I will be running my first 50K in March! Can't wait!

If it's on trails, definitely make sure you get a majority of your long runs in on trails!

Get the book "Relentless Forward Motion: A Guide to Running Ultramarathons" - I had it recommend to me, and I'm about 1/4 of the way into it - it's pretty interesting thus far.

I will be running my first 50K in March! Can't wait!

If it's on trails, definitely make sure you get a majority of your long runs in on trails!

Get the book "Relentless Forward Motion: A Guide to Running Ultramarathons" - I had it recommend to me, and I'm about 1/4 of the way into it - it's pretty interesting thus far.

I've read it, and it's the book I'm using to prepare for my first Ultra in March. (By the way, it's actually called "Relentless Forward Progress")

As David says, preparing for a 50K isn't that much different from a marathon, unless you are talking about a tough trail 50K -- then it might take as much as twice as long as a typical road marathon and really is a much different beast. The book offers some advice about the particular difficulties trail running as well, though you might be well-served to find a separate book that gives additional tips about trails.

Indeed 50K is a basically a marathon on steroids (assuming courses are comparable).

My only 50K was a flat road race. I too used a marathon as my long run about 2-3 weeks out.

I need to run another one someday, most of them are trail around here and that's not really my thing.

Just signed up for my first ultramarathon in October (my first). How should I train for it? I have a 15-week plan from the ultra race organizers but I want to make sure I do my homework on this. It's a point-to-point (non-loop) mostly trail course, Market to Market Solo 50K in Lincoln, NE. Thanks!

Good luck, HornedFrog!

Training for an ultra is pretty similar to training for a marathon with a couple of differences.
1. Do your long runs on trails, hopefully, similar to the ones that you'll be racing on.

2. Take any marathon training plan you like and add a marathon distance long run in before the taper.

3. EATING and food. So, biggest advice I've got is to learn to enjoy the food. The food situation is really different. You CAN run a 50k on nothing but Gu and oranges. You can. But you're going to come to a table full of Oreos and gummy worms and Mountain Dew maybe even pancakes and pizza, and you might even be offered beer, jello shots, and I've even been offered marijuana (I recommend saying no to that for a lot of reasons). You should probably practice using Oreos and gummy worms as fuel during training because you just KNOW you're going to eat them if they are offered and you've been running for 20 miles.

It's so variable that there is no "norm".

A friend of mine puts on this little 50k in Utah with this profile:

http://karlmeltzer.com/files/2008/02/Profile1-1024x532.png

It is an absolute monster.

Have fun! :happy:

Yeah, I've looked at speedgoat- tougher 50k than most 50milers. Distance is definitely relative (to elevation profile and terrain) when it comes to trails. Try explaining to someone that only does road races (or doesn't run at all) that you're shooting for a 12:30 mile though, and they will look at you like you're nuts. Oh, and in would never presume that I could come close to that at speedgoat.

Yeah, Sage Canady could only manage a 9:56 pace on that course, and he has run a 1:07 half (5:06 pace). So that's a pretty tough course! I will be thrilled if I complete my upcoming 50-miler in under 12 hours -- a 14:24 pace.

Which 50 are you running?

I usually cyberstalk people who have run the race before, and then cross reference them on athlinks, then try to find athletes that are of similar ability to me. Usually I'll find enough results to make a decent guess on my finishing time.

I'm doing the Leatherwood 50-miler. I do the same thing, but in this case it's easy because one of my running buddies did it last year (and he's the one who roped me into it this year). He finished in 11:13 and usually does better than me at longer distances, so that's why I'll be happy with a sub-12-hour result.

That looks like a beautiful course! I was trying to figure out which 50 would be in the NC area- I could only think of WC-50 in October and Umstead in April.

Yeah, I'd like to think I could do Umstead faster than that, but I wanted my first to be on a course that was so tough that I wouldn't be worrying about my time and just finishing would be a major accomplishment. There are quite a few other small ultras around here as well. It's different from the west coast but we have a dedicated bunch of ultra runners and some real talent too, like Mike Morton and Charlie Engle.