Given average conditions (low humidity, 60 degrees, cloudy/no rain)
If you were given $100 per mile for every mile you ran, BUT each subsequent mile has to be faster than your previous. How many miles could you run?
To throw a wrench into things, you are not allowed any aid along the way. NO water, NO gu's or food/nutrition of any kind.
start off at 30 min pace, probably 100 miles, but id probably have to eat after that plus it wouldn't be worth the extra 1000 id get for 10 more miles because itd be hard
You likely would benefit from something faster to start. A good test would be how fast can you somewhat casually walk a mile? Lets estimate 16 min. Assuming you could wear a watch and knew where your mile marks were, you could beat the previous mile by just a few seconds with a slight change in pace at the end to get there in time.
Problem with starting at 30 min is if you took a whole minute off each mile, youd still end up wasting a couple hours before you got down to 15 min miles.
Biggest issue is not eating and drinking so finding the balance between going slow enough where you can easily ensure the continuously faster miles, and not wasting time while you have fuel.
I'd agree with that logic, the slower the start means the more time on your feet, meaning the more energy you burn.
Another issue would be where you would do it. Would you pick a track to keep consistency and have an idea of how on pace you were? Or something else that would provide some different scenery?
yeahmann wrote:
start off at 30 min pace, probably 100 miles, but id probably have to eat after that plus it wouldn't be worth the extra 1000 id get for 10 more miles because itd be hard
No.
No one could even come close to 100 miles without any aid
See I'm sure I could go at least 26 dropping the pace every mile and no aid. I'm just curious what others thought, and if there is a hypothetical "upper limit" to the distance.
Its nowhere near 100 miles haha.
If you got an ultra runner, you likely could do somewhere around 40 to 50 miles.
If you "ran" 15 min miles, 40 miles would be 10 hours. I can't imagine going too much further than that without water while continuing to get faster.
you need some ultra runner strategy here. the trick is to run the same slow pace but use gradually smaller walk breaks along the way.
otherwise, you will be toast by 30 miles.
If you only ran each mile a second or 2 slower than the last you woulnthave to change too much. I think i could finish a marathon starting at 8:15 pace and finishig around 7. Could do at least 22 miles