A lot can change in the course of a run.
Moods alter. Seasons change.
Clarity comes and goes.

If all that can happen in 6 miles, imagine what can happen in 6 full days of running?
You can change the world!

And if the world won't change, you will.

No one runs this far for the fitness,
Or the kudos
Or the buzz

You do it for the places your mind goes on the journey
You do it to truly test yourself
And one day, maybe, transcend distance.

There are times when running is about the places it takes you – the hill tops you can only access on foot, the views you experience passing through dawn into daylight – and there are times when running is about the places your mind goes while you place one foot in front of the other. The world of multi-day ultrarunning occupies the latter space.

A 6-day race has to be witnessed to be understood. No 30-second Instagram reel can convey the impact a week’s worth of sleep deprivation, food as fuel, and 1000 laps of a 900m loop can have on a person. By day 6, very little of what we consider athleticism remains. Even Matthieu Bonne of Belgium, who broke Yiannis Kouros’s World Record in Hungary, covering 1046km, was a shell of a man by the final day, doing little more than sliding one foot in front of the other to maintain some semblance of momentum as he cemented his achievement in the record books.

It’s what replaces athleticism that is interesting: a strange blend of steely perseverance, euphoria, camaraderie, and even a little sadness that soon, all this will be over and reality will come roaring back into the picture. In our recent podcast episode, Trishul Cherns, founder of the Global Organization of Multi-day Ultramarathons and himself an experienced runner of almost 50 years, described the sensation of running so far as: “It really is a spiritual act to me. It's tuning into energy and being swept along with that energy – I have the feeling I want to run forever! It’s really taught me how to be in the moment, from a spiritual point of view.”

The race in Hungary is an established national event that is growing in international recognition since the cooperation with GOMU. Runners come from all over the world, from South America to Japan and all across Europe. Held on the northern shore of Lake Balaton, the race takes over a small holiday park for the duration of the 6 days with athletes and their crews living out of chalets alongside the race course. Every lap the athletes pass through a food tent where they can stock up on calories and during the final two days, even get an ice cream.

For Bartosz Fudali from Poland, this was his first 6-day race. Fresh off a win in the GOMU 48hr Championship in May, he was confident of breaking the Polish 6-Day record, but beyond that, he went in with an open mind. “It’s true that I started too fast,” he says, “but I like to compete, so we chase each other a little bit. But this is not a good strategy for such a long distance... This is my debut, so I make a lot of mistakes.” Was that fast start the hardest part of the race? “No,” he says. “Maybe a psychological thing. In the second day for example, you start to think ‘what is the purpose?’ ‘How long it's gonna take?’ I had to break it down to simple steps, for example 10 kilometers, or just one loop – something that you can achieve quite easily and not think about the final score. Even without the records I have some time when everything is fine. I think positively, I listen to good music, everything around me says that this is a good time for me and I was in the good mood. In ultra we say that there is only uphill and downhill, there is no constant, so there will be some problems, but the point is to break it down and go further.”

Bartosz went on to finish second with 842km and a new Polish record, but he will have bigger ambitions next time, and better plans to deal with discomfort and minor injuries on the way.

Hungarian-Canadian Viktoria Brown is more experienced in these long races and approached the event with big ambitions having followed a plan to acclimate to the sleep deprivation in advance of the race. “I had very big goals,” she says, “but those were out the window on the first day right away. In retrospect, I think I made mistakes in the training. The problem is that a six-day race is about sleep deprivation. And I'm just not very good at running at night. So I tried a new approach: every week I had one training day where I would run all night. I did four or five weeks of sleep deprivation training, which was relatively hard and then I was feeling so good about the nighttime running. But then I had a pretty bad race in terms of nighttime running.”

Despite the issues, Viktoria placed second. “I knew that I wasn't going to reach a personal best,” she says, “so I was just basically fighting for second place extremely hard, and eventually it worked out. I'm happy about that, but it was just so tough.”

For Brown, it’s sharing the experience with other athletes that makes these races so special. “I spent a lot of time together with the first-place female, Zsuzsa. She's also Hungarian and she's my friend. We actually became much closer friends, running through the night laughing our heads off at the stupidity of what we are doing.”

Not everyone was in Hungary with the intention of setting records. For German Andrea Mehner, this race was preparation for Backyard Ultras, and she arrived solo with no crew to support. “The biggest problem with not having a crew is that I slept how long I wanted to sleep – this morning I hit the snooze button twice. I think my crew would have kicked me out of the bungalow!”

Mehner still went on to cover 666km, placing fourth woman overall. “I experienced a flow-state several times, but only for short periods of one or two hours,” she says. “It goes up and down. I didn’t push myself to suffer in a bad way.”

Mehner ran the whole race in Mount to Coast R1’s having only run two short jogs in them before. “They were perfect. These are the best shoes I’ve ever had, for these types of races, they’re amazing.”

This was Mount to Coast’s first year supporting the GOMU World Championships and we were blown away by the performances we saw up and down the field, from the first day to the last. Congratulations to all the participants – we can’t wait to see you next year.

Words by Andy Waterman