Ultrarunner: The Slow Way is the Fast Way – Charlie Sharpe

The Slow Way is the Fast Way by Charlie Sharpe

I started running in 2010 because I had poor aerobic fitness, whilst I had a lot of upper body strength from rock climbing it was not so useful for endurance running.  My very vague initial plan was to get a bit fitter.  I still focused on rock climbing, but I chose to run 3 or 4 days a week initially.

I didn’t really know any ultrarunners and so I wasn’t thinking oh I should be knocking out an ultra every weekend and 80 to 100 miles per week like that Charlie Sharpe guy or see ultras in the calendar more or less every weekend and think I need to enter them all.  If I had been starting out now, 10 years later when ultrarunning has grown tremendously in terms of participants and number of events it would have been easy to get carried away and overly ambitious in the first year or two and ultimately end up making far less consistent progress.

When it comes to training, particularly for ultrarunning, it is all too common to see people looking for the next short cut or newfound training method to accelerate their progress.  Whilst there are many ways to optimise training and lots of race day strategies to help you achieve a quicker time in your next ultra, there is one key ingredient to ensure you are making regular progress in the long run.  This ‘secret’ is consistency.