Words by Andy Waterman
Photos by Matt Shapiro
“I've always been a hard worker,” says Cole Crosby, fresh from his win in the 24hr category at the Mount to Coast sponsor Aravaipa Across the Years race in Arizona in January. He ran 150 miles in that race, looping round a baseball training facility. It was just the latest in Crosby’s steady evolution into a gritty, successful ultrarunner.
“I was a division one walk-on at the University of Oklahoma,” he says, explaining his route into the sport. “I wouldn't necessarily say that I was a super talented runner out of high school but I was talented enough to be in the same room as a lot of really talented national level athletes.”
After college, Cole stepped up to the marathon, joining a serious training group in Oklahoma City with an eye on the Oklahoma City Marathon in April. Perhaps contrary to his coach’s wishes, he threw a 50k trail race into his training a few weeks before the marathon. “It was one of these no frills, no entry fee, just show up kinda races, called the White Rock 50k. I won with a course record. I think my feeding was bananas and gatorade – nothing like what we have nowadays.”
The risk paid off and in his marathon a few weeks later, Cole ran 2:36, finishing in second place on home turf. “I had a really strong negative split,” he says, “and after that, I kind of realized that the longer the distance, the more I had skills that would be utilized.”
After the Oklahoma epiphany, Cole moved back to the north east, to Rhode Island, the smallest state in the US. “It's about an hour south from Boston and what I usually tell people is that I live in a region called New England,” says Cole.
Patience is a Virtue
New England was one of the first regions of North America to be settled by Europeans. Arriving to find a harsh climate and none of the creature comforts of home, those settlers had to be resilient, and patient: it takes a long time to grow crops or build roads and houses. “I think I've always been a fairly patient person,” says Cole. “I think it's also a skill that I've developed over time. With 11 or 12 years of ultrarunning, I've been able to sharpen that tool. When I first got into ultras, I was redlining from the get-go, thinking it was like a 10k. You learn quickly that you can't do that! So I kind of retooled my thinking: I need to spread that peanut butter over the slice of bread as evenly as possible to get my best performance.”
That willingness to leave a little peanut butter in the jar and spread what you have evenly over the bread is what separates ultrarunning from distances up the marathon. Especially in races below half marathon distance, it’s all about riding the red line of physiological thresholds, particularly at the sharp end of the race, and pacing is helped by predictable courses and conditions. In ultras, things change, fast. “Marathon running, in my eyes, is a little bit more of a controlled environment,” says Cole. “I think in an ultra, especially multi-day, we're having to wrestle with so many other factors like, how you slept, how you’re dealing with food, the variations in terrain – it's just more extreme. It's not about running at a given pace, it's a matter of human will: can I just keep moving forward?”
Cole has become a specialist in mult-day ultras in recent years, so the 24hr race at Across the Years was a step into the unknown. He went in with the intention of running far enough to be in with a shot of selection for the US 24hr team, which would mean running over 140 miles. With 152 miles covered, he was well clear of his goal. How was it running so far on such a short loop? “Traditionally I love point to point courses,” he says. “And I haven't really done a ton of looped events, or if I've done loops like on the trails where each lap is like 10 miles.” That relative lack of experience was perhaps a blessing in some ways, with Cole finding some aspects of the race easier to deal with than others. “The whole experience was different from what I expected initially,” he says. “I thought I could just ride the wave of it, but there was this huge mental strain because everything is always the same. I definitely had some ups and downs.”
Real Food, Real Fuel
Cole’s approach to nutrition is interesting and a good reason to listen to him on the Mount to Coast podcast. Rather than focussing on sports nutrition products, through extensive trial and error he’s worked out which real foods work for him and which don’t. “We're all an experiment of one,” he says, “so the off season is always a great time to experiment with things. I started eating more proteins and fats, and things that could be easily digestible: hummus, guacamole, baby food, cheeses, olives, all these different types of things. I still use my sports nutrition, and I did a good amount for this event, but I eat all kinds of things.”
It’s an unusual approach, and would probably be seen as unorthodox in many circles, but the fact is, the only calories that matter are the ones you put into your body, and what your body is then happy to process. Sports nutrition is great, right up to the point that it isn’t: eating a varied selection of food that keeps your emotions steady, your stomach happy and your legs moving forward is a tried-and-true tactic in longer ultras and one that requires experimentation.
Footwear for Ultras
After nutrition, shoes are another part of the puzzle that can make or break an ultra runner’s experience. As well as being a Mount to Coast athlete, Cole is also a sales representative for the brand in the north east of the US, so spends his days singing the praises of the shoes to running stores around the region. “The thing that's unique about ultra running,” he says, “is that it's about going the distance – transcending distance, right? The only way to go the distance is if you have a shoe that doesn't bother you, that's comfortable, that gives you the performance you need and has the durability and kind of support to go the distance.”
That journey to finding the right shoe is also deeply personal. Some athletes can race a 6-Day in a carbon-plated super shoe, while others will find that kind of shoe is aggravating even over a 50km. “I think the big thing is that the footwear is similar to the nutritional journey – it has to be your own journey,” says Cole. “What works for me may not necessarily work for you, and that's okay! I personally don't do well with carbon-plated shoes, but where we are currently in the industry, which is very much performance-focused, people are training in them all the time as if they're a regular trainer. For me, a carbon-plated racing shoe should be used for one thing only, and that's for running fast, either speed workouts or top line speed races like the marathon.
“I like to have a product that I can do a lot of different things with,” he says. “And that's really special with the R1, you can pretty much do anything with it. Obviously I'm biased, but I think there's something really special behind what the Mount to Coast team is bringing to market right now.”
Discover more about Cole Crosby by tuning into the full podcast.