Collin wrote:
Looking at people faster than me, let's think about a couple elites that have excelled in both the regular running world and the ultra world.
1. Sage Canaday jumped into ultras and immediately...destroyed one of the most highly regarded records in trail racing (White River 50). With a lot of ultra experience, Sage is arguably not racing any better in ultras...
2. Matt Carpenter. When he raced Leadville for the first time, he did more typical ultra stuff in his build-up and just exploded in the race. Second time around, he followed his instincts and never went more than 2 hours in training. What was the result? Arguably the single greatest 100 mile trail performance of all time. Really tough guys can perform extraordinarily well without doing Krupicka-esque 10 hour training runs.
Boy, this resonates with me. As always, different things work for different people, but I think a lot of folks do better with keeping some quality in their training. Couple examples:
1. Joe Henderson. Founder of LSD, right? What was his fastest marathon (as near as I know)? HIS FIRST. He had gotten "burned out" on faster track work, so he ran longer and slower for some weeks, then (with the faster work still "in his legs") jumped in his first marathon.
In subsequent marathons, doing everything "right" (according to his LSD principles), Joe never matched that time. I really doubt that that's a coincidence.
2. Me, a much lower-level athlete. When I was racing 50ks, I found that longer training sessions never seemed to help me as much as just going out for about an hour at a stronger pace. Now, I might have had two or three "about an hour"s on a given day; but I was fairly fresh for each, and was usually well recovered the next day. When I did the longer single sessions (say three hours, more or less), it took me a couple of days to recover and never seemed to pay off in races.
I'm not saying every ultra racer benefits by keeping more quality and less quantity in his/her training--we all know people whose races have improved when they went to a much higher training volume and/or long single training runs--but I'd bet a good percentage of athletes would be better off if most of their training resembled what they'd be doing to prepare for races in the 10Mi to marathon range.