Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

Assorted Topics on Race Preparations

Racing Basics

Arrive in time for the pre-race meetings/briefings and logistics' preparations. Especially so prior to your first race - you want to concentrate on the official announcements, have time to preview the race course, get your supplies organized, and to enjoy a sideline "show". Your last pre-race concern should be rest and sleep. However, it is best accomplished not on the night before the race as few athletes are sleeping well on such night. Your nights prior to the last night is what counts. (See more on the subject in Strategy Topic: Sleeping section.)

"Fishing tales" should not intimidate you. Pre-race social exchanges may reveal accounts by seasoned athletes of heroic victories and defeats, monsterous training sessions, horrors of GI distress, blisters, and visions of gigantic rabbits at night. Be prepared to feel overwhelmed, unprepared, achey and doubting yourself.

Race plan. As a race begins, let an experienced athlete set the early pace. Otherwise, you should have the detailed plan worked out during training to keep you on track for survival. Certainly you won't want to force your pace to be too slow. Nonetheless, fast "rabbit" starts are very common cause for failures in ultras. To survive an ultra it is preferable to race at a pace that will not debilitate you too soon, rather than blasting away and relying on "guts" to fill the gap between fatigue and the finish. Racing to the finish means you can often actually increase your pace in the home stretch, rather than slowly dwindle to a crawl.

Body Maintenance. Over the long distances we face the certainty that our bodies and minds will be sorely tested. No weak spots will be overlooked by the stress and strain. Much like any machinery, you will find that maintenance is cheaper than repairs for your body machine. Apply proper preventative treatment prior to the race. Should a hot spot develops, treat it right away. Don't end up running on blisters; you can suffer adequately on race pain alone. Likewise, lubrication should be applied where chafing could occur, rather than where it has. Hydration comes before thirst, food before hunger, warm jacket before cold night, and so on.

Beware the chair! Be very afraid! Comfortable chair, cot, bed, sleeping bag, or even nice and flat ground have been known to win the battle against even the strongest athletes. "Chair" has a stealthy ability to invite you in, make you comfortable and hold you in. It could be seconds, or minutes or even hours before you may win you release. Meanwhile, such breaks can add up to a significant "dead" time in ultra distance events. Sometimes, not only battles lost but the whole war... as athlete may surrender into temptation, get comfortable, and soon idea of dropping out cames alone, idea that seems now rational and followed by the DNF.

Strategy Topic: Handling Pain and Mental Lows

"This too will pass..." There is one other aspect of preparation that is often not trained for - the mental preparation. A large part of mental preparation is logical in nature. Planning a reasonable schedule for the run, with walk/run ratio and fuel intake schedule based on the experience gained during long training sessions, saves athlete from endeavoring to determine what to do after pain and fatigue sets in. But somehow, the race is worse than you have imagined and prepared for. You feel so low that the thought of deliberate self-injury is preferable to continuing. Or somehow, you feel almost deliriously good. Get carried away by that good feeling and you'll burn out. In both cases the operative phrase is "this too will pass". Whether you are fighting the euphoric desire (usually, a quickly passing one) to go all out or surrendering to the perfectly reasonable argument to stop, the key is to remember that the these feelings will change and opposite sensations are guaranteed to visit you.

Emotional preparation is another part of mental preparation that is the opposite of logical. People with previous competitive athletic experience are familiar with psyching up for a competition. Psyching is a delicate art in any competitive endeavor. Nowhere is it finer than in ultras, where the cost of overenthusiasm is utter disaster. What must be remembered is that, unlike in other sports, ultra-distance athlete's opponents are pain, fatigue, and distance rather than other athletes. The athlete must be prepared to take punishment, not dish it out. During training stage you must prepare yourself emotionally for the trial to be endured. Therefore, think in terms of endurance, not explosion. Also, don't just sacrifice all that time to training, think about why you are sacrificing it. Approach the training session with a solid resolve that the big chunks of your life that you chose to spend training were not a down payment on a DNF. As race day approaches, these emotions may become a fixation. Don't, however, waste the fixation thinking about great success. Think about the discomforts, pain, self-doubt, and reasons to quit that will await you; prepare yourself to such challenges, to endure and to overcame them. Remember, the race seems to consume an eternity while you are engaged in it. Nevertheless, there is a finish line and it eventually come. So think about the final pay-off, that incredible sensation of complex feelings and emotions running through you at once: of accompishment and joy, pain and relief, fatigue and pride.

Mental and physical relaxation are tied together in pain management process. So combine efforts to relax: slow down your breathing; droop your chin and lower lip; drop your shoulders; check your face, head and neck for tension. Relaxing your muscles will help you to diminish pain. Repetitive mantra thought/phrase/breathing pattern can also help to stay focused, diminishing your mental capabilities to observe pain, and providing simplistic bio-feedback.

Fracturing distance or goal down into smaller, manageable segments is a classic method to survive any ultra distance race. Such distances are just too long to comprehend in total. Think in terms of smaller, easy achievable goals: getting to the next mile marker, next feeding, maintaining speed until the next turn. Bargain with yourself: decrease speed/effort (and associated pain level) after certain point in the time or distance, increase pain until certain other future point.

Intelectualize your pain, study and analyze it - is it result of your effort or is it injury in the making? Is it a familiar feeling of working hard that you can maintain or a completely new territory that you can (or cannot) stay in? How will it feel if you go faster? What can you do to diminish it without lowering your performance? Embrace pain for a while, think that this is what it feels like to race that fast or long.

Disassociation. Try to distance yourself from the physical sensations by assuming an external observer role. Study pain with analytical curiosity not desperation. Try to link specific pain and reasons for it, what motion caused what discomfort, what effort results in what level/type of pain. Ultimately, try to retreat elsewhere in your mind. If you can float away from the immediate reality (during segments of your race where you can do so without loosing your focus and effort level), your pain and discomfort will be less intense. You may go traveling to a better times and experiences, go to your pleasant past or jump ahead to the great times after finishing this race.

Strategy Topic: Choosing DNF

Rational reasons

When faced with trully inhuman environmental conditions (life-threatening storm, arctic cold front, etc.) or when personally unable to handle specific conditions (i.e., not prepared to swim in dangerously large surf, dehydrated due to inexperience in racing in hot and humid conditions, etc.)

Mentally quitting and unable to maintain motivation and desire to keep racing.

Challenging yourself beyond your limits and unable to recover or react.

Lack of adequate training going into the race.

Priorities of your non-athletic life (private or professional).

Educated expectation that the injury (pre-existing or sustained in the race) will do great and prolonged damage is a rational reason to quit, but not the pain of the injury during the race. Decision should be made only after a careful consideration of risk/reward scenario centering around some type of measurement to determine if a finish is worth a longer term injury. Serious traumatic injury or certain illness are also reasons to stop.

Strategy Topic: Sleeping

See Sleep Strategies During Ultra-Distance Endurance Events article page for additional information, links and resources.

It's common for athletes to be anxious the night before an event, and have trouble getting to sleep. Here's where a wisdom of resting and sleeping well nights before the last comes in, as being well rested in the days leading to a race is perhaps one of the greater factors in handling lack of sleep during the event as best as possible.

As a general rule for sleeping during the race, if it's an event up to 36 hours in duration, then it's better not to employ a sleeping strategy, and continue racing while anticipating the morning, which will erase the effects sleepiness. At sunrise, you will feel more awake whether you slept any or not. And this cycle continues every day. If a race will take 48 hours or longer, then a sleeping strategy might be a wise idea.

People have different tolerances to sleep deprivation. Everyone gets affected eventually but the level (mental and physical) is different. Good coordination and sound judgement will be noticably affected by the second night. You can't simply train for sleep deprivation, and expect that it will not affect you, but athletes can physically and mentally prepare to such and even adapt to lack of sleep over a longer period of time. Some people seem to need mental aspects of sleep, that is to shut the mind down and stop thinking for awhile. Some crave physical rest. Some just want to rest their eyes, to reduce straining their eyes.

Caffeine is a traditional solution. It requires athlete to abstain prior to the event since it is strongly addictive and body builds up a tolerance to it. During the race, no caffeine should be taken during the day, starting intake as needed (usually around 2 am) and ending right before the daybreak. It doesn't matter in what form caffeine is delivered, as long as it is easily digestable and tolerated by the athlete. It could be a cup of coffee or sodas or a NoDoz tablet.

A lot of research on sleep had been already done but the final word have not been delivered. Anectotical evidance suggest short naps of 15 minutes as optimal to rest and recovery, rising in longer events to 30 min, 60 min, and 90 min. Such periods are suggested by the science of sleep, as person goes through cycles of deep sleep and light sleep. Waking up during the light sleep part of the cycle is much easier and provides feeling of having a better and more complete rest. Approximately for the first 15 minutes of sleep, person never goes into the deep cycle, but still satisfies brain's need to dream and rest.

Personal Hygeine

Cycling

Saddle contact areas: Be clean before your ride. Apply your favorite lubricant for the longer rides. Properly wash and dry your shorts after each use. Wash yourself as soon as possible after every ride.

Helmet: Wash your helmer straps and helmer pads.

Keeping any and all areas which come in contact with your bike, especially pressure areas (feet, hands, elbows, buttocks) clean is a good policy.

Support Crew

Ultra athletes will tell you that getting to the race start is half the fun. If, like most ultra-athletes, you are bringing a support crew to the race, you'll need to realize that for the crew getting there is all of the fun. Your work is half-done already: you trained, your organized, your dreamed; now you only have to enjoy your race. Your crew's work just starting now: they may helped you with some logistics prior to the race, but now their job start in earnest and and will remain until some time after the race. Crew, typically, will consists of friends and family members. And you should be prepared that they may go through three stages during your involvement in ultra racing: enthusiasm, disillusionment, and disgust.

At the first ultra they attend, crew is filled with enthusiasm. Crew is awed at the feats of endurance and treat their athlete like a god. They respond to any demand with alacrity, overlooking the often abrupt way demands are presented. With experience the crew becomes disillusioned. Awe at athlete's accomplishment is replaced by their own demands: "Why aren't you up with the leaders?" When the athlete's suffering manifests itself in rudeness they are apt to respond with hostility and even threats of abandonment. Left untreated, disillusionment can lead to disgust. Soon, your crew will stop volunteering and won't help for anything short of a substantial cash reward!

There are two things that athletes can do to minimize crew disillusionment and avoid disgust. First, treat your crew like the invaluable contributors they are. Make every effort to provide tangible rewards and recognition to your support personnel. Buy them an extra race T-shirt, reward them with special treats such as a trophy or plaque or even just a meal at their favorite restaurant. Most of all, make every effort to be polite, cheerful, and, most important, appreciative. And try to make the trip to include fun for them.