Originally featured in Outer Edge magazine.
On a beautiful autumn weekend earlier this year, Brendan Davies ran 100-kilometres through Australia’s Blue Mountains faster than anyone had done before. Outer Edge caught up with the Australian trail running marvel to discover how he, a humble teacher and relative newcomer to the sport, developed the weaponry to run faster than Kilian Jornet, the poster boy of world ultra-trail running.
Of all extraordinary feats achieved in sport, nothing provokes incredulity quite like the efforts of boundary-breaking endurance athletes.
Australia’s breakout ultra-trail runner and winner of May’s 2013 North Face 100 kilometre epic, Brendan Davies, astounded everyone with a display of sustained speed over a punishing route through New South Wales’ Blue Mountains. His time broke the record set by renowned Spanish endurance phenomenon, Kilian Jornet, a feat that instantly vaulted him to a place among the world’s best. Jornet was recently described in the New York Times as “the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation”. Brendan eclipsed his 2011 record by three minutes.
The manner of Brendan’s victory was so startlingly abrupt and unexpected that the significance of his performance didn’t have time to galvanise into something mainstream sport media could recognise. Ultra-distance trail runners such as Kilian Jornet and South Africa’s Ryan Sandes, like the Californian climber Alex Honnold, are famous outside the narrow confines of their niche communities. Brendan Davies doesn’t enjoy anywhere near their scale of acclaim. Brendan is so far from the glow of popularity afforded to the likes of them he’s Pluto; way out in space, far away from the limelight.
In Outer Edge’s estimation, Brendan taking out Kilian’s record was like the Socceroos knocking Brazil out of the World Cup. Ultimately, it was a shame Ryan was afflicted by a cruel stomach virus that forced his retirement well before the halfway mark of the 2013 event, because even a fully fit Ryan would most likely have had his hands full with Brendan hitting the form he did.
With the status of Ryan as a benchmark, it would have been a lot easier for the mainstream media to understand Brendan’s performance. The fact he finished nearly 30 minutes in front of the superb Vajin Armstrong and Andrew Tuckey in second and third, and broke Kilian’s record, confirmed the significance of the achievement; but doing it while also defeating Ryan would have been something else.
Six years before the adulation that came with winning The North Face 100 so convincingly, life for Brendan was very different.
It was around that time he looked in the mirror and saw a podgy dude looking back. He’d spent the previous decade eating pies and knocking back stubbies with his mates.
“I didn’t really do a thing in my twenties, I was a typical university student, drinking beers and having a good time and after that I focussed on my career, got married and became complacent with my fitness,” he told Outer Edge soon after his victory in the Blue Mountains.
“There was an actual moment; I remember it well – I saw a photo of myself and thought, ‘I’ve got to do something about this weight!’ so I joined the Woodstock running club,” he remembers. “Within two years I’d lost 25 kilograms and been selected for the Australian 100-kilometre team.”
Despite being mildly interested in running as a kid, and being aware he had some talent as a distance runner, he didn’t think to investigate the boundaries of his ability as a younger man.
“I’m a naturally curious person, so it’s strange I didn’t have a crack back then,” he says. “Perhaps I was just focussed on getting my career sorted first and it crowded out everything else.
“Now I’m always looking to try new things. With running, there are so many types, so I started with basic road running – but I started to bottom out with my times, so I added some trail running to mix it up and really loved it,” he adds, with a sense that he’s recounting the key plot points of a grand plan.
“I started running along trails in the Blue Mountains and, after being selected in the Australian mountain running team thought, ‘Okay, I’ve been selected now’ and began to take it seriously. We were looking to buy a house and I suggested that we look at the Blue Mountains. We moved there and discovered a really cool community of trail runners.”
His entire family – his grandparents, his parents and his sisters – are teachers, so he had a strong urge to achieve his tertiary teaching qualifications before anything else. Then, seven years into his career, he decided to go back and do a Masters in special education.
“I wanted a new challenge and with special education, it’s not just teaching the curriculum in a classroom, but teaching life skills as well,” he says. “It’s hard to explain the motivation except to say after teaching essential life skills to someone who needs them more than most – well, I can go to bed at night knowing I’ve been a good person that day.”
Six years into his 30s, after earning his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, marrying his sweetheart, Nadine, and curtailing his fondness for pies washed down with schooners of Toohey’s New, he won The North Face 100 in record time.
He went from a 30-year-old podgy weekend ambler taking his first tentative steps to become, at 36, one of the best trail runners Australia has produced. It’s an amazing transformation considering it started with nothing more than a casual glimpse at an uncomplimentary photograph. But it was a glimpse that triggered a dormant memory; a scant recollection that distance running was somehow interesting; a thought that perhaps running could be something cool to get into.
These days he’s fully plugged into the type of routine you’d expect from an elite athlete, but it’s the intelligent composition of his weekly breakdown that grabs attention. It suggests that his nimbleness is no accident, that he’s astutely adopted speed development principles and unpacked them into an ideal program for ultra trail training.
Australia’s greatest ever distance runner, former marathon world champion Rob de Castella, loves his trail running. Now long retired from elite running, he does the bulk of his running for pleasure in the Stromlo Forest, a short jog from his home in Canberra.
“Running in the forest is very relaxing,” Rob says. “It’s so beautiful, I don’t have to deal with noise and traffic, and I can run with friends. I want to enjoy my runs, not fight with cars.”
Rob is famous for his pioneering use of multi-pace training principles. He based his world-leading performances on long controlled-pace runs to establish and maintain a solid aerobic base and bolstered this with significant blocks of anaerobic speed work. He is famous for doing a weekly session of 8 x 400 metres at full pace when in his prime.
During a conversation with Australian middle distance runner Craig Mottram about how best to train for a long race, he told Outer Edge: “Just get out and put steady, easy miles into your legs, once you have built up to a weekly distance you think is adequate, start to factor in shorter distance interval work to sharpen up and practise speed.” Brendan seems to agree.
“My basic training week is a quarter hilly trail-runs, a quarter on the road, a quarter on the track and a quarter on the treadmill in an altitude chamber,” he replied to a question about developing his own eye-catching speed.
“The track component is interesting because there’s a notion that trail running is all about being out in nature and feeling wonderful because of it, whereas track work is highly competitive but dull in comparison,” he continues.
“I live by the philosophy of it’s what you put in that’s important; the intelligence of what it is you’re doing to improve. I’m not competitive on the track, I’m not nearly quick enough compared to 1500 metre, even 10 kilometre track specialists, but the work they do is great anaerobic training and so, in my opinion, is important for trail runners to include.”
Doing sets on a flat oval track, getting the body used to travelling at a pace much faster than what you’d maintain over an up-and-down 100 kilometre trail course, should be an essential part of an endurance program. Stoking the anaerobic system, exposing the body to repeated doses of maximum effort induced lactate acid is, he suggests, extremely beneficial for the endurance specialist.
The buzz now is for “easy speed” – not cheap crank pried from the clutches of a yellow-toothed biker, but rather of attaining a rare physical mastery; a supreme all-over fitness that allows for shifts in optimal race rhythm and speed at will.
It’s the ability to unleash “easy speed” that separates the elite from the rest of us. It’s attained by repeatedly battering the system with high threshold anaerobic sets; sprinting until complete failure, resting, then doing it again. The body adapts – fast pace begins to feel “easy”.
“It doesn’t really matter whether it’s interval or pyramid type training, it’s about being conditioned to flush out the lactic acid and recovering faster. I needed to learn how to push harder for longer. I tended to stay away from the shorter sets designed for those who race exclusively on the track, sort of modifying the track training format to suit an ultra runner,” he explains.
“I’m really good at recognising my weaknesses and I tend to focus on those while training. For example, climbing had been a real struggle for me, but this year I was 20 minutes faster on that leg because of the specific work I did for it while training.”
Brendan Davies has spent six years banishing weaknesses. It’s not that long really. If he has any left, a few more years of concentrated work dealing with them may grant him the same worldwide fame as his new running peers.
