The Longer the Race, the Weirder the Racers' Physiology, and the Less You Can Generalize From Them

A study by Saugy et al on PLoS ONE makes (or implies) the claim that super-long ultras (as in, 200 miles) don't damage muscle as much as just "regular" ultras of 100 miles.[1] The data for this paper comes from 25 runners (9 completing) the 2011 Tor des Géants (TdG) in the Italian Alps. (Video of that race here). To be sure, it's a cool paper, and I admire them not only for conceiving and executing these studies, but also for getting anyone to put up with their experiment during the race! They do a number of measures on the nerves and muscles of runners before and after the race, and compare against a control group of people who are merely sleep-deprived; this way they can get an idea to what extent the wear-and-tear of super-long ultras is related to sleep deprivation. When races get to be this stupid-long (in space and time), part of the endurance is the lost sleep.

Here's the part that the press picked up: in addition to comparing racers to sleep-deprived controls, the paper also compares the results from one race to another - specifically, to the shorter Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc of 2009,[2] which is "only" 100 miles, with 40% of the elevation change of the TdG. Counter-intuitively, runners in the shorter race showed more fatigue and inflammation than in the longer race. Interesting! The authors go on to discuss reasons why this might be, mainly that the pace in a longer race is slower, which is less punishing. Specifically, the pace in the longer race here was 15% slower, and some of the wear-and-tear parameters were 50% or more lower!

That does make sense, but it raises another interesting question they don't address about inter-individual exercise response differences - which I think is more likely to be relevant here than in most experiments. We can't be sure the difference is because of any difference in the race experiences themselves, because the racERS are different too. The longer the event, the more systematically different the racers are from racers in shorter events. Not only will people train differently; more importantly, in these groups of racers at the margins of human endurance, you are certainly enriching for genetic variants that allow this kind of performance and which are likely to affect the response to this kind of stress. You're out at the very end of a long tail, many standard deviations away from the mean. The harder the race, the more you're enriching. Basically, they're a bunch of mutants! Consequently, the clearest support for this theory would require that they sample the same runners. This would be hard to pull off, but it might make a difference.

Above: the route during the Tor des Geants, i.e. what's wrong with you people. From Jiloutside.
Below: a few of the Tor des Geants runners. Get it? From screenrant.com.


To my knowledge this has not been studied, but here's an experiment that would test it. Take a group of people who ran a 26-mile road marathon, and another group who have run a mountainous 100-mile ultra. Train them equally, and control for pace so you expect them all to finish in around the same time. My prediction is that even with the same pace and distance and training, the 100 milers would have less wear-and-tear than the marathoners. Because the 100-milers are further out on the tail of the genetic distribution. On the other hand, if the wear-and-tear is the same, then Saugy et al were right not to worry about it. (Part of the improvement in athletic records may be because of new mutations and/or a more efficient sorting mechanism to find these athletes, discussed here in the prediction of 2038 for the first sub-2-hour marathon.)

Granted, the difference between people who run 200 miles versus 300 miles is probably not as great as the difference between people who road marathons and 100-milers. And, it was probably hard enough getting this data for any runners, let alone the same runners in multiple events - and try getting a budget to train people and an ethics board to approve your experimental endurance race. But interesting study and look forward to further results from this crew.


References:

1. Saugy J, Place N, Millet GY, Degache F, Schena F, Millet GP. (2013) Alterations of Neuromuscular Function after the World's Most Challenging Mountain Ultra-Marathon. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65596. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065596

2. Millet GY, Tomazin K, Verges S, Vincent C, Bonnefoy R, Boisson R, Gergelé L, Féasson L, Martin V. (2011) Neuromuscular consequences of an extreme mountain ultra-marathon. PLoS ONE 6: e17059. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017059

Training by Not Training

I used to wonder what would happen if competitive road marathon runners got on some of the mountainous trail courses in the Western US. My prediction was that, gifted though they were, trail and terrain would be the undoing of people accustomed to flat predictable streets. I finally got at least one data point when a trail runner I'd met a couple times in one of the groups I ran with, ran against a Tanzanian guy who was single-digit finisher in one of the big Northeast U.S. marathons. No doubt the trail runner I knew was a strong runner, but he wasn't a national-level ass-kicker. And sure enough, the trail runner beat the road marathoner.

I can't extrapolate too much from that N=1, but I also wondered if familiarity with the terrain meant something as well. Because the race in question was on Mt. Diablo, which the trail runner knew like the back of his hand. There's something to be said for being familiar with a trail; your body just knows when it needs to gear up for a climb and how nasty it'll be and when it can relax. It's for that reason I was so interested in this great piece by Tommy Rivs about his experience trail racing in Costa Rica. Long story short (but still worth reading the long version), an outstanding college runner got his ass handed to him in a mountain race in Costa Rica by the locals - even after training for it for 6 months. So of course he wanted to know why, dammit. And the answer was that the guys who beat him were porters. Almost every day during the year, they hiked up that specific mountain, with weight, and then ran back down. Not surprisingly, after becoming a porter with them for a few months, he took 30 minutes off his time in a 20-mile race.


Legally you have to put pictures on blog posts. Above, Mt. Diablo from Mt. Tam (from Wiki), below, looking back down Cerro Chirripó in Costa Rica, from summitpost.org.


Perhaps also relevant: these porter guys were porters as moonlighters (literally; read the piece). During the day they worked in coffee fields. So no part of any of their jobs involved sitting down.

Western States 100 vs Angeles Crest 100 Comparison

While running in Berkeley today I ran into noted ultrarunner Mike Palmer, as one does. (Seriously, this has happened to me so consistently I would be worried he were stalking me if I weren't the weirder of the two.) During our brief chat I asked if he did the Angeles Crest 100, and he responded "It did me." (With that course could it be otherwise?)

Full disclosure: I have never run either the AC100 or the Western States, and don't plan to, but the trails they're run on are fun and I've run much of the AC100, and getting on toward all of the Western States in my quest to "connect" from Nevada to the Golden Gate Bridge. And after Mike and I parted ways I wondered which course is harder? The best way to compare might be to look at any runners who ran both.

In 2015 there were six such maniacs. Despite that the AC100 took a median of 9.1% longer for these six to finish, they finished a median of 5 percent better in the rankings in AC than in WS. The obvious explanation for this is that although WS100 has a more competitive field, AC100 is more difficult. (Interested in this stuff? Check out Dick Collins 50-miler scatter plot of age vs time. Difference for men and women!)

So: Jeff Giumarra, Matthew Menacher, Jorge Pacheco, Mauricio Puerto, Franco Soriano, and Mark Tanaka, this Bud's for you!




The total elevation gain loss for WS of 41,000 is less than 46,390 for AC, and AC is higher on average. The page I got this from has a number of other profile comparisons, many of them done by Chihping Fu.

Rod Dixon: A Great Pennsylvania/New Zealand Marathoner

Because he ended up moving from the awesome mountain trails of New Zealand to settle in my home town in Pennsylvania, I decided to look up Rod Dixon. People mentioned him living in the area when I was a kid. If you don't know where Nolde Forest is, that's okay - this article about his crack at the 1983 New York Marathon is still interesting as a document of early 80s running history. He won in 2:08:59 by 9 seconds, catching the leader at the end in what is widely considered the greatest finish in the history of the race.

Interesting, and difficult though this is to believe for us in 2014, Dixon was the first non-American to win New York - and no American-born runner has won it since. (And only one American has won it since then, Eritrean-born (and San Diego/Mammoth's own) Meb Keflezighi.)

He also held the course record for Bay to Breakers in 1983, but did something even better in his fun-run in 1985.

Might I just point out with absolutely no patriotic bias, once again we see that the two best places to train in the U.S. are Pennsylvania and California.

The Boston Marathon...Not That Long Ago

In 1972 (1972!) women weren't allowed to run Boston. Actually it wasn't until 1977 that they were allowed to run, largely as a result of what Kathrine Switzer did in 1972. What's amazing is that based on the story, and based on the footage, the participants in the race seemed completely supportive. Oddly, it was the race director who had the problem.

Kickstarter for Documentary About "Suffer Fest" Races

In an interview recently I was asked how I got into trail running and long races. (It was a residency interview, not an interview about running, but it just came up.) I said that I seemed to have a knack for endurance, solitude, and not knowing when to quit, and I went from road races to road marathons to trail marathons. Once you start doing trail marathons on wacky terrain, a) it's really purty and b) you mean progressively weirder = more interesting people, and finally aspire to be one of them. You meet paleo people, and back-to-nature types, and high-tech self-quantifiers, and poets, and radicals, and auto mechanics, and people who live in geodesic domes, and people from countries and tribes you've barely heard of who are addicted to these races and follow them around like the Grateful Dead of old. There's something off about people who do this stuff for fun. I mean seriously four-standard-deviations-away-from-the-mean kind of people, and I love them all, every last one.

So - the Kickstarter mentioned in the title is for a documentary that seems to focus on these weird=interesting people, which is a huge part of why people do this, and what I personally love about the community. It deserves a shout for noticing this truth. Give it a look-see!

Analysis: Dick Collins Fire Trail 50M, Time vs Age

Thought I'd take a look at the numbers from what used to be Ann Trason's race in my old backyard in the East Bay hills. Until I coincidentally ran some of the still-marked trails later on the same day this year, I'd completely forgotten about this race, or rather hadn't thought "hey it's October in the East Bay hills, when's Fire Trails" which come to think of it I guess is forgetting. (Hey, sue me. I've been in another city in medical school.) I was sad not to have used the chance to stop by to see some friends, but not sad I didn't enter; had no time to train anyway. Here's a scatterplot of the results.

What those numbers above mean is that for this curve (with a decent R^2 value) male runners gain 4.3 seconds on their mile split in this race per year of age. This is a little more pessimistic than the claim that runners keep their times until their sixties, as argued by many, most recently and famously McDougall in Born to Run. More interestingly, the women were all over the place with a much worse goodness-of-fit score that predicts only a 1.7 second gain on mile split per year (below). This is the trend I'd expected ahead of time, but not to this degree! Being all over the place is emphatically a good thing because it means that race results for you ladies are much less predetermined by age than for us men, and on top of that your time increase per year is smaller. Whether this is a result of universal human biology (women innately resemble fine wine) or something to do with selection (e.g. women start racing later in life, or are more likely to interrupt racing careers with more-traumatic-to-female-physiology childbearing which can be recovered from, and so the times show that) is another question.

Angeles Crest 100 2013

No I didn't run it. I thought about going up to pace but ended up not being able to leave San Diego that day due to other commitments (medicine sucks.) But I was very happy to run across this nice vid done by Chihping Fu, who I had met in the trail/ultra community when I was still up in SF. Super nice guy and glad to see him here. Enjoy! I should also add it seems like the post-race tradition is now to go to Din Tai Fung in Arcadia. Great, now when I hit that place one the way back from Angeles N.F. I'll feel guilty for not having just finished a 100-miler. Yeah, thanks guys! :)

Beware, as of this writing (9 August 2013) there is a fire burning in the northeastern part of Angeles N.F. (Lone Pine Canyon) that has caused some evacuations in Wrightwood, and may be changing this guy's plans for the weekend.

The Big Horn Trail Run

If ever you doubt the ability of dedicated trail runners to make a difference in protecting the land, look no further than the Big Horn Trail Run in Wyoming: "These runs were initially started by local trail runners interested in preserving and protecting the Dry Fork and Little Bighorn River Canyons from a planned pump storage hydroelectric project and other development. We desired to increase public awareness of the natural beauty, rugged terrain, and unique geology of the Bighorn Mountains and Dry Fork and Little Bighorn River drainage in particular so that informed decisions could be made regarding management of these resources. Through extensive public input, the planned pump storage hydroelectric project has been placed on hold and probably is dead; but the area remains potentially threatened in the future by other possible development."

My own experience with these mountains is in literally stumbling across them during a road trip and they're every bit as awesome as the picture below suggests. If you want a once-in-a-lifetime experience, check this race out. (It doesn't hurt that the rest of Wyoming ain't half bad either.)


From bighornmountains.com

"This Was a Terrible Mistake"

From economist Dan Ariely on mountain climbing: "...if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, 'This was a terrible mistake. I'll never do it again. Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos.'"

The first time someone runs a difficult race or class of race, they generally have that reaction near or at the finish line. Then that night, they're looking for online running calendars to find the next one.

It must be said that the beauty if you go climbing in Latin America, mountains and same (or next) day beach mojitos are not mutually exclusive. You can get mojitos in Washington State and drink them on the beach but somehow it's not the same.

Below: two awesome beaches.
As an exercise, reason out on which a mojito is best consumed.

Winners of Boston Are Winners, Period

Let's not forget one important thing about the race: the winners! This year it was Lelisa Desisa (Ethiopia). Another incredible story is the 1946 winner, Stylianos Kyriakides (Greece), who used the race quite deliberately to raise awareness and money for his war-torn country's recovery.



While we're at it, let's not forget Vanderlei de Lima (Brazil) who got attacked on the course in the 2004 Olympic marathon in London and lost his shot at gold and got the bronze.

A Fake Marathon. No, Not The Running Of It, The Actual Race Itself

Some goober has created a website for a marathon which is admitted on its face to be fake; maybe s/he is hoping a real event will grow out of the online presence. For the Borges fans out there, it's a sort of Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius of endurance events. The internet abounds in such opportunities!

If you haven't yet read it, this New Yorker account of a Michigan dentist's much more deceptive faking of marathons is fascinating.

This Will Make You Feel Good

Marines in a triathon carrying a kid whose prosthetic legs failed during the race:

Marathon Cheater Article in New Yorker

Amazing article, highly recommended.

Why Lie About Your Marathon PR

An important question, relating to a (suddenly much more) public figure.

No Algodones Dunes Marathon: Or, the Rare Triumph of Common Sense

After a scouting trip to the desert, I decided to take a pass on my brilliant idea of running the Algodones Dunes from I-8 to 78.


Running this for 22 miles? No thank you sir.
That's actually one on of my worse ideas, which is saying something.
Even driving it like these guys would suck.
As if to emphasize the point that this is a blighted land, while we were passing through nearby Brawley on the way to the Blythe Intaglios, the Earth delivered up some nice earthquakes.  The timing couldn't have been better.  I had to put down the coffee I was preparing and ran out of the convenience store.  I went back in to finish it and another one hit. 

But a bad idea that I still think is good is the San Diego coastal relay! 78 miles, 10 runners. Who's in? Main problem to solve, running along the shipyards and whatnot along the east side of San Diego Bay would be much less pleasant than running along the Silver Strand, but how to cross over from OB/Point Loma to Coronado - add a kayak leg?


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Why Isn't Meb Keflezighi Better Known?

[Update: he did the half and no one saw anything but his back. 1h2m40s, ahead right from the gun. Congratulations Meb.]

Hometown boy Keflezighi was a silver medalist at the 2004 Olympics, and the first American winner of the NY Marathon in who knows how long. And according to this article in the U-T, the guy can't get a shoe deal? Something's wrong there. I remember how excited I was in 2004 to see an American take the silver. I hope athletic marketers start to realize what an undervalued asset he would be. If you go out to see the start of Rock n' Roll, look for him!

Great Narrative For Western States

Read Mike Palmer's account here.

No More Alcohol at Bay to Breakers in San Francisco

As of now the funnest footrace held every May in San Francisco is banning alcohol. People couldn't figure out how to have fun without making a shambles. As someone who quite often consumed large amounts of this substance during past races but still was able to refrain from littering, peeing on people's doorsteps, and generally being a nuisance (along with the rest of the people in my group) I'm sad, but I'm also sympathetic with the city. For those familiar with San Francisco's traditions, this has gradually turned into Halloween in the Castro.

Also worth noting: in Japan you can buy beer out of vending machines, and drink it legally while walking around in public. Why? Because people behave themselves, that's why.

"The Best Post-Race Food, Ever, No Question"

Agreed. Why can't we have sauerkraut after races in California?