The Rise of the Ultra Runners
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*Shortlisted for the 2019 William Hill Sports Book of the Year* Marathons are no longer enough. Pain is to be relished, not avoided. Hallucinations are normal. Ultra running defies conventional logic. Yet this most brutal and challenging sport is now one of the fastest-growing in the world. Why is this? Is it an antidote to modern life, or a symptom of a modern illness? Adharanand Finn travelled to the heart of the sport to find out - and to see if he could become an ultra runner himself. His journey took him from the deserts of Oman to the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies, and on to his ultimate goal, the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. The Rise of the Ultra Runners is the electrifying, inspirational account of what he learned along the way. Through encounters with the sport's many colourful characters and his experiences of its soaring highs and crushing lows, Finn offers an unforgettable insight into what can be found at the boundaries of human endeavour.
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Finn perfectly captures why we run for silly distances and what we feel when we push ourselves to our physical and mental limits. Without resorting to extraneous adjectives he shows how we talk ourselves into pushing even deeper than we're comfortable admitting. To arrive at the finish line, on the other side of darkness and pain, is very difficult to explain. “Rise of the Ultra Runners” is what I want to give to others after I complete an Ultramarathon, to say “here - this is what I feel.”
Running! Running far! Finn goes from marathoner to ultramarathoner for work reasons but falls into the addiction of the pain cave and brings a number of interviews with elite ultrarunners into this tale of running one of the biggest ultra races.
If you have been in or followed the ultra scene for any amount of time there is nothing new here for you.
The author found a way to have someone else pay for him to race and get into UTMB.
One take away is the amount of talk about mental struggles in races and yet way more time spent discussing running form than mental training to improve his performance/enjoyment of racing long distance.
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