Has anyone here run/walked 100 miles in 24 hours?...

Common sense guy wrote:

There was a 100 mile walk/run held at a small lake where I work out sometimes. I was going in the opposite direction of what they were going at the time and so saw pretty everyone who was participating. There were probably a few hundred.

My primary inner thought that I wanted to shout, but never did, was, “Why!?!???’

I arrived after they had been going for about ten hours already. Some were obviously hurting badly but soldiering on. Good for them, but I was going to go home after a few laps and enjoy the rest of the evening. I truly do not understand what drives a person to actually want to stay up and run/walk for 24 hours..... or 100 miles.

Nothing against the thought, but it is completely alien to me.

Why do it? Just for the achievement - of the people posting in this thread, I think there's been just one person who's even done it.

It seems that fewer people have covered 100 miles in 24 hours than run a sub-3 marathon.

But, I'd say the sub-3 marathon is harder.

BLtheKid wrote:

Why do it? Just for the achievement - of the people posting in this thread, I think there's been just one person who's even done it.

It seems that fewer people have covered 100 miles in 24 hours than run a sub-3 marathon.

But, I'd say the sub-3 marathon is harder.

I agree. A lot less people do 100 mile and 24 hour races than running Marathons. So a lot less people have run a sub 24 hour 100 miler than a sub 3 hour Marathon

But a sub 3 hour Marathon is harder. But it does not mean that every sub 3 hour runner could run an ultra or a sub 24 hour 100 miler. These are basically two quite different skillsets.

So both things are hard and not many runners can do both.

oakland runner wrote:

It has been kind of humorous reading this thread. FWIW, I ran/walked my first 100 miler in 1979 in 18 hours. I was a 2:39 marathoner at the time. The marathon time eventually went down to 2:27 but I never ran/walked another flat 100 miler until 2015 although I did over 100 ultras between 1979 and 2015 and was on the U.S. national ultra team. At age 60 it is going to be a challenge for someone who has not been doing ultras regularly to break 24 hours. I think that the game plan of running 20 miles in three hours and then alternating running and walking on a 4/1 ratio is a good one. That is basically what I did back in 1979 except that I ran the first 40 miles, not the first 20.

This discussion does have me more curious about actually doing this in a few years. When I walked for 17.5 miles six years ago, I was doing no running at all but walking 130 miles a week. The endurance was there but I wouldn't have been able to mix in a faster running portion to get me to 100 miles (if I had tried and even been able to do 24 hours).

In the future, if I'm running 50 miles per week but with no extra walking beyond what I normally do in a day, I'll be in decent running shape, but maybe I wouldn't have enough endurance?

In order to do it, I think a rough overall plan for myself might be to run 37 miles in 6 hours and walk 63 miles in 18 hours. And this would also presume I didn't somehow stiffen up too much during the walking parts to prevent me from running again.

It's very hard wrote:

I walked 30 miles once when I locked my keys in my car. It was terrible. It hurt much worse than any of the marathons I've run.

LOL. Nice. That feeling is what I was doing once or twice a week in lead up to a 100 mile ultra. I over trained a bit and didn't finish but got really good at banging out 30 miles on any day of the week with no recovery needed. Recovery was usually just a bigger dinner than normal.

I'll comment on some of the suggestions based on my experience in a few 24 hour events...

As some have said, time on your feet is a big factor. The long hours beat up your feet. I don't mean blisters, but rather fatigue/pain/swelling.

For most people there ends up being A LOT of walking vs. running. I didn't practice walking and the different biomechanics between running & walking had me hurting badly in new places that my long runs didn't prepare me for. You might want to include some long walks in your prep phase.

Unless you are in the kind of shape that suggests you could run most/all of the way, then incorporating alternating run/walk periods from very early on seems to pay off better than running as far as you can then resorting to walking.

24 hour events on a looped course are fun! (For me that means 1.5 to 3 mile loops, not a 400m track.) You will see the same people many time during the event. There will be people who are slower than you (almost guaranteed) who you will pass occasionally, and there will be faster people passing you every once in a while. There will also be people that you find yourself pacing with for long stretches and you will probably make a few friends along the way.

As others suggest, having regular access to aid is really valuable as a time saver and also serves to mentally break the event into manageable chunks.

BTW... I'm 59 now and although I've been a runner since I was 16, I didn't begin doing ultras until I was 53. Before I did my first ultra (50k) on a whim, with about 2 weeks warning, I was running over 60 miles per week. I surpassed my goal in that first one, but never really did as well in the longer (i.e. 24 hr.) events. I'm kind of over them now due to health issues, but it was fun to take on a new challenge for awhile.

I'm reading Adharanand Finn's "Rise of the Ultra Runners" and what stuck with me was that in the middle of his ramp up to run UTMB, when he was regularly staying in the lead packs of 50M+ ultras, and when his marathon times were right around 3 hrs, he ran the 24-hour race on the 400M track in London.

He completed 87 miles.

Now, he was probably one of the best runners there, and he hadn't been gearing his training to track running, but his account of his time at the 24h race is gripping. He 1) had a plan, 2) followed the plan, 3) 12 hours in, the plan went to hell, 4) he was broken and tried to drag himself along, or to quit, 5) suddenly, he got a burst of wind and finished happy.

This is a guy who ran the "up run" at Comrades in 8h 45m. That's better than a 10 minute mile for almost 9 hours.

I agree that running a sub 3 marathon is probably HARDER than running 100 miles in a 24 hr race, but there's no guarantee that succeeding at the first will make you successful at the second. None at all.

I have walked 100 miles in 24 hours 8 different times from 2015 to 2018. Training now to make two more attempts in 2020.

Running sub 3 hour Marathons, running Comrades and running a 24 hour race are entirely different things. Different running skills required of each of them. I probably could have done Comrades in that time, I did over 100 miles in 24 hours many times but I never did a sub 3 Marathon.