I have a hobby. I like to run ultramarathons on the mountains: anything longer than a marathon basically, races where you half climb and half run downhill. To successfully run ultra you must take care of several things: strong head, equipment, food, training, tactics. I am not a superhero and I don’t have any experience in sports from the past. I started to run quite recently. am the father of 2 lovely girls and my routine allows me to train just 3-4 times a week. 30-60km a week. This is not a lot in the context of ultra running.
I signed up for an 87km race with a 4800m ascent on the Dolomites in Italy. There was a time limit of 23h. I was aware that my preparation did not go as well as I would have liked. My expected training mileage during 6 months did not even reach 1000km.
Because running ultra involves many factors besides running,I decided to cover all remaining bases to increase my chances of finishing the run on time. After I settled on my equipment, tested food and practiced some meditation techniques I moved on to pace tactics.
I used web scraping to crawl publicly available, popular sports tracking websites like Endomondo or Strava. With this I collected historical data on runs over the trails in the Dolomites area in order to train machine learning models to plan the most energy efficient pace tactic. I then used my performance factors from my Strava account to compute splits timing for each checkpoint, in the form of a simple table. My predicted completion time was 21 hours. I was totally fine with this.
Last but not least … I had to show up at 8AM by Lake Auronzo on a very hot June’s morning.
“Energy efficient tactics” did not translate to “easy”: the very hot weather did not help, yet it was surprisingly convenient to follow the time table and almost everything went as planned. It looked like I could make 21 hours easily. The biggest technical lesson from all this is that Machine Learning is not a modern type of “crystal ball”. It takes a long time to meaningfully “learn” rare, specific factors that relate to me. You can get injured, dehydrate yourself or lose consciousness; you can also cross the ridge and see the night lights of Cortina d’Ampezzo, get excited and race downhill like a lunatic. I completed the race in 19h ;)
