Flatland Training for America's Mountain Part II
What if the key to summitting a 14er quickly actually has little to do with altitude?
If running 13.5 miles and 7,800’ straight up Pikes Peak were easy, then everyone would do it. Actually, everyone probably wouldn’t—it’s a weird goal— but also, the rules of physics would be different.
My first post outlined some ambitious goals for the Ascent. Here are what I see as the chief obstacles to those goals and my plans to overcome them. The list of people who care about this goal may be short, but I hope that there are enough people interesting in training for mountain running that this may be useful to some others at some point.
For those who are coaching others for mountain races, this could be a useful test case with regard to training certain physical qualities in the absence of altitude acclimation, since like many trainees living at or close to sea level I will have no ability to do altitude training—but I will do a lot of vert.
Ascent-focused running is hard and choiceworthy because this kind of training and competition puts you in direct competition with a fundamental ordering principle of the cosmos (viz., gravity). Gravity always wins, and the difficulty of ascending and keeping up a pace in the face of this challenge is humbling, painful, and demanding of continual resilience in a way that is not quite the same with flatland running, however fast or difficult it might be.
Obstacle 1: inability to control the pace of the race
This may seem like a strange pace to start, but I think this is actually the main barrier to success at the Ascent or other races. Because of how hard/ unsafe it is to pass on the single track, participants regularly describe a “conga line” of runners that dictates a slow pace through the beginning of the run. If you can’t dictate your own pace, then A) you aren’t really racing, and B) no other training interventions really matter if you any goal besides simply finishing the race. In order to have the ability to control your own destiny, you have to get out of the middle and back of the pack.
Solution 1: securing a place in the first starting group: CHECK.
I was able to use my win at the Possum Kingdom 56km ultra race in 2022 to secure a place in the first wave of runners, so this means that I will avoid the infamous “conga line” of congestion that slows many competitors to a crawl over the first several miles. It also means that I will starting with a group that ranges from folks like me at the slow end and international elite racers like Killian Jornet at the top end. I will have to be careful not to go out too fast.
Obstacle 2: altitude—or is it altitude?
Oxygen levels falls precipitously as you rise, and elite and non-elite participants alike describe the final 5k of the race above the A-Frame as disorienting, difficult, and slow. Many amateur participants tell stories about getting to the A-Frame and then just having everything fall apart, and it is frequently asserted that anything can happen past treeline, so there is not really any point in preparing for it.
Obstacle 2 analysis
The popular wisdom is half right here. My analysis of 2022 Pikes Peak ascent times indicates that everyone does indeed slow considerably at the top.
Taken as a group, all 2022 finishers held a pace that was 54% slower than their pace below the A-Frame. All 2022 finishers as a whole averaged 18:50 per mile before the A-Frame and 29:10 per mile after the A-Frame (154% of pre-A-Frame pace).
Elites were by no means immune to this phenomenon: sub-2:45 finishers averaged 10:05 per mile from the start to the A-Frame and 14:38 per mile after the A-Frame (145% of pre A-Frame pace).
So the popular wisdom is right that everyone slows down a lot after the A-Frame. But this got me thinking—if everyone slows done a lot, why is altitude really the limiting factor? If altitude were the limiting factor, one would expect elites to slow down much less, since they have more ability to prepare.
Likewise, if altitude acclimation were the key predictive factor, one would expect Colorado finishers to do better. But if we compare the 209 Colorado runners who finished sub-4 to the 66 non-Colorado sub-4 finishers who were still from the United States (to weed out international elites), the results are really similar: the non-Colorado sub-4 finishers averaged 2:21 to the A-Frame, 3:26:28 to the top; the Colorado sub-4 finishers averaged 2:24:32 to the A-Frame, 3:29:59 to the top. For both groups, the time at the A-Frame was 68-69% of their total time to the top.
Moreover, popular wisdom fails in this respect: it is not the case that “anything can happen” past the A-Frame. In fact, what happens past the A-Frame is highly predictable: everybody’s pace slows by 45-50%, pretty uniformly.
Another way of putting this is that the time it takes to get to the A-Frame is highly predictive of final finish. Runners don’t really get to the A-Frame and then just fall apart once they pass that level of altitude. Consider:
Of the 54 runners who made it to the A-Frame in less than two hours, how many failed to summit in less than three hours? Only one—and he finished in a very respectable 3:05:45. 98% of sub-2 hour A-Frame finishers went sub-3:00.
Of the 1304 finishers who failed to make it to the A-Frame in less than two hours, how many still managed to eke out a sub-3:00 finish? Just nine. 99% of over-2 hour A-Frame finishers went sub-3:00. What’s more, every single one of these nine got to the A-Frame under 2:05.
The fact that A-Frame time is pretty perfectly predictive of the final finish strongly suggests that what decides the outcome of the Ascent has nothing to do with what happens above the A-Frame, at least not when it comes to going sub-3. The key to the Ascent does not have to do with altitude.
The tendency of popular wisdom to ascribed greater variability than what really exists to the end of the race is surprising, but not unprecedented. It is a psychological phenomenon that will be familiar to many from the flatland marathon. Many marathon runners will say “anything can happen after 20 miles”. While many runners do “blow up” or have suboptimal races, these blowups tend to be predictable on the basis of overall training volume (mileage), v02 max/ aerobic fitness as measured by typical training and workout paces, and the experience of the runners in question with longer training runs
My analysis of the 2022 Pikes Peak Ascent times suggests that overall performance up to the sub-3 mark is regulated not by the vicissitudes of altitude, but rather by the overall aerobic capacity and long-duration aerobic endurance demanded by this marathon-length event. Specifically, training for ascent, like training for a flatland marathon, requires:
High v02 max
The ability to sustain high velocity past the two-hour mark even as glycogen stores become depleted. It is possible that the increased reliance of the metabolism upon glucose at high altitudes could accentuate this requirement.
Solution 2: develop high aerobic capacity & ability to perform despite glycogen depletion past two hours
To develop the aerobic capacity to compete the event, I will develop high overall aerobic capacity. By looking at the Strava profiles of those who get to A-Frame in or below sub-2, it looks like you need to be faster than a sub-3 marathon, but not a lot faster.
My training goal is to develop the overall aerobic capacity to run a 2:45-2:55 flatland marathon, which means a vDot of around 60-64 (for those who follow Daniels' charts).
The majority of my training will be a conventional 75-85 mile per week marathon program, with weekly training like this:
Monday: v02 max/ interval running with standing rest (~5k total ~5k pace, ~5:20 mile pace, in 400m-1k intervals with 2:1 run: standing rest ratio), 5k warm-up & cool-down, 9.3-10 miles total
Tuesday: Initially a medium/ long run of 14-20+ miles in 1:30-2:30, ~7:00-7:45 pace; now switching to a medium/ long treadmill run using a chart of grade by mile to simulate the Ascent (more on this later). 10-20 miles total.
Wednesday: Steady, 9.3-11 miles at 7:00-7:45 pace.
Thursday: Threshold: Daniels-style intervals with 4-6 total miles at 5:45-5:55 pace.
Friday: Steady, 9.3-11 miles at 7:00-7:45 pace.
Saturday: Long, 18-22 miles at 7:00-7:45 pace, hopefully adding some marathon pace work at 6:00-6:25 or closing fast at sub-6:00 as I develop my fitness.
Sunday: Steady, 9.3-11 miles at 7:00-7:45 pace.
At the end of the day, the Ascent is a marathon-length event and the primary physical quality required to complete is probably… drumroll… marathon-duration aerobic capacity.
But there is the wrinkle about it being all uphill :). That is the next obstacle, and the focus of my next post about treadmill training.