Ultrarunning - The aftermath

So if you follow me on Twitter or are maybe part of the Ultrarunning community, you may have got wind of the storm that was blowing in Ultraland and on Twitter in response to my last post.

Some of the tweets were valid, some abusive, some irrelevant but in all, a bigger reaction than I expected.

After the dust had settled a little, I tweeted earlier this week that I would give the chance to even things up and proposed to interview 3 amateur Ultrarunners on the blog and let them respond to my questions I have on the subject, after all it's difficult to debate in 140 characters on social networking.

So Wednesday night, I put my Jeremy Paxman head on to try to come up with some hard hitting questions.

I penned my first question....

An amateur marathon runner can just about train for a marathon around work, family etc. But how can anyone unless they are an elite Ultrarunner, train for a 100 mile race and not risk serious effects on the body?

In between coming up with my questions I flicked in and out of Twitter.

I remember I had favourited a tweet from Susie Chan and a link to her latest blog post which was a response to my last post. http://www.i-run.co.uk/ultra-running-why-heres-why/

Susie is a well known and popular amateur Ultrarunner on Twitter, who lives local and has joined me and friends on a couple of runs while she was training for the marathon des Sables.

I read her well written post and after reading, she had answered what was to be my first question above.

Amateur runners can achieve these huge distance races, how and why?

There is no 'why' to any of this, there are no questions to ask.

Why am I even taking this any further. 

Why challenge fellow runners just because it's a distance I don't choose to travel. As someone tweeted, who cares what distances people run at least they are up off their arses!

So I'm cancelling my interview post, but thanks to Richard,Tim and Naomi from Twitter for agreeing to take part.

The original post was just my opinion on the subject of Ultrarunning and actually my main gripe was the fact that the trail running press and media seems to be relating everything trail running to Ultra's. When I open up the popular trail running magazine( you all know the one!) to read about trail running; interviews and race reports are generally all Ultra related.....put Ultra in the title so everyone knows what type of magazine you are!.....Oh god, sorry I'm at it again!

I called Ultrarunning a fad.....by the response I got, maybe I was wrong :-)

I wrote the post to give my blog a bit more of an edge, to be a bit different than the rest, to provoke a reaction....it got that all right!

I put at the end of the post that I didn't want to alienate myself from fellow runners who run a lot further from me, hopefully I've not done that as there is some great people out there. 

I even got a new follower on Twitter who is an Ultrarunner!

Anyway I'm off to put together my next post....'Fad diets'.........I'm joking, I'm joking!!!