Week 10
Remember to warm up before running.
| series 1 | series 2 | series 3 | ||||
| running | marching | running | marching | running | marching | |
| day 1 | 11,5 | 1 | 11,5 | 1 | 11,5 | 1 |
| 1-day break | ||||||
| day 2 | 12 | 1 | 12 | 1 | 12 | 1 |
| 1-day break | ||||||
| day 3 | 12,5 | 1 | 12,5 | 1 | 12,5 | 1 |
| 2-day break | ||||||
If you manage to complete the entire day, you can safely proceed to the next one. If you are having a bad day and cannot run the entire training, it will be better for you to repeat the training after a day’s break. There is no need to hurry – regularity is more important than results.
The races that make a marathon look short
A marathon is 26.2 miles, and finishing one is a genuine achievement. Then there is a whole other world of running where the marathon is barely a warm-up. Ultramarathons stretch the definition of what a person can cover on foot, and the events below are some of the most extreme on the planet.
Heat, mountains, and history
Few races are as notorious as the Badwater 135, a 135-mile (217 km) run through Death Valley, California, in the depths of summer. Runners face temperatures that can top 120°F, climb across three mountain ranges, and rack up around 14,600 feet of ascent along the way. It is routinely called the world's toughest foot race, and the field earns the title.
Others trade heat for history and altitude. The Spartathlon covers 153 miles (246 km) across Greece, retracing the route the ancient courier Pheidippides is said to have run from Athens to Sparta in 490 BCE. The Western States 100, a 100-mile (161 km) run through California's Sierra Nevada, pairs punishing distance with high mountain trails. In the Italian Alps, the Tor des Géants pushes things to 205 miles (330 km) with a staggering 79,000 feet of cumulative climbing, while Colorado's Hardrock 100 packs roughly 33,000 feet of ascent into its 100 miles (161 km) of high, unforgiving San Juan terrain.
The truly absurd
Two events sit almost beyond comprehension. The Iditarod Trail Invitational sends runners across frozen Alaska over either 350 miles (563 km) or a full 1,000 miles (1,609 km), through cold and terrain that would stop most people cold. And then there is the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race in Queens, New York, the longest certified footrace in the world. Competitors must cover 3,100 miles (4,989 km) within 52 days, averaging nearly 60 miles a day, by looping the same 0.55-mile city block roughly 5,649 times. It is as much a mental and spiritual ordeal as a physical one.
What draws people to distances like these is hard to explain from the couch. Finishers often talk less about the miles than about what the miles did to them: the strange clarity, the low points survived, the bond formed with other runners and with the landscape itself. You do not need to attempt any of this to appreciate it. But it is worth knowing these events exist, if only as a reminder of how far the human body can go when someone decides to find out.