How much walking will I do?
10:25am, 17th Jan 2024 | Escape from Meriden | 26 Comments
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In case I haven't banged on about it enough, this November I am doing Escape from Meriden: escapefrommeriden.co.uk - it's a 24 hour race where you have to get as far away from the start as you can.
If you know anything at all about me, you'll know I like playing with numbers. Having never done an ultra before, it's a great big unknown to me - so as well as looking for advice on our 'Ultra training for beginners' thread: fetcheveryone.com/forum/ultra-training-for-beginners-55137/ I've also been looking at the data to see what it can tell me. There are 17,714 ultramarathon training entries in our training log database, which should be plenty!
It's probably beyond all hope that I will manage to cover 100k in the 24 hours, but as an interesting starting point, I looked at all the 95-105km entries in our training database. There were 288, enough to get a flavour of how people tackle this distance. They ranged in time from the fastest in 6hr43, to the slowest in 36hrs.
First up, here's a simple percentile graph:
(as an example, 10% of runners (shown as 0.1 on the x-axis) complete a 100k in 10hr29 or less; 50% of runners (shown as 0.5 on the x-axis) complete a 100k in 15hr05 or less; and 90% of runners are done inside 21hr22).
At my peak, my 5k and 10k times graze the top 33% of all runners, but as the distance increases, my percentile gets worse (you can look up your own numbers here, and filter by age and gender: fetcheveryone.com/league-percentiles.php ). My half marathon time makes the top 47%; and my marathon time is top 57% at best. So when contemplating 100k, the numbers don't seem to be in my favour. But I'm here to give you the info, not whine about my chances
The second thing I looked at was the proportion of walking involved. I've been told that I will spend a great deal of time walking - but how much is a great deal? The first thought was to look at pace distributions for participants, but I think that's quite a muddy approach. All of us have a wide range of paces that we consider to be 'running', even during the course of one event; but it's more clear cut if we look at cadence. I looked at a few training entries, and found that the cadence distribution graph typically looks like this (ooh, matron!):
There's typically a nice gap between the two peaks (hey, no sniggering at the back!) which means it should be easier to separate the walking from the running. For a real-world example, have a look at Sam Jelfs' impressive training entry for EfM 2023: fetcheveryone.com/t-22463882 - scroll down to the cadence section, and in the graph marked 'cadence distribution' you'll see two distinct bumps, one corresponding to his walking, the other to his running.
Most 100k attempts are similar, with two distinct peaks - but each one is a little bit different. At this point, I should highlight the obvious, because if I don't, someone else will Every 100k is different, in terms of elevation, terrain, time of year, weather conditions etc. But if we can put that aside for now, let's see what we can find out with a broad brush
Rather than picking fixed cadence values for running and walking, and applying them to everyone, I used machine learning (something called k-means clustering if you want to look it up) to work out the position of the two peaks for each run individually. This sounds very fancy, but in our case it boils down to about a dozen lines of code. The average walking cadence was 117 strides/min; and the average running cadence was 170 strides/min - but individuals varied a bit from these. Side note: there was no obvious correlation between the walking cadence and race outcome; and only a slight tendency towards higher cadences for the faster runners.
Knowing the walking and running cadence for each participant, I was able to figure out the proportion of time they spent walking versus running. As you might expect, some of the faster people did not walk at all; whereas those at the tail spent around 70% of their time walking. Here's the graph:
So if we assume that it would take me most of 24 hours to accumulate a notional 100k, then I'm probably looking at spending around 70% of my moving time walking. That's a useful figure to keep in mind, and will encourage me to spend plenty of time on my feet this year.
To turn this into something that's hopefully useful for everyone, I've added run/walk percentage to every run and walk in your training logs. You can find it in the cadence section. Here's an example from my last marathon, where I did a fair bit of walking in the last 10k:
It might be useful if you're looking at your ultramarathons; but it can be useful if you're doing Couch to 5K too. Seeing the percentage of walking slowly drop as you make your way to your first 5k will hopefully encourage you, and maybe give you an understanding of why some days on the plan feel harder than others.
And that's it for this blog
I hope you found it useful and/or interesting. If you've got any questions, or suggestions for other stuff that I can look at (whether in ultra running or other distances; or even cycling or swimming), leave a comment.
Btw, I'll post this on LinkedIn, and the Beyond Marathon (organisers of EfM) Facebook page, and maybe a couple of other places (I'd love it if you'd share a link to it too: fetcheveryone.com/blog-share.php?id=478013 ). And if you're visiting Fetcheveryone for the first time, do stop for a look around. On the face of it, it's just a training log, likestrava (*gags*), but with two key differences. Firstly, there's just me, not a team of 200 people with hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital; and secondly, Fetch has no paywall. Everything is free, and the site survives on voluntary donations. Those that can support me do, but everyone gets access to the best I can offer. And as you can hopefully see, I love running and stats. Please give Fetch a try, and if you like it, please tell your friends!
If you know anything at all about me, you'll know I like playing with numbers. Having never done an ultra before, it's a great big unknown to me - so as well as looking for advice on our 'Ultra training for beginners' thread: fetcheveryone.com/forum/ultra-training-for-beginners-55137/ I've also been looking at the data to see what it can tell me. There are 17,714 ultramarathon training entries in our training log database, which should be plenty!
It's probably beyond all hope that I will manage to cover 100k in the 24 hours, but as an interesting starting point, I looked at all the 95-105km entries in our training database. There were 288, enough to get a flavour of how people tackle this distance. They ranged in time from the fastest in 6hr43, to the slowest in 36hrs.
First up, here's a simple percentile graph:
(as an example, 10% of runners (shown as 0.1 on the x-axis) complete a 100k in 10hr29 or less; 50% of runners (shown as 0.5 on the x-axis) complete a 100k in 15hr05 or less; and 90% of runners are done inside 21hr22).
At my peak, my 5k and 10k times graze the top 33% of all runners, but as the distance increases, my percentile gets worse (you can look up your own numbers here, and filter by age and gender: fetcheveryone.com/league-percentiles.php ). My half marathon time makes the top 47%; and my marathon time is top 57% at best. So when contemplating 100k, the numbers don't seem to be in my favour. But I'm here to give you the info, not whine about my chances
The second thing I looked at was the proportion of walking involved. I've been told that I will spend a great deal of time walking - but how much is a great deal? The first thought was to look at pace distributions for participants, but I think that's quite a muddy approach. All of us have a wide range of paces that we consider to be 'running', even during the course of one event; but it's more clear cut if we look at cadence. I looked at a few training entries, and found that the cadence distribution graph typically looks like this (ooh, matron!):
There's typically a nice gap between the two peaks (hey, no sniggering at the back!) which means it should be easier to separate the walking from the running. For a real-world example, have a look at Sam Jelfs' impressive training entry for EfM 2023: fetcheveryone.com/t-22463882 - scroll down to the cadence section, and in the graph marked 'cadence distribution' you'll see two distinct bumps, one corresponding to his walking, the other to his running.
Most 100k attempts are similar, with two distinct peaks - but each one is a little bit different. At this point, I should highlight the obvious, because if I don't, someone else will
Every 100k is different, in terms of elevation, terrain, time of year, weather conditions etc. But if we can put that aside for now, let's see what we can find out with a broad brush Rather than picking fixed cadence values for running and walking, and applying them to everyone, I used machine learning (something called k-means clustering if you want to look it up) to work out the position of the two peaks for each run individually. This sounds very fancy, but in our case it boils down to about a dozen lines of code. The average walking cadence was 117 strides/min; and the average running cadence was 170 strides/min - but individuals varied a bit from these. Side note: there was no obvious correlation between the walking cadence and race outcome; and only a slight tendency towards higher cadences for the faster runners.
Knowing the walking and running cadence for each participant, I was able to figure out the proportion of time they spent walking versus running. As you might expect, some of the faster people did not walk at all; whereas those at the tail spent around 70% of their time walking. Here's the graph:
So if we assume that it would take me most of 24 hours to accumulate a notional 100k, then I'm probably looking at spending around 70% of my moving time walking. That's a useful figure to keep in mind, and will encourage me to spend plenty of time on my feet this year.
To turn this into something that's hopefully useful for everyone, I've added run/walk percentage to every run and walk in your training logs. You can find it in the cadence section. Here's an example from my last marathon, where I did a fair bit of walking in the last 10k:
It might be useful if you're looking at your ultramarathons; but it can be useful if you're doing Couch to 5K too. Seeing the percentage of walking slowly drop as you make your way to your first 5k will hopefully encourage you, and maybe give you an understanding of why some days on the plan feel harder than others.
And that's it for this blog
I hope you found it useful and/or interesting. If you've got any questions, or suggestions for other stuff that I can look at (whether in ultra running or other distances; or even cycling or swimming), leave a comment.
Btw, I'll post this on LinkedIn, and the Beyond Marathon (organisers of EfM) Facebook page, and maybe a couple of other places (I'd love it if you'd share a link to it too: fetcheveryone.com/blog-share.php?id=478013 ). And if you're visiting Fetcheveryone for the first time, do stop for a look around. On the face of it, it's just a training log, like
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