Fitting 39km of running a day around work or sprinting 160km in 43 hours through the Alps is something that ultra runners take in their stride, as three of them tell ROSEMARY MacCABE
ON OCTOBER 25th, some 13,000 people ran in the Dublin City Marathon, a 42km crosscity course. For them, the event was the culmination of weeks of careful training and, for many, a physical and mental achievement the likes of which they had never before experienced. But there are those for whom a marathon is equivalent to a Saturday training session.
These people are ultra runners, taken from the term “ultra marathon”, used to describe any race longer than a marathon, usually starting at 50km and stretching to 24 hours, and longer. These people run while the rest of the world sleeps; they run while the rest of the world watches television; they run while we are eating breakfast, preparing dinners or sitting in the cinema. Somehow they manage to fit running in and around their lives – to them, there is logic in the madness. But who are they? And how do you get to a point at which running for 24 hours is normal?
"I'd stopped smoking and was looking for something"
AISLING COPPINGER is 38 and lives in Knocklyon, Dublin with her husband, Rob, and their three children, 19-year-old Carrie, Grace, 18, and James, 16. Together, they run Wheelworx, a sports shop in west Dublin and – also together – they run, almost every day, for between three and five hours before work. “Because we work for ourselves, we squeeze it in before the shop opens,” says Aisling. “We get up early and do a long run, for three or four hours. Rob runs with me a lot of the time but if he’s not doing five-hour runs he comes on the bike with me. We spend every minute together, basically, but it works for us.”
Aisling hasn’t always been the active, outdoor type – running became a hobby at the same time as smoking ceased being a habit, which might be a story familiar to a lot of quitters.
“I was one of those people who’d stopped smoking and was looking for something. My goal, the minute I started, was to run a marathon. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done but I wanted something bigger so, a year later, I entered the Connemara Ultra Marathon, which was 39 miles. I just set myself a challenge and decided I was going to do it.”
Her most gruelling challenge so far has been a 160km run through the Alps – which took a staggering 43 hours to complete. “That was the longest run I’ve done . . . but you’ll find people who’ve run a hell of a lot longer.”
The mental aspect must be the most difficult thing to conquer. How did she keep her mind focused, even if her body felt able? “It was really hard, mentally,” Coppinger says. “My legs will get me through anything but there were two dark nights through the Alps, and I found it really tough. With other long runs, I always think, you’re just putting one foot in front of the other. That’s the way I’ve always been with running.”
The striking aspect about ultra running seems to be the sense of community and it’s something that echoes in Coppinger’s Alps run. “You have an understanding with other runners,” she says. “You get each other through it. Everyone suffers through the same things.”
Today, Coppinger will run in the 100km world championships in Gibraltar. “They’d be continuous laps, short laps, so you’re not seeing anything beautiful but I’ve done two of them and loved them, and wanted to have a go at something longer.”
Then, bizarrely: “I found them very short. Next year I’m going to try a 24-hour, maybe even try at an Irish record at 24 hours.”
So, do people think she’s mad? “It drives me bonkers,” she says, and laughs. “Other runners think you’re mad, too.”
‘A lot of it, for me, is the sense of adventure’
HELEN LAVIN is 33 and lives in a suburb of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-Saint Paul in Minnesota. A native of Castlebaldwin in Co Sligo, Lavin works for Boston Scientific as a regulatory affairs manager. Lavin runs five times a week, practises yoga in the evenings, and finds the odd evening to phone home.
“The biggest problem is fitting it all in,” she says. It’s a common refrain. “One of the best things is that, when I moved here, I joined a running club, so my circle of friends is largely made up of runners. Rather than meeting up for coffee, we’ll meet for a run. I don’t have kids, so that helps, and my boyfriend’s a runner too.”
Lavin ran her first marathon – the regular kind – in Dublin in 2004. “I started running eight or nine years ago. I was pretty inactive before that, and I just started going to the gym to get a bit of fitness back.”
It must have been a difficult journey, going from inactivity to ultra running. “I started running on the treadmill and hated it, but over time . . . I did the mini marathon and struggled through it, in 2002.
After that I started running outdoors and, just by keeping it up, I started to realise, ‘I can do this’,” she says.
“When I moved to Minneapolis, I started training with a group, then running on trails. I was running with a friend when I started to hear about people doing 50km and 50-mile races, and a friend and I decided, in early 2007, that we should just try one of them.”
Ultra runners speak of these races as if they’re trying on shoes, or new coffee brews. “Well, I had been training for marathons pretty regularly, so I trained for it the same way I would train for a marathon. I’d run 30 to 40 miles a week, and do long runs,” she says.
Lavin’s longest run was 161km, in September 2008. “The race was great – I felt ready for it. My training had gone well, my sister was over on vacation so she supported me, and I knew a lot of people there,” says Lavin. “There were tough times, in the middle of the night section especially, maybe at 60 or 70 miles. There were parts where I wished I felt better but I didn’t want to stop.”
For Lavin and her ilk, the training never stops. One race ends, there is a recovery period (where training might get a little lighter but it doesn’t stop) and then it’s on to the next race.
“The more races I run, and the more running I do in general, the less time I need to rest beforehand or to recover afterwards,” she says. “I’m currently training for a 100km in December, in the Blue Ridge mountains.”
But why? Why run for 24 hours? Why run 26 miles in a weekend? Why spend five evenings, or mornings, a week, running?
“A lot of it, for me, is the sense of adventure,” says Lavin. “I love being out there, particularly on trails. Yesterday, I ran 25 miles, not far from the city but far enough that you’re high above, on this trail that’s so beautiful, in the woods. I’ve run that trail several times before but every time there’s something a bit new. Yesterday, the leaves were on the ground . . .”
Lavin realises that this isn’t for everyone – and it’s not something you can instantly pick up. “When I think back to when I first started running, I would run for 10 minutes and want to die. It’s just a matter of, over time, getting to the point where you enjoy it. When you’re out there, thinking, ‘yeah, this feels good’.
“Knowing what a great feeling it brings makes me want to get up on freezing cold mornings and be outside.”
‘Having a strong mind and a weak body – that’s when you lead yourself into injury’
JOHN O’REGAN, 41, is an operations planner with Irish Rail, and works at Connolly Station. He is married with two children, aged nine and 13, and lives in Leixlip. Most days, he runs about 39km – more if he fits in a run around his lunchbreak – and at weekends, he runs for between three and five hours before the rest of his family gets up.
Doesn’t this eat into his life? “It could take up a lot of time,” says O’Regan, a careful understatement if ever there was one. “But to make it work, I fit it around my life, rather than fitting my life around training. I run to work, run during my lunchbreak, and run home.”
Like most ultra runners, O’Regan, has not been training like this for his whole life. He only started running in 2001, when he heard about the Marathon des Sables in the Sahara desert, a six-day, 241km race.
“I wasn’t doing any running but I did a lot of hillwalking and mountaineering,” he says. “I had done a few Ray Mears training courses, and when I heard about that particular race I thought it would be a good chance to try out my skills.
“I started training for that race, following a regular marathon training programme with a few friends who were training for the Dublin marathon,” says O’Regan. “I just increased the long runs at weekends, so instead of doing a regular training run of maybe 20 miles, I was running a marathon on Saturday, and something similar on Sunday.” The terrifying thing is how casually these milestones are offered, like chats down the pub. Oh yeah, I ran a marathon on Saturday. And on Sunday, you know, the usual.
More recently, O’Regan completed the Spartathlon, a 246km run from Athens to Sparta. “The dropout rate is 70 per cent,” says O’Regan, “so I knew, standing on the start line, there was a strong chance I wasn’t going to finish.”
How does someone mentally steel themselves for a race they know they might drop out of? “I knew I’d done everything I could do to get me there. That helps keep the mind strong. It’s knowing you haven’t been bluffing along the way. Having a strong mind and a weak body – that’s when you lead yourself into injury.”
What next? “I didn’t do the marathon because I’m running a 100km in Gibraltar [today], I’m on the Irish team for the 100km world championships. I would run just about anything, as far as distances go. I like something that challenges me – something that’s going to test me. The feeling at the end is just fantastic.”
