In the fantastic running documentary Chasing Pounamu (stop reading right now and go spend 30 minutes watching that film if you haven’t already), Sally McRae, 2018 Tarawera miler champion, points out that everybody in a race - whether you win, whether you’re in the middle of the pack, or whether you’re at the back, we all have the same goal in mind, to get to the finish line. Later, she adds that if you’re at the middle or back of the pack she has a lot of respect for you because you are mentally and physically so strong - you are out there for longer, you endure more of the elements, you have to deal with a trail in a worse shape. Everyone in a trail race is doing the same thing. Just moving forward.
I’ve been at the back of the pack in many a race, particularly when I started or when I was 30kg heavier. I’m a very competitive person, and being at the back was painful for me. I hated it. Mentally, I very much struggled with it. It was hard to wrap my head around the idea of being last or near last not being failure, particularly when I was putting in so much time and training as hard as I could. (Of course, I realise now that being at the back of a race isn’t coming last when you’re competing in a sport and distance that less than 0.01% of the world’s population can do!)
One thing that’s tough is that you actually ultimately have no control over where you are in a pack. I recently ran the 50km at Tekapo Ultra, and came in the back third of the pack in a time that would have had me in the front third on any other course - and this was a course with 1100m of climbing. It was just an inexplicably very fast field, and the results were very clustered - I think if I’d been 15 mins faster I would have knocked off 30 places. A friend of mine who usually podiums finished just behind me. You can never control who else turns up on the day; you can just control how you respond to it.
A big part of running is disconnecting your emotion or sense of self-worth from your results. Running is a funny little sport. Some days, and we’ve all had this, you go out and your body seems to think you’ve never run a step in your life before. Sometimes there’s an obvious reason - you haven’t slept well, you didn’t drink enough water the day before, you’re short on carbs - and sometimes for absolutely no reason, you just can’t run well. Sometimes that happens on a race day. And so it’s good to bear in mind that no matter where you are in a field, it doesn’t mean anything about you - as a person or even as an athlete. It’s just what happened that day.
I’ve worked my way up from the back of the back - generally - to mid to front pack, with the occasional age group or overall podium depending on who else has turned up. And so there’s a few things I’d like to share from my experiences at the back of the pack.
- It takes a lot of maths. Often if you’re at the back of the pack, you may be running close to cutoffs. Every time you pass a kilometre marker there’s often some mental math going on to work out just how fast you need to run to get past the next cutoff. It can get a little stressful - particularly if you don’t know the course well and suddenly come across a hill you didn’t know was coming.
- You need to be more organised. The course record at the Tarawera miler is under 16 hours. The back of the pack comes in right up until the cutoff at 36 hours. That’s more than double the time the front runner is out there. That means you have to have a much bigger strategy for hydration and nutrition. You might need to change shoes, socks, or your entire outfit. Your crew has to be out there for longer. There’s so much more you need to consider the longer you’re out there.
- You accumulate more fatigue. In the case of Tarawera, you’re out there for a day and a half if you’re at the back. By the time you finish, the front runners have gone home, had a full night’s sleep (well, debatably), a few meals. You have to do the work for longer. Every step you take when you’re running accumulates some form of muscle trauma. When you’re out there twice as long, your body is simply taking more of a battering.
- You go through the whole gamut of emotions, and the mental game has to be on point. In an ultramarathon especially, everybody goes through all the different emotions. In a way, an ultra is a metaphor for life. Things feel good sometimes, things feel bad sometimes, and all you’ve got to do is keep going and it’ll get better. When you’re near the back, you’ve got to particularly protect against this. You might have long stretches where you don’t see another soul. You may end up running with chatty tail end charlies that drive you insane (if you talked to me in early 2021, you know who I’m talking about). It’s a different kind of mental toughness than the pain you need to sustain if you’re at the front - but it takes a lot of it.
If you ever want to see the best of humanity, I encourage you to go to any long race and see the tail enders come in. There’s few things in this life I get as emotional over. Watching people who have pushed themselves to their limit and never given up - that means everything to me. I have very little respect for front runners who give up if they’re not winning. For a few years, there was a particular elite runner in New Zealand who would do that - if he was in second or third place early in the race, he would quit. For me, that’s incredibly disappointing because that isn’t what this sport is about. Running - particularly distance running - is about being tough. It’s about doing something extraordinary, no matter whether you’re naturally talented or not. It’s about having the resilience and toughness to stay out there no matter where in the pack you are.
And so ultimately, that’s what I’d like to say about being at the back. I’m proud of my races where I finished at the back - because I finished. No matter how things were going, I didn’t give up.
I love working with runners who are currently at or have previously been at the back of the pack - because I’ve been there. I know how it feels, and I know how tough they are and how much work they can put in. That’s a dream athlete to have as a coach!
I’d love to see us all reframe the way we think of the back of the pack - it’s nothing at all to do with fitness or whether people are “good” runners or not - the people at the back are determined and tough as hell. Like Sally McRae says, we’re all out there tackling the same terrain - just some get to go to bed earlier, and some have to hang on for longer. And to me, that’s a pretty amazing thing to see in people.