Ultrarunners May Be Crazy, But Their Zeal for Life is Incomparable

The most commonly heard phrase for ultrarunners may be what makes them special.

“Dude, you’re crazy!” is the phrase you’ll most often hear when you tell people you run ultra-marathons.

Being willing to not be typical and like everybody else may be just what makes ultra-runners special in today’s running society.

After a year in which running exploded as people escaped lock-downs, running to just run has increased everywhere. A study by RunRepeat states that during the pandemic, exercise was up 88%. Running was a huge part of that increase, with runners increasing their participation by 117% on average.

Max King, an athlete who runs everything from ultras to obstacle races, wrote about the myths of ultrarunning, including that ultrarunners are crazy, in a Podium Running article titled “Overcoming the Myths of Ultrarunning.”

What may seem crazy to many people is why ultrarunning is becoming popular. Ultrarunners may just hold some keys to returning to some semblance of normal as society opens up.

What Makes Ultrarunners Special

Several things make ultrarunners unique, but there is a couple that really stands out and can guide everybody adjusting to the new normal.

• Ultrarunners fit training into an already busy life.
• Many of the trails one will encounter in state and national parks and forests are maintained by ultrarunners.
• The perseverance, adjustments to adversity, and goal-setting traits found in ultrarunners are a great model for all of life and society.
• Attaching positive meaning to negative events is a psychological trait found in ultrarunners that many can learn from.

None of these make ultrarunners “better” than any other runner or human being. However, they are traits that anybody can duplicate and live a better everyday life.

Fitting Training Into a Busy Life

Many pre-dawn mornings, you can find these mysterious creatures with a light coming from their head running on trails in the mountains, parks, and golf courses surrounding where they occasionally lay down for a few hours of sleep. They call these creatures ultrarunners, and they’re mostly harmless as long as you don’t get in the way of the bacon waiting for them at their lair.

You’ll find ultrarunners running out of their offices with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches clutched in one hand and a protein/hydration bottle in the other.

You’ll even find them bypassing television and bar time for a long run as the sun sets.

In between runs, you’ll find ultrarunners running small businesses or working any number of jobs. You’ll find nurses, doctors, engineers, lawyers, mechanics, electricians, stock clerks, wait staff, and many other occupations. The requirement for an ultrarunner is enough money to pay for new running shoes and gas to fill up their vehicle for an expedition into the mountains near where they live.

Canadian Trail Magazine wrote an article about these mysterious creatures that talk about family/life balance, commitment, and adjusting to life’s challenges.

The one common trait everybody could take away from ultrarunners is family comes before their running or their work. Ultrarunners don’t live for their seemingly crazy habit of running long miles. Ultrarunners fit their crazy habit around everything else going on in life.

Mentally, it may seem too much to balance. However, if you were to spend much time with ultrarunners, you would find running is where they make peace with everything going on in the crazy world surrounding them. Running is what keeps ultrarunners mentally stable enough to do all the other things they do.

Maybe regular, non-crazy people could learn something from crazy ultrarunners.

Thank an Ultrarunner for That Maintained Trail

One of my favorite groups in the ultrarunning community is the Dirtbag Runners. On Tuesdays, you can find groups of these people with trash bags handpicking up garbage along the sides of trails and roadways all over the United States.

Another runner community, the Human Potential Running Series, rewards runners with free race entries for coming out of trail workdays. Ultrarunners maintain, re-route and fix trails they’ll spend one day running a race on so the community surrounding their race can enjoy the trails the other 364 days a year.

Many ultra-marathons have race entry requirements that you work a certain amount of hours with a local state or national park doing trail work alongside park staff before you can run their races.

In other words, everybody could learn a lot about paying it forward from ultrarunners who spend many hours making sure trails are taken care of. The more all of society can learn from how ultrarunners give back to their communities without asking for recognition or awards, the better all of society can be.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if these secret elves worked all over our communities to beautify and maintain a clean, fresh look so everybody could enjoy nature?

Perseverance, Adjustments, and Goal Setting

In a Runner’s World article from November 2020, Elizabeth Willard wrote about the mental toughness and belief in one’s ability to succeed that set ultrarunners apart.

Throughout an ultra-marathon, ultrarunners will face many physical challenges like cramping, nausea, and pain that they will need to overcome to finish their races. The physical ability to overcome these is one thing, but what sets ultrarunners apart is the mental toughness to run through everything that faces them.

Perseverance is simply “the continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure or opposition.” The definition should have a picture of your average ultrarunner alongside it, which defines what it takes to run long distances.

Ultrarunners learn how to make adjustments on the run to succeed where adversity causes many to quit. Running success and adversity are common themes you can find in almost all ultrarunners.

It cannot be stressed enough to succeed in life, one must first believe in their ability to succeed. No runner ever takes off running a 100-mile race without first feeling they will cross a finish line in the next sixteen to thirty hours. The mental mindset of seeing success long before you finish is why ultrarunners run hundreds of miles before they ever toe the start-line in a race.

Everybody could learn something from the mental ability of ultrarunners to stay the course when everything seems to be going awry around them.

Making Positive Out of the Negatives

There are a lot of negatives that will occur in life. Just this last week, many people on the East Coast discovered what happens when gas pipelines can no longer deliver gas to the pumps.

What many people will never know is how many ultrarunners parked their cars at home, strapped a backpack on with their office clothes, and ran to work while everybody else was sitting in long lines at gas stations waiting to fill their tank.

That is just one example of turning negatives into positives.

Bigthink.com has a great article on their site, Here’s how long-distance runners are different from the rest of us, that points out how different these people are. “Ultrarunners scored significantly higher on the resilience questionnaire than non-runners and were more likely to indicate they used positive reappraisal when regulating their emotions — in other words, they were better able to reframe a situation with a positive angle.”

The ability to reframe is what actor James Dean was talking about when he said, “I can’t adjust the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”

In today’s culture, we need a lot more people to take the negatives that flow like a raging river and turn them into something positive that will help make our world a better place.

This is something ultrarunners do daily.

The Grand Takeaway

There is no way that everybody is going to become an ultrarunner. However, everybody can learn from these seemingly crazy people that see a mountain and instead of simply admiring the beauty, ultrarunners ask themselves and others, “Do you think there’s a trail to the top of that mountain? Or should I just bushwhack my way to the top?”

You don’t have to run crazy long distances like fifteen miles in the early morning darkness when ordinary people sleep. You don’t even need to set off to run for 24 hours and complete over 100 miles to be a person of great value.

The ability to live life to the fullest amid busyness, give back to your community by keeping nature beautiful, persevering, adjusting to reach your goals, and making lemonade out of lemons will significantly benefit all.

The next time you meet an ultrarunner, don’t just dismiss them as crazy. Instead, ask yourself what you could possibly learn from that crazy person.