I like the challenge of ultra running.
They usually span the best part of a day. In most of the ultras that
I do, you get to cover quite a lot of ground, and it's a bit of a,
an all day picnic, which is quite nice.
So I'm Carla Molinaro.
I'm a ultra runner and I'm probably best known for
having tackled LEJOG this summer,
which was a run from Land's End in the bottom of Cornwall
up to John O'Groats in the very top of Scotland,
and I managed to break the world record at the same time, which was pretty cool.
So a week.
Um, in regards to training on a Monday and a Wednesday,
I do an interval session.
So that could be short speed stuff like 20x200s or 10x400s,
um, or a hill session like I did today,
where I went and did six long hill reps and 10 short hill reps.
Um, Tuesdays is, um, an easy run,
just like super easy. Um,
I have a mid-week long run where I do anything between two to three and a half hours.
Fridays. Sometimes I'll run. Um,
if I'm feeling okay if I'm feeling it and that'll just be 45 minutes,
super easy, but if I'm feeling really tired,
then sometimes I just scrap that run and do it on another day.
Saturdays is a long tempo session. So yeah,
my favorite session at the moment, which is four times 5k,
which I know sounds mental,
but I think the only reason I really like it at the moment is because I've
finally nailed it after the first time that I did it,
I ended up in a bush wanting to die. Um,
and now I can do it quite well, uh, and hit the same splits for each,
each 5k. And then on a Sunday, it's a long run.
So those have been anywhere.
They kind of started out at an hour and I've built them up to five hours,
which I did last weekend.
So I typically wake up about eight or nine o'clock in the morning.
Um, head downstairs, grab a cup of tea, have some breakfast. Um,
breakfast kind of depends on what I'm doing that day,
but it can be anything from like French toast to Greek yogurt,
to porridge, um, have my breakfast.
And then I like to do most of my training in the morning.
So after checking emails and going through some coaching stuff,
I will probably start to train about 10, 11 in the morning, do my session,
come back, um,
have lunch and then sit down and work for the rest of the day.
If I've got a second session, if that's like mobility,
yoga, strength or another run, um,
I'll do that later on in the day, probably around five,
six o'clock and then get to bed about 11 o'clock at night.
It's a quite a long day. Um, but yeah, pretty much the same day in, day out.
So just sat down for breakfast.
I've got lovely Greek yogurt with berries and some sort of seed
concoction. I'm just gonna have a little look at my training today.
So I've got hill reps, um,
six long hills,
10 short hills with the jog back recovery and about a 3k warmup and cool
down. Um, to get down from my hill. Um, it's a pretty nice day,
so I'm pretty excited that I don't have to run in the rain and yeah,
before I go, I'm just gonna eat my breakfast,
probably drink three cups of tea and then check some emails,
um, before heading outside.
So it's Thursday in the week and I am on my hill session.
It's the last hard session before I get a rest day tomorrow.
So my legs are pretty tired,
but I know that tomorrow's a rest day,
so I can actually push pretty hard up on the hills. Um,
yeah. And I really enjoy doing this session, especially on a day like today,
where it is absolutely beautiful out here and
yeah, thinking about hills, do they ever get easier?
The answer's no, because I think the more you do them,
you add a little bit of time onto them. You vary them up.
Sometimes you go quicker, um,
and, little bit out of breath! They never get easier,
but that's the beauty of hill and interval training
that you're...
like continually pushing yourself and making yourself
a better and stronger runner.
So at the end of January, I am doing a race called Project Carbon X2,
um, Hoka One One are releasing their new shoe, um, in January.
And there's a whole bunch of us from around the world that are setting out to
break various different records.
And we're going to be racing over a hundred kilometres around a
car racing track in, uh, Phoenix, Arizona. Yeah.
My training has changed quite a lot for this event for something that I would
have done before.
I've essentially almost got like a marathon training kind of framework and
then bolted on a lot more miles. Yeah.
My long runs have gone up to 62 kilometres, where like in a marathon you'd
obviously probably only go to 40, um, if that,
so I've tried to keep in speed sessions,
hill sessions and tempos.
There's just a lot more of them in this training cycle.
So we're at the Rickmansworth
Aquadrome where I liked to come and do my interval sessions.
It's about just under a k and a half all the way around this lake.
And it's pretty flat and fast and there's no traffic,
so it's quite nice. I can just run quite quickly and not have to think about anything.
So I do two fast interval sessions in the week
at the moment. One is a shorter speed session here,
which is in-between 200m to 1km reps.
So the a 100k at the end of Jan,
I'm going to be wearing the Carbon X2, to do the race,
which, yeah,
I'm really excited to see how they perform over a 100k.
I'm pretty confident in them at the moment because I've had
absolutely no issues and I don't get any blisters, which is amazing.
Um, so yeah,
looking forward to seeing they can get my 100k PB down
quite significantly.
I think everyone thinks they have a limit.
And then once you break past that limit,
you realise that you can push yourself a little bit further.
And then that just carries on going. Like, when I started running,
I was like, there is no way I'm doing a marathon like that is mental.
And then you do a marathon and you don't die and it's all right.
And then you're like, okay, I can now do an ultra marathon.
And then you do one that's a little bit further,
and then you do multi-day stuff. And even like LEJOG,
like I was so close to the edge of what I thought that like my
body could handle, but like looking back, I'm like actually, yep.
Things went wrong and my legs started hurting,
but that was because I got a skin infection,
not because my body was shutting down on itself. So yeah,
I think, I don't think we have a limit. Well,
I don't think anyone's got quite close to what that limit is because every time
you get to that boundary and you reflect on what you've done,
you realize you can go a little bit further.
And that's what I think is really cool about endurance sports is
that there's always something more ridiculous and further that we can push our bodies.
I don't really see it as I'm having to make a sacrifice because this is what I like to do.
Like some people like to go to the pub and get
drunk and go dancing all night.
I like to go and run on the trails and drink tea, and
eat cake. Like, so for me, it's not,
I don't see it as a sacrifice because that's what I find fun.
So I am on one of my recovery runs, um, just a nice,
easy 30 minutes up and down the canal dodging the
ducks and the dogs. Um, so this run for me,
I don't even look at my watch to see what my pace is.
I pretty much just ignore it. And I just go out for 30 minutes.
Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow and yeah,
it's just quite nice to listen to everything around me.
The birds, get a little bit of
headspace where on the intervals and faster runs,
sometimes it's a little bit harder to take in the surroundings,
so yeah, just nice and chilled.
And then looking forward to going home, chilling out,
doing a bit of yoga,
getting a bit of a stretch on and reading a book, probably.
So nutrition for me does play a huge part because like food is
super key in terms of giving you energy to train
and to recover. Um,
I'm probably a bit of a foodie. I've grown up like I'm in now in a pub, um,
surrounded by food.
And I couldn't live like a really simple diet of eating the same
things every day.
And I quite like that because especially if I go away to race,
my body is so used to eating different things all the time that I'm not like
put off, if I have to eat something a little bit different. Um,
I've definitely like probably in the last year started to eat way more carbs
the day before a long run. Um,
I did a little bit of work with a nutritionist and that was something that I
was eating carbs, but not the level that you needed to,
to fuel yourself for the next day's training. Um,
so yeah, easy ways to get that in for me,
are like drinking a can of coke, and eating more cake, which I'm all for.
I think to be an athlete at this level,
you've got to want to do it. Um, if you, you know,
a lot of the sessions that I do are quite hard. Um, they hurt quite a bit.
You finish them and you need to sleep for five hours to like recover after
doing it. And it's not that pleasant. Um,
but when you get to a race and you do really well in a race,
like all those sessions are worth it.
But I think if you don't have the inclination to want to do that, um,
it's very difficult to be able to get to that level.
So I think anyone has the capability to do it.
I think it's having like the desire to actually want, want to do it.
And it's completely fine if people don't want to, same as,
as if they do. Um, and for me,
I just really like seeing like what, what I can do.
And especially now like a lot of people, you know,
when I first started running told me that, Oh,
like you've passed being able to run, um, at an international level,
cause you're too old at 30,
which is ridiculous where I'm 36 now and I'm still running at that
level and still running competitively and I'm getting quicker than I ever have
been. Um, so definitely in ultra running, you know, there's,
there's a big span of what you, what you can do. And yeah,
if you've got the desire to go and run 4x5k really fast round,
round in circles, then you know, you, you can do well.