Can I finish 100 miles in less than 30 hours?  I really have no idea.  (That happens to be the same answer that I had every step of the way, Sprint triathlon, Olympic distance tri, half Ironman, full Ironman, marathon, 50k, and 50 miles.)

For me, there is so much more to running than just trying to go faster.  I want to explore.  On one level I guess I want to explore what my body is capable of but in a more literal sense, I want to explore the country from a place that most people don’t get to see.  One of my goals for next year is to do a double crossing of the Grand Canyon.  They have a name for it on the Ultra list, the Rim to Rim to Rim.  I know it sounds impossible but there are many people doing that each year.  This year, as a training day for the hundred, I plan on doing some running on the Appalachian trail.  I’ll get on the trail at Hawk Mountain and run the 12 miles to where it crosses route 309 and then turn around and run back.  That’s the kind of exploration I’m talking about.

In the end, I’m not so worried about finishing or not finishing the 100 mile race.  If the weather is good, if my training is good, if my nutrition is good…then I’ll have as good a shot as anyone.  I’m just a normal guy with very average running talents who has happened to meet some wonderful people all due to running and most have become very good friends (I’ve never met a runner that I didn’t like).  So, it isn’t important to me that I finish.  It is important that I start.