My name is Francesco Puppi, I’m a professional trail runner for Nike and a head coach for Vert. In my athletic career I have specialized in any distance that is defined as “short trail”, or what in Europe we refer to as “mountain running”: short trail races, up to the 50k distance. But my favorite distance might be the mountain marathon. Why? Because they are a lot of fun to race and train for–and they are intense, various and generally not too hard to recover from, so you can definitely do more than one per year. In this post I will talk all about it!

Ok, so let’s start off by stating the obvious: running a 100 miler is HARD. (And we mean very, very hard indeed.) Training for and running 100 miles is just about as hard as it gets in the sport of trail running, actually, so if you’re thinking about running a 100 miler, you should first ask yourself these two questions: 1.) Do I want to run a 100 miles because I really want to? Or am I doing it because I feel like I’m “supposed” to as an ultrarunner? 2.) Do I have a friend or someone else who is pushing me to take on training for a 100 miler before I’m ready to?

We’re really serious about asking yourself these two things, because it’s actually pretty common for ultrarunners to feel obligated to try to tackle this distance before they’re ready. And while on one hand it can be good to have some “motivators” while training for or racing a 100 miler, the reality is that if you undertake this huge goal for the wrong reasons, it’s going to be much harder to actually achieve.

We know that as trail runners, the questions never end. No matter how many years we’ve been trail running–and no matter if we’re prepping to run our first trail 5k or our first 100 miler ultramarathon–there are always tons of things we ask ourselves.