Ever curious what it’s like to tackle 64 miles of hills alongside some of the world’s strongest runners?

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Every ultra story is different, but few can easily be conveyed through just words. So here is the Canyons 100K experience through colors and lines.

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Data was pulled from Strava.

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1. The adventure, at scale.
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2. A space-time chart of our journey and the top 3 women @katieschide, @emkaysulli, @akacius. One of the most profound things I’ve ever heard about this sport is from @heymiya: “Running layers our experience of space and time”. It’s crazy how over 64 miles, the hills seemed like just small bumps! Let’s add color for the third dimension: elevation gain.
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3. Now we see forward, upward, and onwards all at once. The technicality + steepness of the hills on this course was the most challenging part.
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4. Zooming in, we can see how much the hills actually affected our speed. The kinks in our space-time graph are clearer. The entire span of our paces is captured in this 22 mile section.
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5. Let’s look more closely at pace vs hills. Going up is intuitive. Steeper = harder = slower. Duh! Note, the sloped bars on the abscissa convey relative grade, not absolute.
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6. Downhill…not as simple of a relationship between pace and grade. Downhill running is fascinating, biomechanically and neuromuscularly. Gravity takes some stress off off the lungs allowing us to move faster, until a certain point. For me, anything steeper than ~700 ft drop/mile, i.e. -13% grade, meant I needed to brake to maintain balance. This inflection point is consistent with studies done on the treadmill. How does fitness affect this threshold?
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7. Winner @katieschide is a gazillion times (technical measurement, trust me) fitter than me. Note how her paces are not only much faster overall, but also tighter in range. Yet, we see that her inflection point is similarly ~700 ft drop/mile, suggesting that fitness makes us faster and more consistent, but the anti-faceplanting threshold is fairly universal.

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