Rait Ratasepp: ANALYSIS IS THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL PERFORMANCE

^01.02.2023

^{Reading time: 4 minutes}

The start of the year is the right time, and high time, to review the past year's activities: to find out exactly what and how much was done, which methods worked and which didn't, what should or could be changed, and so on. I place great emphasis on comparing and analysing my past training, and this has certainly been one of the reasons I have learned how my body works and how to set the right time goals. In addition to the yearly summary, I also like to keep an eye on my sporting activities over the years. This perspective highlights the aspects that characterise ultra sports, such as the kilometres covered, the duration, the energy burned and consumed, and so on.

Photo by Jakob Meier.

To illustrate the big numbers typical of ultra sports, I'll share some overall figures here in this blog. 

Although I started running on my own (i.e. school PE lessons don't count) in 1998, I didn't record any numbers for the first couple of years. By the summer of 2000, the running bug had well and truly bitten me and I started training purposefully. From then until today, I have run a total of 75,041 km. 

Of those 75,041 km, as much as 71.76%, or 53,851 kilometres, I have run in the last 10.5 years using Garmin devices. The Garmin Connect training log shows that the first entry dates from 18 July 2012 and that my first watch was the Garmin Forerunner 910 XT . 

These 53,851 km comprise 3,277 separate running workouts with an average length of 16.4 km. Covering this distance took me a total of 4,344 hours, which gives an average running pace of 4.50 min.sec/km (or 12.4 km/h)

For the last seven years (2015 to 2022), my annual running mileage has exceeded four thousand kilometres, ranging from 4,329 to 8,008 km.

Finally, a marathon tally that I keep myself. To date, in running races, ultra runs, self-organised marathon challenges, training sessions and full-distance and ultra triathlons, I have run a total of 311 marathons. In other words, on 311 occasions I have run 42 km or more in one go. For example, the 100 km run at Haanja Ultra100 counted as 2 marathons, while a 64 km training run counted as one marathon. 

I did not count the many times I have run more than a marathon in a single day but did so in two, three or even four runs. I call this the split-run method, and it has been central to my preparation for ultra challenges.