Ultramarathons - Test 5

C1 Advanced · Multiple Matching · C1 Advanced Trainer 2, Cambridge University Press

You are going to read an article about ultramarathons. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections of the article (A–D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

About a year ago, I was standing at the office tea point when a colleague, who had heard I was a runner, asked me if I did ultramarathons. He looked put out when I told him I didn’t. ‘Marathons?’ he asked, tilting his head. ‘Oh, just marathons?’ In terms of impressing colleagues, family and friends, it seems marathons no longer cut it. We are in the post-marathon age, when everybody knows somebody who has run a marathon. Now, it seems, for a feat to impress, it’s better if you can reel off numbers in the hundreds, and preferably trot over an insanely steep mountain range or a desert. The last decade has seen an explosion in the number of races. ‘In previous years,’ one ultramarathon race organiser, Karl Lang, said, ‘you could just turn up on the day and enter, but now the most popular races sell out in minutes.’ Many of the world’s most oversubscribed events, such as the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in France, have had to develop sophisticated systems to manage the hordes wanting to take part.

I myself have now completed five ultramarathons. I had run ten marathons, when someone suggested I run the six-day, 160km Oman Desert Race. In strict running terms, the race had little appeal, but the notion of crossing a vast stretch of barely charted land, with only myself and a backpack of energy bars to keep me going, lured me in. While adventure has always appealed to the human spirit, Lang puts the almost overnight boom down to the growth of social media, which spreads the word and fires imagination. ‘People see their friends’ pictures and go, “Hey, I want to do that!”’ Some in the ultramarathon world, however, are disdainful of this, saying it has given rise to people looking for kudos by calling themselves ultramarathoners, and that the sport has lost its edge as a result. ‘Once all ultras had a sense of danger,’ one race director told me wistfully. ‘Now so many races make it easy for runners to achieve this “status” with “everyone-that-enters-is-a-winner” and finisher-hand-holding events.’

Experienced ultra-runner Josefina Gomez sees things somewhat differently. ‘So many people have done a marathon, that now if someone tells you they’re running one, you ask if they’re doing it in a panda outfit or something,’ she says. ‘It’s not that the marathon is no longer a stiff test because it is. It’s just, over time, that there’s a kind of natural race inflation. The human spirit will always want more. It will always crave that feeling of pushing itself to the edge.’ I often hear ultra-runners talking about pain. As the world becomes ever more sanitised and automated, there is a deep stirring to get out of our comfort zone. At one event, I met a Swiss couple in their 60s. They looked completely shattered after three days pushing themselves through scorching heat. This was their 15th ultra. ‘Why do we do this?’ Mélanie asked rhetorically. ‘We’ve never been so bored. Here’ Her husband, Ralf, looked at her and said simply: ‘Because we have such a nice home.’

After completing his first ultra, Omar Nasri blogged that ‘the race pounded me almost into submission before somehow I was lifted on a wave of euphoria.’ Veteran ultra Keiko Sato recognises the experience. ‘You move from agony to a place where the beauty and timelessness of a greater moment come into sharp focus – you actively chase that.’ A number of recent studies, however, including a widely publicised one led by James O’Malley, suggest that the obvious health benefits of running begin to tail off, and even reverse, if you run ‘excessively’. An irreversible hardening of the tissue around the heart is the main concern. Physiologist and ultra-runner Greg Whyte says ‘the evidence is there, and we – the ultra community – often bury our heads in the sand over things like this.’ But researchers like O’Malley tend to conflate intensity and duration of exercise to define ‘extreme’. Ultra-running may, on the surface, seem extreme, but, in practice, it is usually undertaken at a low intensity – with walking forming a large chunk of most ultra races for the majority of competitors. ‘Anyway,’ says one runner, ‘it’s difficult to do enough to put you at greater risk than couch potatoes.’

Ultramarathons

At 80 kilometres or more in length, ultramarathon races are at least double the length of the traditional marathon. Yet the number of people running ultramarathons is rising fast. Long-distance runner Louis Adis investigates.

a sense of nostalgia for what ultramarathons used to be like

a view that there’s a misconception about how most runners approach ultramarathons

a method for dealing with excessive numbers of race applicants

a belief that an increased demand for ultramarathons to take part in is inevitable

an issue that many ultramarathon runners deliberately ignore

an individual’s initial motive for running an ultramarathon

a contrast between everyday life and the ultramarathon experience

a state of mind that ultramarathon runners seek

a general shift in perceptions about what constitutes a genuine challenge

a theory explaining the rapid rise in the popularity of ultramarathons

Available as a free printable PDF worksheet with an optional answer key.

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