Taking Advantage of a Second Chance

I arrived in Ottawa late Thursday night just after midnight for my second attempt at a 24 hour race. This time I did not have the stomach flu, I was healthy. Since my failed race attempt 4 weeks prior I had done a couple of 40+ mile runs and a two week taper. Everything felt like it was in order this time as I arrived. I spent Friday going to Walmart to get my needed food/supplies and then dividing it into 50-75 calorie portions that I would consume during the race. After eating my traditional pre-race meaty marinara pasta from Pizza Hut I went to the dome where the race is held to pick up my packet.

Picture inside the Louis Riel Dome where the race is held.

I have to say I was a bit concerned when I saw the track, it was not at all like a normal high school track. It seemed much more stiff, but there was no point worrying about that now. I talked to some of the other racers who all knew each other since the Ontario ultra circuit is fairly small.  I would know many of them better after spending 24 hours on a track with them!

I woke up on race morning after probably sleeping only 5 hours due to excitement/nervousness. I arrived at the dome plenty early, set up my table and cooler with my goodies, and sat around until 15 minutes before the race. At this point you must meet your lap counter. Yes, a person counts your laps for you. This event is put on by the Sri Chinmoy marathon team and it is an endurance event for counters as well. I had two counters that each did 12 hours. Each lap around the 400 meter track you have to wave, make eye contact, or something to make sure they saw you. We took a picture and then we started. Two minutes later I had seen the entire course.

Everything I hoped I needed to run for 24 hours.

Picture of everyone starting the 24 hour race.

I started at my planned 8:00-8:15 pace while walking one lap every twenty minutes. So I would run two miles and then walk a lap. While walking my goal was to eat 50-75 calories and drink. During this time period I settled into third place, Ian and Victor were in first and second.  Both of them were running at a faster pace and also not taking walking breaks so their lead grew quickly. I knew these runners and others had much more impressive prior results than I and it was a long race so I promised to myself not to worry about the standings unless things get interesting towards the end.

They took most of the pictures in the first hour when people were still smiling.

This track is inside the Louis Riel Dome. Unfortunately it was unseasonable warm and sunny so the dome heated up. I heard it reached 76 degrees, which is not too bad, but it was very stuffy. The same as how it feels in a tent on a sunny day with the windows closed. As it heated up my stomach started to turn around 5 hours into the race and I knew I was getting dehydrated. Hours five through seven were not very pleasant and my pace had now slowed to around 9:00 per mile while running much earlier than expected. Hour seven I stopped eating solids and started only drinking Gatorade. This started to turn things around for me and by hour 8 I was feeling good again. I started alternating solid food and Gatorade every twenty minutes. I kept going between 9:00-9:15 pace while running because it is was what felt good at this point. By the 12 hour mark I was at 72.5 miles which was about two miles short of where I expected to be. At 9 hours and 13 minutes Victor stopped since he was no longer on pace for his age group world records that he was attempting. So at this point I was in second place.

This is the leaderboard (in km) they updated very frequently throughout the race.

At hour 12 my stomach once again was not great, but I continued alternating electrolyte drink with solid foods on each of my 20 minute breaks. I had expected to switch to a walk break every 15 minutes at hour 10, but my legs still felt as good as they can after running 70+ miles so I kept up the 20 minute intervals. By 14 hours in both my stomach and legs were feeling the best they had since 4 hours in. I knew there was a good chance I could have been moving very slowly at this point of the race, but instead I had logged 83.5 miles and running 9:00-9:20 pace presented no problems. So I kept clocking out unexpected miles. At the end of 15 hours I was now ahead of my expected distance already and still feeling much better than expected. I wouldn’t say my legs felt exactly fresh, but nothing was preventing me from continuing to run. At 15:18 Ian hit 100 miles and stopped. At this point I was in first place of the people still on the track, though I knew it would be at least a couple hours until I reached 100 miles.

Hours 15 to 18 I kept very steady running around 10:00 pace for 1.5 miles, then walking a lap. During hour 16 I switched from electrolyte drink to Coca-Cola. I was alternating around 8 oz of coke and half a nutty bar at each of my walking breaks. At 17:07 I hit the 100 mile mark and officially was now leading the race. I can’t say I felt good at this point of the race, but better than expected. I was focusing on 20 minutes at a time.  Each 20 minute interval is much easier to manage than thinking about 7 more hours of running.

Moving to the top of the leaderboard as I surpass 100 miles.

I slowed a little more during hours 19 and 20. My pace was now between 10:00 and 10:40 per mile. At this point my goal of 120 miles was just about locked up so I had two new motivators. I would be lying if I said at this point I didn’t want to win the race. Galya was in second and he was running at a consistent pace so I knew it would take a good effort over the last five hours to keep the lead. Second, I wanted to try for 131 miles which is five marathons.

For the first 40 minutes of hour 21 I started to slow more now closer to 11:00-11:20 per mile while running with a very slow walk on my walking laps. I think Galya noticed I was slowing and he picked up his pace. My 8 km lead quickly went down to 5 km. At this rate I knew he would catch me quickly so I now dug deep and put together one more hour of running around 10:00 pace for the running portion of each twenty minute interval. This hurt, a lot. By the end of that hour my lead was back up to 6-7 km and Galya seemed to slow now as well. From here on out I just tried to maintain something that resembled a run, but it was not pretty. My “running” laps were now approaching 16:00 per mile. At 23 hours and 22 minutes I hit 131 miles to mark my five marathons. I managed two more miles over the last 38 minutes to finish with a total of 214.18 km. That is 535.5 laps and just over 133 miles. My average pace, including walking, over the 24 hours was 10:49 per mile.

Left of me is Baladev who was third and right of me is Galya who was second.

Four hours after the race I was already going through US customs at the Ottawa airport. I was wondering how it would go since I was stumbling around, dehydrated, and exhausted from sleep deprivation, but there were no problems. I made it home that night where Kendra had my recovery plan already started for me.

Pumpkin Oreos are key to proper recovery from running 24 hours.

The race went much better than I expected. There were a lot of things that went well.

Stomach: While I had my stomach issues, I was able to take corrective actions each time before allowing any of them to really slow me down.

Feet: At the end of the race I only had one very small blister. My strategy of putting on dry socks and shoes every six hours with a new coat of Vaseline on my toes seemed to do the trick.

Legs: My legs held out a lot longer than I thought they would. I do feel like I entered this race in the best shape of my life for a long flat race, but I had no idea my legs would still function at a real running pace 20 hours into the race.

In my first three races that were longer than 50 miles I was not able to meet my original goal, this is the first time that has happened. I feel the biggest reason is just experience and making better adjustments both during training and during the race. I am pretty excited for what I can try to accomplish in the coming years.

The official results can be seen at http://ca.srichinmoyraces.org/node/6973/previous-results/2014.

And now for my favorite part of running a track race, the data. I have every lap time recorded on my Garmin Forerunner 220 that I uploaded into Excel. First is a simple breakdown of my 5 marathons. I was surprised to see that marathon 4 was actually faster than marathon 3. While I obviously slowed down, I was expecting to slow down much sooner and at a more rapid rate.

Next are by calories consumed by food and per hour. I am amazed by how there is a different food at every race that ends up being my go to food. At Leadville it was watermelon and soup. At this race it was coke and nutty bars.

That is 10 of the 12 bars that come in a pack of nutty bars.

This shows the number of miles per hour while only counting completed laps. This is much more consistent than planned or expected.

And the graph I am sure everyone was waiting for, a scatter plot of each lap time with a line for my cumulative average lap time. You can distinctly see my three shoe changes which were the only laps over 6 minutes. There is also a distinction between my walking laps and running laps. The few falling in between were running laps with a bathroom break. That is until the end where things slowed down.


And the last graph show my cumulative average lap time plotted against the expected times I had mapped out before the race for 120, 125, and 131 miles. Once again, I was much more consistent than I thought would be over most of the race.


Aftermath: I was pretty well dehydrated at the end of this race and was not able to eat much until a few hours after it ended. Full meals did not all settle for a couple days. My legs were absolutely destroyed the day I finished the race and the next day, but by the third day my walk was almost normal. Now, five days after the race, I feel like I am mostly recovered for every day purposes.

For the next couple of weeks I will purely rest. Then I want to focus on strengthening surrounding muscles even more than last year before building back up to a high volume of running. I am likely running the 50k in May at the IAT50, but I have no defined plans yet after that. I am sure I will find something. Let the off season begin!