What We Didn't Know We Didn't Know

When we talked to Scott, Haley was 35 days out from her first 50K trail race. It's Cloudland Canyon: roughly 30 miles, 5,000 feet of elevation gain, and a backcountry section neither of us has ever set foot on.

Haley is a strong, fit runner and has been following Alex Viada's powerlifting-marathon program, which ends with a mock powerlifting meet one week before race day.

But neither of us has ever done an ultra. And the problem with that isn't what you know you don't know. It's the stuff you don't even know to ask about. You can't know what you don't know.

So we got on a call with Scott Hagnas, an ultra runner and coach who has been racing ultras and competing in powerlifting simultaneously, which he called "kind of uncharted territory." He's also stayed healthy doing this together for a really long time. That's the part that got my attention.

An hour later I had an entire page of notes.

The stuff we didn't know to ask

Scott's frame for the whole race: you have four things to train for, "running on the flat, uphill running, power hiking, downhill running," and a fifth if it's really steep, which is basically step-ups.

5,000 feet isn't one number. Scott's first question was whether Haley knew the course. Mostly. We've hiked the rim loop and the canyon bottom with the kids, but never the backcountry. His point: 5,000 feet spread over long climbs is a completely different race than 5,000 feet of steep, punchy ones. Pull Strava files from people who've run it and look at the profile, not just the total.

He learned that the hard way: on his last ultra, the one piece of the course he hadn't scouted turned out to be way steeper than he remembered. Basically high box step-ups all the way up the hill. He said he would have trained differently if he'd known.

Hike more than you think. I've gotten a different answer to the run-or-walk question everywhere we've asked. Scott's: switch to power hiking more than you'd expect. The energy cost is much lower for a very small drop in speed on most hills, and it pays off late in the race when your legs aren't smashed. He's tested it on his metabolic analyzer: running the same hill sends heart rate up for almost no change in pace.

Match the race's elevation in a week. Scott tries to hit the race's total gain and loss in a single training week, starting around eight weeks out. It can be one big long run or spread across smaller ones, and once you're there, spike up to it for a few weeks, then taper it down over the last couple. Our neighborhood trail gives Haley 1,224 feet over seven miles. Her last seven days still came up about 2,000 feet short.

Downhill running. I hadn't even considered it. Duh, right? Downhills are an eccentric stress, and you have to build tolerance to them. Scott does a big, legs-pounding downhill session as little as once every three weeks and does the last significant one about two weeks out. He said there's good research on that three-week principle, and he's experimented with it and it works really well. For our neighborhood loop, his advice was to run it both ways this close to the race and hit both the steep and the gradual descents.

There's a skill piece too: in his first trail race, Scott passed people on the opening climb, then watched all of them bomb past him on the way down. He wasn't even breathing hard. "It was not a fitness issue," he said; it was confidence and knowing how to navigate. Now he looks further down the trail, lets his feet find the line, and switches to short, quick steps when it's loose and steep. I've had the exact same experience: I crush people on the uphills and they fly by me coming down.

The CrossFit takeaway. For my CrossFitters, this was the biggest thing I took from the call: a dose of eccentrics every third week. I've already built a progression from it, and we talked it through in Ruth Performance Collective office hours. The idea is that a strong dose of eccentric stress provides a fairly long lasting protective effect, which means you can carry less fatigue into most training weeks.

Stairs. The race has a lot of them. Do you just squat and lunge and hope? Scott's upcoming race starts on big railroad-tie steps, so he's been doing timed step-ups on a 14-inch box (about the average step height), VersaClimber work, and BFR on step-ups. Sometimes he runs, then goes straight into step-ups as the finishing piece.

The tools Scott leans on

Strength is protective. Scott has been competing in powerlifting this year alongside his running, and he hasn't had downhill-running DOMS, even racing a 50K with 7,000 feet of gain. Haley has landed in the same place he has: ultra endurance plus powerlifting.

Uphill treadmill threshold. This is one of the two things Scott says he's felt the most. After a 20-minute warm-up:

• Start with 6 x 3 minutes at 8% grade, 1 minute easy between
• Build to 4–5 x 5 minutes, 2 minutes easy between
• Effort is lower zone 4, sub-threshold. Not your flat track or road threshold pace.

You get cheap elevation without pounding the body the way the same session would on the road. It doesn't cover the downhills, but it covers the up. I've already started using uphill running with my CrossFitters, because it creates a respiratory profile a lot like hard barbell cycling and then having to run out the door.

BFR. The other one. Scott uses the endurance range, 60–70%, in two 10-minute rounds, a protocol he got from me for the bike. He started on the bike and has moved to step-ups and the VersaClimber for this race. One athlete he coaches, a Tactical Games competitor, had a kick up the final hill of a weighted run that Scott had never seen from him in years of working together. My one add: with my performance athletes, the last BFR session is the Monday before a Friday competition. Three-day washout.

Heat. Before races, Scott does heat training for hemoglobin mass. In a build phase he's at around four days a week, started a ways out so the fatigue doesn't land close to the race, then he maintains it with passive heat like the hot tub after certain workouts. "It's not fun," he said.

Long runs. Alternate weekends: one pace-focused, road-runner-style long run, then one on trail. And this close to the race, trail runs aren't just three hours of zone 2. Push the hills, add some fartlek, or plan a chunk in the middle where you go.

Tendons, year round. Scott does isometrics for the tissues that get hammered:

• Knee extension holds for the quad and patellar tendons
• Ankle pushes into an immovable bar, bent and straight knee, for the calf and Achilles
• Single-leg GHD iso holds (or single-leg RDL or long bridge isos) for the proximal hamstring
• Single-leg GHD sit-up holds for the abdominal tendons, which can get irritated from uphill running

The ankle work matters for running economy too. Scott tests a lot of strong people, and their ankle strength is surprisingly weak compared to what a runner can put out. I'd just been reading the research on this. If two days a week of calf and foot isos can improve running economy for CrossFitters who don't run much, why would I not do that? Mine are weak, Haley's feet always need strength work, and it's on the list.

Depth drops. Climb up on a high box, jump off, stick the landing. Scott does them in warm-ups on strength days, year round, for bone health.

Race day, and the day after

Fueling. Haley has a sensitive gut, and it's been weeks of trial and error. On her last long run, about 2 hours 20 minutes, she got in 72 grams of carbs total. Scott's response: that's leaving performance on the table.

In his ultra, Scott took about 90 grams an hour, all gels, on a 25-minute clock. Right around 20 to 25 minutes he can feel his RPE tick up, he takes the next gel, and within minutes he feels great again. Over and over, for hours. He worked up to that in training; he didn't start there. He skips solid food because he feels better running as empty as he can, and his caffeine was his normal morning coffee plus a couple of caffeinated gels, one around the 90-minute to two-hour mark and one starting the final descent. One kind of gel, with a mix of sugars, the whole race. When I ran the glycogen math for Haley, 75 grams an hour was her floor to finish depleted. 90 is closer to finishing and feeling decent.

So the homework is clear: practice the target number on every long run, with the honey packs she tolerates. That means a lot more honey packs.

Anything that could be annoying will be annoying. That's how I summed up Scott's gear advice, and he agreed. A vest that rubs a little or a shoe that's slightly off isn't a problem on a three-hour run. Over eight hours, it is. Fix it now. Pack a change of socks and blister supplies. Start in the dark with a decent headlamp.

Pickle juice. Scott carries pickle juice shots for cramps. On his ultra he felt one coming, took the only shot he'd brought, and kept it at bay for the hours that were left. He wished he'd had a second. I'm a cramper. We hadn't even thought about it for Haley.

Weird stuff happens. In one trail half, Scott got sudden shooting nerve pain in his knee less than a mile in, bad enough that he almost dropped. By mile three it was gone. At mile eight he tripped, dislocated his shoulder on a rock, put it back, and finished. As I put it on the call, "No matter what endurance task you're doing, at some point you question all your life choices." That's normal. Keep going.

Eat after. Scott pointed to research showing how enormous the calorie demand is in the week after an ultra. One year he ate normally afterward, got sick for the first time in over a decade, then turned it into a lung infection. He thinks he just didn't eat nearly enough to recover. This year he kept calories up even when he didn't feel like he needed to, and his recovery was clearly better.

Why you hire someone who's done it

Two weeks ago, Haley's biggest fear was rhabdo, and Scott doubts it happens to her, given how much she strength trains and the background she has. After this call, the list is downhill running, a course profile we haven't looked at, a fueling number she hasn't hit yet, stairs, tendons, pickle juice, socks and what she eats the week after.

None of that was on our radar, because neither of us has ever done this, and you can't Google a question you don't know to ask.

Scott said it well: you learn by doing, and by the mistakes you make along the way. He'd already made the scouting mistake, the under-eating mistake and the "I'm garbage at downhills" mistake, so we don't have to.

This is the Dunning-Kruger part, all the stuff we don't know, which is why talking to an expert, talking to a coach and talking to someone who's done it, who has experience, is so valuable. So before your next first-time event, or an athlete's, ask yourself who you know that has already done it, and get them on a call.

Nine days after our call, Scott raced Run The Rock, a trail half marathon at Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. It's the same race as that first trail race, where everyone he passed on the climb bombed past him on the way down. This time he finished second in his age group.

Thanks, Scott, and we'll post the race report after Cloudland.

- Kyle