Making the 100 club.

Having completed not one but two hundred mile races this year, I began to wonder just how many of us there were, do running 100 mile runs at weekends then going back to work on mondays.

Then I decided that there was no point in just lazily wondering how many there were, when it wasn’t actually that hard to work it out. UltraMarathonrunning.com had already done the hard work listing all the UK Ultras, all I needed to do was filter through the list and pick out the 100 milers, look up the results and copy and paste them into a spreadsheet.

I started off with a simple list of runners, races and times a column with multiple entries for multiple races, then as I started to add more races it became harder to work with. I reworked the format with runners on the verticals axis and race titles in the horizontal.

This seemed to work, so any took the next logical step and started to add the race details, date, distance, amount of ascent, time limit etc.

As this was starting to become quite useful i shared the document on google docs and posted a couple of links to various facebook groups. I got a few suggestions on other race that i should include, such as the LDWA 100 which is technically a walk but which many people run. I also had a few people want me to include results of endurance races where runners simply rack up as many miles in 24 hours as they can, some of whom were well in the hundreds, or to include people that DNF after a hundred mile mark in races like the Viking way. Unfortunately I had to make the decision that this was going to be too complicated to administer, but the list seemed pretty popular.

Its an ongoing project, that I’ll have to keep updating as new races finish, but it you want to take a look , here’s a link – UK 100 mile club 2013.

In a way its quite funny that we put significance on certain numbers, as if achieving a 100 mile run is any more amazing than 98 or 99. There’s also a tenancy to call races 100′s even if they are 105 or 108 miles, I guess the names just that bit more catchy. Even grouping hundred milers into a single category is a bit of a stretch, the distance is only I factor the ascent, the terrain, the time of year and even the level of support make each one truly unique.

The Cotswold 100 was entirely on the roads, the hills had very gentle gradients, there were checkpoints every 10 miles or so and I was joined by my good friend Paul Stoneley for the last 20 miles, so it should have been a lot harder that the Lakeland 100, four weeks later. But because the Cotswolds was so much more runnable than the Lakeland which is almost entirely on trail, with lots more hills and two night time sections, my legs actually felt better after the Lakeland than the Cotswolds.