Good evening, beloved -
I told you I’m in training for my first ultra, right? This one, to be specific — which, as you’ll no doubt have noticed, is somewhat terrifyingly coming up a month from yesterday. (You’ll also have noticed that it’s a 50K, just over 31 miles...which makes it the shortest run one can do and still legitimately get to call it “an ultra.” Still.)
One of the things I’ve come to realize is that, even at a mere six miles longer than a marathon, a 50K already imposes a fundamentally different kind of mentality and training plan on aspiring runners. If the sense you get from watching marathoners is one of Day-Glo fleetfootedness that extends right down to the aerodynamic, carbon-fiber supershoes, the ultra is much more about logistics, problem-solving, fuel management. Sheer speed is less of an imperative; over longer courses, especially, walking is not merely allowed or encouraged but even essential, as a matter of shepherding one’s finite capacity and conserving it for the decisive moment. A surprising amount of thought goes into getting the titration and timing of hydration, sodium intake and carbohydrate loading right. (I’ve heard ultras described as “an eating event with some legwork involved,” and now I understand why.)
Another difference between marathons and ultras is that most all the former sort of events take place on pavement, on roads and city streets that are officially closed for the duration of the run. By virtue of their extension in both distance and time, though, ultras tend to take place overland, on trails and forest paths. And this just requires a differing approach to running: where you could foreseeably finish a marathon more or less on autopilot, I suppose, simply by putting one foot in front of the other, trail conditions demand a more acute focus of attention, greater energy expenditure on the maintenance of situational awareness, even somewhat more technical footwork.
Given all this, I thought it was really cool that event organizers Camino whipped up a 14K run yesterday morning, along the actual route of the full ultra I’ve signed up for, from Ponders End station to the finish line in Hackney Wick. This accomplished two super-useful things: one, it gave me the ability to assess trail conditions ahead of time, and maybe scope out what a reasonable time-per-mile would look like under circumstances that are even roughly comparable to those obtaining yesterday (grey, 52 degrees fondly Fahrenheit, unpleasantly damp and chillier than that sounds). This, in turn, means I’ll have a much better idea what to wear on race day, and which among the shoes I have are best suited to the conditions of this specific route. And secondly, it functioned unimpeachably as a rehearsal for the all-important late run: the regime in which the whole game is about fatigue and pain management, and knowing which waypoints and landmarks connote arrival at the homestretch might just make all the psychological difference between a deflating DNF and a successful completion.
§ I got to Hackney Downs station a little early, on my way up to Ponders End, and two or three trains went by before mine, which gave me the ability to compare three different sub-subcultures of runners among the Saturday-morning passengeriat. Going by the wide spread of ages, fitness conditions and interpretations of suitable running gear among the first cohort, I expect it consisted of folks heading home from their local Parkrun — bless them all. (I say that without snark or hint of condescension, mind you: until the black day some jerk comes along to milkshake-duck it for us, I’m bound to regard the love people have for Parkrun as one of the few redemptive qualities of our sad and fallen world.)
The second cohort was what I can only describe as the Real Housewives of Clapton-adjacent running-club crew. They were young and performatively fit, dressed to trade socials in bright colors and matching new kit, and they just didn’t have the mien of ultra runners. Again, no snark intended: there are any number of worse ways to meet people you might conceivably want to hook up with than by meeting up for a Saturday run, and pints after. It’s just not my scene.
But then a bunch of people filtered onto the platform that I knew, at a single glance, were headed the same way I was, and for the same reason. On average they were, oh, say ten years older than the running-club kids. To a one, they sported the hydration vests that make even the most brightly-dressed ultra runner seem vaguely tactical, if not post-apocalyptic. Their shoes were toothier with lugs, and mud-streaked into the bargain. At the level of outward personal affect, some of them looked a little raw — a little hard-done-by by life, maybe even a little brittle around the edges. I’m not sure any of them were “my people,” exactly, in the way the heads at Saint Monday of an afternoon can be. But if anybody on the platform at Hackney Downs yesterday morning came close, it was the members of this last group.
And here I did begin to feel a little bit ungracious. A most un-British amount of chattiness had already been struck up among most of the ultra contingent by the time the train pulled in. It increased as our little group arrived at Ponders End, and then increased some more as we waited, huddled underdressed against the wind, for all the other registrants to show up. But I kept my distance from all this, and in fact from all the warmth and fellowship on offer throughout the event, hopefully without coming across as outright abrasively antisocial.
I just wasn’t there to meet anyone, to socialize, to scarf cinnamon buns and pose for smiley group pictures at the finish. I was there to NULLIFY.
I wanted to be in the experience of running, that is, to the point that my default mode network shut down, taking my “I” with it and leaving behind only raw phenomenology and the moment-to-moment execution of tactics. I wanted to achieve, and remain in, the place before language. I wanted to practice doing everything implied by the word “ultra,” which is to say everything that had drawn me to the pursuit to begin with.
§ In the end, happily, that’s mostly what I managed to do. This particular ultra extends down a trail that was once the towpath of the River Lea, which in its lower, more heavily-engineered and -managed reaches is also called the Lee Navigation. (Note spelling. If you found it confusing to learn that e.g. Pusan and Busan are the same place, well, wait until you encounter that kind of variation in a context where there’s no question of differing transliteration strategies. Evidently they just never decided to regularize the place-naming conventions hereabouts.)
What makes this more than usually interesting to me is the way the route takes you down through the heart of London’s postindustrial hinterland, the long, low-density, Sinclairian scrag of industrial estates, marshy wastelands and flimsy newbuild developments that lines the northeasterly approach to the city. The Lea or Lee is lined with narrowboats, and — as I know from our friend H’s moorage, out past Southall — these’ll tend to be quasi-marginal folks’ last desperate grasp at being able to live anywhere inside the M25, moreso than the province of scenically bourgeois weekend-pleasureboat frippery. There are places along the way, indeed, where the tangle of barges draped in camouflage netting, repurposed rescue-orange lifeboats and half-sunken hulks takes on a proper doom-hippie vibe. Past Walthamstow Marshes, the air grows thick with the illegal smell of anthracite coal, being burned for heat in the stoves of all those boats; clapped-out appliances, rusting bikes and similar life-stuff are strewn all over the adjacent shore; from Tottenham Hale straight down to Hackney Wick, the graffiti reads FREE FREE PALESTINE and MIGRANTES VALIENTES. Taken as a coherent composition with that vaguely survivalist aesthetic I’ve mentioned ultra runners already tend toward, it’s something of a Mood.
Compared, again, to commercial marathon operators, ultra organizers like Camino generally don’t have the kind of social/economic throw-weight that closing the trail to other users would require (and frankly, I wouldn’t want them to). That means you contend with all the other folks who, reasonably enough, think it’d be nice to use the towpath on a somewhat clement Saturday morning in late winter: distracted dogwalkers yammering into their phones, kids learning to do without training wheels for the first time, headlong deliverypeople on e-bikes, strolling Hasids, etc. etc. And so they, too, become part of the terrain — another set of dynamic conditions that compel you to adapt, devise safe and considerate traverse corridors, and generally avoid running into or splashing with puddle-muck. To a far greater degree than the relatively simpleminded collision-detection routines invoked by running in a road-race pack, you really do need your wits about you. And in turn, at any point in the run past mile five or so, that means thinking about how you’re going to fuel cognition itself.
§ I mean this quite literally, and it’s worth spending some time unpacking why it’s an issue and how one goes about managing it.
One of the run’s sponsors was a company called Precision Fuel & Hydration, who were distributing samples of their 60g carbohydrate chews. You know I loathe it when this sort of marketing actually works as intended, but at the risk of sounding like I’m shilling for them, I was so impressed with this product that I’m inclined to say something about the whys and wherefores. (By all means feel free to skip ahead to the next section, if you’re as acutely allergic to any appearance of the commercial as I am.)
In their design of these chews, it feels like Precision laser-targeted themselves on solving a real and multidimensional problem for ultra runners — one I’ve actually been confronted with — and have done so successfully. The problem, in a nutshell, is that sustained high-intensity physical effort depletes you at the cellular or even the molecular level, but a few different aspects of that very effort challenge your ability to address the situation.
You’ll remember from high-school biology, of course, that a single molecule, adenosine triphosphate or ATP, powers all cellular processes in every living organism known to us. This obviously includes the rhythmic muscular contraction running consists of. But it even extends to modulation of the cognitive processes I’ve described as part and parcel of ultra running: all the ahead-of-realtime microdecisions involved in choosing your line, keeping your footing on discontinuous or unsteady terrain, avoiding knocking that elderly Satmar couple into the canal and so on. Unsurprisingly, ATP is consumed extremely rapidly during high-intensity running; as ATP turnover approaches availability limits, and demand outstrips your body’s ability to produce new stores of it, your capacity to generate energy itself becomes rate-limited. If you want to keep going past this point, you need to replenish your body’s supply and availability of the chemicals it requires to generate ATP, notably glycogen. And in terms of macronutrition, that means taking on carbohydrates — lots of them.
I get why this sounds like bro-science, but there’s nothing bro-ular about it. If high-intensity endurance running badly perturbs the body’s energy chemistry, by contrast maintaining carbohydrate availability preserves glycogen stores, sustains a steady rate of ATP production, stabilizes blood glucose and baseline CNS function, maintains ion gradients (and therefore contraction efficiency) in muscular tissue, lowers the output of stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline, supports thermoregulation and circulation, and ultimately reduces the muscular breakdown and inflammation I tend to suffer from in the 48-72 hours following any effort of ten miles or more. Carbohydrate is a one-stop shop for the support of just about every metabolic process, and certainly all of those involved in running distances in excess of the 26.2-mile marathon.
So we’re agreed that taking a sufficient amount of it onboard is a good and a necessary thing. The trouble is that “a sufficient amount” is a considerable amount: for a runner my age and weight, over the distance and type of course I’m attempting, the number that drops out of the planning equation starts somewhere north of 60g an hour, and increases from there. And like I say, there are some practical difficulties that militate against your being able to take on that amount of carbohydrate straightforwardly. It’s hard to manage running and chewing and breathing simultaneously, for one thing. The act of holding the thing you’re eating in one hand and repeatedly raising it to your mouth subtly throws off your previously bilaterally-symmetrical gait, and you want to reduce the number of strides on which you’re hobbled in this way.
Furthermore, none of the carbohydrate-dense foods endurance runners traditionally turn to — dates, bananas, onigiri, boiled potatoes (!) — are actually sufficiently dense that preparing and carrying enough of them for an six-hour run is a simple matter. They’re bulky; other than maybe the dates, they jostle unpleasantly when you’re strapped into your full battle rattle for the long effort. If you suffer from neurospicy-style sensory issues, like I do, their stickiness and mess are profoundly unpleasant, even to the point of distraction from your mission objectives.
Of course there are any number of products on the market that are designed to address these issues, from the original malt-nut Powerbars I literally lived on in my bike-messenger days, to all their latter-day bar and gel and chew descendents. But I’ve never found any of these quite adequate to my purposes. For one thing, modern products tend to be offered in sweet, ostensibly high-palatability flavors like Cookies & Cream, Salted Caramel or White Chocolate Macadamia Nut. And something I learned on the Dunwich Dynamo is that there is such a thing as flavor fatigue...and it’s cumulative. You know full well you have to take in the calories, but after two or three fuel bars, you start to build up a potent disgust for the general sweetness. From that point on, you start to become avoidant, and then you run all the risk that depletion entails. These products also tend to be sticky and, again, leave a residue on the fingers that can be both an unpleasant sensory distraction and difficult to rinse off on the trail.
But all of that pales next to one final issue that attends the question of nutrition support for long-distance runners, which for me at least is far and away the most daunting. Rapidly taking on hefty amounts of carbohydrate, especially without adequate hydration, reliably produces “GI distress,” which is a polite way of saying “shitting yourself mid-course.”
This is something that actually happens not infrequently to elite runners, most notably Paula Radcliffe in the 2005 London Marathon, and Mikael Ekvall in a shorter race a few years later. And while, in each of those notorious cases, the victim seems to have transformed the experience into an index of just how hardcore they are, I absolutely do not have the kind of runnerly machismo that would allow me to treat that as a badge of honor. In fact, I still have searing memories of the time a kid named Whitman (and therefore already clearly doomed, poor guy) had diarrhea all down his leg in third grade. He never did recover. He had to change schools! So for me, preventing the onset of GI distress — doing an end run around it, as it were — is a consideration of absolutely primary, if not transcendent, importance if I want to avoid the most dispiriting, humiliating and quite literally soiling of DNFs.
Precision seems to have ticked every last one of these boxes in the design of their carb chews. What they’ve managed to do is engineer a food product that packs a stupid amount of carbohydrate into a compact, pleasingly chewy form, that fits comfortably into my vest and sits there without bouncing around, isn’t sweet, isn’t sticky, submits to ready and reasonably rapid mastication, and — so far as I have yet been able to determine — produces none of the symptoms of gurgle, gassy bloat or internal unsteadiness I’ve come to regard as premonitory of the dreaded “distress.” The closest referent I have for the texture and flavor is mochi, which makes it neutral enough to remain palatable in the unique psychophysiological circumstance of the late race. I had the one I was given about an hour in, and it made all the difference not merely to the rest of the run, but to my recovery as well, without any untoward GI effects to speak of either during the effort or at any time thereafter.
The recovery bit is actually what I’m most impressed by. I’m generally totalled the day after even a ten-mile run, sore and stiff to the point of near-immobility, and it has a nontrivial impact on my ability to train as consistently as I’d like. I’m not dealing with any of that today, and to the degree I can narrow it to a single, controlled variable, it’s pretty clearly in finally being able to take an adequate amount of carbs onboard in the course of my run. In a result that will surely delight Precision, then, I ordered a few packs of their chews more or less as soon as I got home.
OK, forgive me. I just wanted to give you an idea of how impressive it is that someone’s seemingly managed to resolve all the dimensions of this particular wicked problem in a single oblong slab of chewy, colorless gel. But here endeth the product spiel.
§ This leaves the natural and obvious question, made perhaps still more pointed by the fact that to this day I’ve never run any distance longer than 20 miles: why ultra?
I want to say that what attracts me to ultra running is the same quality that attracts me to all the other psychophysiological limit experiences we’ve talked about here, which is the opportunity to dance along the edge of what the combined human sensorimotor, cognitive and psychoemotional apparatus is capable of enduring, perceiving, recording and relating. And that’s true, so far as it goes. But it doesn’t quite get to the kernel of what I think is really going on.
My best guess as to what’s really going on is this: finishing even the babiest of baby ultras, and doing so in public, sure seems like it ought to serve as proof that one is objectively hardcore. You could certainly ask why any such thing should matter. But whatever their other qualities, every last person who finishes a 50K (let alone the longer distances!) has demonstrated their discipline, rigor and capacity for self-overcoming, in the most concrete and incontrovertible way.
Now, at my age, caring about this — which is necessarily a confession that even now, in mid-to-late middle age, and with all the meditation practice I have under my belt, I still put far too much weight on those perceptions of me held by others — is admittedly a little embarrassing. But especially seeing as we’ve already discussed my abject terror of shitting myself on-trail, I see no reason why I shouldn’t be honest about it.
And actually, while we’re being honest, I may as well disclose the final psychological hitch that attends ultra training for me. It’s an odd sorrow, of a kind that I’m not sure many will contend with or relate to or even recognize. It consists in the disgruntlement that attends being able to do this, but not at all looking like I can.
You can read the discipline, fairly plainly, on the bodies of most people who can perform at this level of output — virtually every last one among the other finishers at Hackney Wick yesterday, for example. Or my friend Frank, who’s done “a bunch” of 75K ultras, and at least one 100K, and thoroughly looks the part. (I might describe his outward appearance as “somewhat cuddly, middle-aged Techno Viking”). Me? For all the effort I’ve put into training and nutrition, I remain lumpy, spindly, oddly-proportioned. Ungainly. I get around on calves that stubbornly refuse to accumulate any muscle mass to speak of, even of the knobby, whipcord-rawhide sort we associate with distance runners.
I can do the thing, and that is without doubt its own, very considerable and extremely validating pleasure. What I’ve come to accept, though — what I’ve had to accept — is that while I can train for, and accomplish, whatever feats of endurance I may please, my gross allometry will never reflect it, not even in that stripped-down, built-for-speed way. I want to look capable, endurant, but I do not, and will not. My long immersion in Buddhist practice, not to mention exposure to various forms of body-positivity discourse and disability activism, have on the intellectual level convinced me that this aspiration is foolish. But it’s a tenacious bastard, and I can’t see it lessening its grip on my imagination until the implacable onset of actual old age finally forces it to surrender. And I don’t mind admitting to you that on some level, that hurts.
But however real that is, it’s its own thing. Like I say, it doesn’t seriously interfere with the extreme pleasure I’ve been taking in working toward this goal, and — inshallah, and maybe with the help of some carb chews — the still greater pleasure I’ll feel in crossing the finish line a month from tomorrow. I cannot recommend this enough, if you have the slightest affinity for time on your feet. It will take you out of yourself, and anchor you in your body, in the most intimate terms of blood chemistry and mitochondrial cycling. You’ll be forced to distill everything your senses are telling you, integrating knowledge about the shifting quarter of the wind or the slickness and viscosity of the mud on the path into every momentary decision you make. You will modulate the forward, downward and lateral components of your motion with infinite sensitivity, balancing them in a vector that stabilizes the striking ankle, and carries you that one lunging pace closer to your goal. You will do all of this without once thinking the words that describe any of it. You will disappear. You will abscond from your own awareness. You will NULLIFY. You will feel immanent in every step, completely and radiantly alive. And should you choose to give it a try, let me know how you get on.
§ In other news, I found out this week that whatever interdepartmental committee needed to put its chop on my application to be a Visiting Professor at the Sociology Department at LSE has actually gone ahead and done so. So that’s what I’ll be for the next little while.
It’s absurd. I actually giggled when I read the mail. But there it is.
§ Right now I'm reading this article on Rationalist-adjacent Bay Area douchery, which contains not one but two contenders for Sentence of the Year, and finally, after many years of wanting to, the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, basis for a few different varieties of Stalker; listening to Meadowlands by Moon Mother, which is flat-out extraordinary; and watching The Eternaut, which was fine until the bugs showed up, and, wow, Oslo, August 31st.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 158 of Sunday, 22 February 2026, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊