A tough day at the office: A popular phrase, but does it really mean anything anymore?  How would you define ‘tough’ in the modern world?  Working through your lunch hour?  Carrying a heavy box up the stairs? 

To some people, it might mean a bit more than that.  To stock-brokers or solicitors, a tough day can mean a twelve or thirteen hour slog, bound to the desk with an ear to the phone and eyes on the computer screen.  To a footballer it might mean playing extra time in a cup match, or perhaps even the added pressure of a penalty shoot-out.

But is that actually a tough day?  Is it not just a tough couple of hours for the footballer, a tough half-day to the lawyers and the money-men?

On the other hand, for William Sichel, a tough day at his office is just that: A tough day.  At the very least, he will have a gruelling 24 hours.  Sometimes he may be pushed into working solidly for 48 hours, or even several days.

This is nature of the gut-busting, knee-jarring, energy-sapping extent to which his sport, ultra-distance running, expects him to push himself. 

Unlike other long-distance running events like the marathon or 10,000metres, ultra running doesn’t require an athlete to cover a certain distance in the quickest possible time.  It demands the athlete to cover the highest possible distance in a pre-determined time.  And races can last up to 144 hours.  A decent marathon run rarely lasts longer than 144 minutes.

William has an engine that would put most endurance athletes to shame.  In the 24-hour race his personal best distance is 153.3 miles.  In the 48-hour race he has covered 213.92 miles (a Scottish record), and in the six day event, where he was World No. 1 in 2006, he dragged himself thorough 478.6 painful miles.  Those are distances that most of us would find cumbersome in the comfy confines of a car, let alone on foot with literally minutes to rest and eat.

“Anyone that is trying to achieve a big distance in the 24-hour race wouldn’t plan to stop at all, except for toilet stops and maybe a quick stop to tend to your feet and change your socks or shoes” says William. 

“When I did my personal best there were only six minutes when I wasn’t actually running.  In the 48-hour you would maybe require a short sleep or a meal break, but in the 24 you have got to really keep going.”

Most recently William finished third in July’s Austrian 24-hour Championship, where he staged a late sprint to finish with a distance of 134.5 miles, the best British time this year.  But he feels he still has plenty left in the tank to get better, even at 53 years old.  More impressive still is Sichel’s confidence that he is yet to ‘peak’ as an ultra runner.

“I’ve learned so much in the last two years, especially about pacing and race nutrition, that I believe the best is yet to come, because I know how much I’ve been restricted by nutrition within races, and I know how that will help me improve in the future, so I have not peaked yet.”

William places a great deal of faith in the wonders of correct nutrition.  It is paramount to such a fuel-burning event as ultra running (William can burn up to a kilogram of fat in a single race).  But getting the science and volumes of food and liquid to take in just right is one of the most difficult aspects of his sport.  As a discipline, there is very little scientific advice out there in adequate nutrition to allow the body to sustain such a punishing.

For William, the science and precision behind nutrition is as important as anything else required of an ultra runner.

“It doesn’t matter how good your basic speed is, how talented you are or what your muscles are like, you do have to take in nutrition.  A good marathon runner can get by just on water, but an ultra runner has to take in water, carbohydrate and electrolytes, as the absolute minimum. 

“I graduated in science, I have a science background, and I use all that knowledge and training.  It has taken eleven years of personal research to get to where I am today.  You need to get enough, but not too much.”

This is a lesson that William learned from personal experience.  Over the years he suffered from nausea, vomiting and stomach upsets due to incorrect intake of nutrients and surplus stomach acid. 

“For years and years I was paying too much attention to scientific data and overloading, especially with carbohydrates.  All the books say 60g of carbohydrate per hour is what you need, but for 90% of ultra runners that is impossible.  You can’t take that in because the body can’t process it.

Or, to be exact, William’s body couldn’t process.  At only 1.63m and 58kilos, he is smaller than an average man, despite his prowess as an athlete.

“Then about two years ago I discovered that I could do very well on just 35g of carbohydrate an hour, and run like a dream.  And that made me realise that I was different to the textbook athlete.  And this is the skill, fine-tuning the nutrition to the individual.”

As small as his frame may be, however, Sichel says he is perfectly built for his sport.  In fact, he says that as an all round human being, he could have been made specifically to endure such a discipline.

“I do find I’m very well suited to the event, and even after a 24-hour race I won’t have sore muscles any longer than two or three days.  I’m always amazed myself actually! 

“I’ve also got a very economical gait.  I have worked on it over the years and have worked to improve it. I have a very steady, even, lightweight tread, a very economical way of running.  There is very little pressure and jarring on the joints.  My muscles also recover very quickly.”

So it really sounds as if William was born to ultra run.  So how can he be one of the world’s best at 53?  By that point, most athletes have hung up their boots / spikes / trainers and taken up something easier, more relaxing, and less stressful, such as fly-fishing or hill-walking (or TV punditry).

“That is definitely not the case in ultra running.  Even in the shorter races like the 100km, which is the most universal ultra of all, it is not unusual for the champions of that to be pushing 40. 

“One of the reasons is that there is so much to learn.  The intricacies of pacing and feeding take years to get right, I’m still finding that myself, how to capitalise on it.  Learning how to pace yourself and apply effort, let alone the nutritional side of it, takes years, because you are only doing a few races a year relative to shorter distances.  It takes years to gather the experience to know what suits you best.”

So in the case of ultra running, the older you get the better you become?

“Well my last twelve months have been my best since I came into the sport in 1994.  That means any loss I have had physically has been more than made up for by being able to run the race better nutritionally and mentally.

“It is also the sort of event where people move up the way.  In athletics, sprinters go from the 100m to the 200m; 5,000m runners go to 10,000m.  It’s the same again for me.  I was quite happy doing marathons, I was knocking them out in 2hours, 38minutes quite regularly, and then somebody got me into ultra running.  I found I wanted a bit more.”

It has always been a case of wanting more for William Sichel.  Average is never enough for him; he wants to continually raise the bar.  It is a mentality that has stuck with him from his teenage years, when he first learned that he didn’t fall into any conventional moulds.

“For some unknown reason when I was in my teens I had this very strong desire to be world class in sport, but I didn’t know which sport it was going to be!

He also realised early in life that to stand out, he had to be extra special.

“I come from a very large family, [he is the middle child of nine, with four brothers and four sisters] and we moved around a lot when I was of school age, so I was always the new boy in school, and I was very shy and very small, so I used prowess in sport – football, athletics and rugby – as a way of getting integrated into new schools.”

However, what may come as the biggest benefit of Sichel’s belated foray into the international sporting arena is his mental toughness.  As modern athletes often enter the elite fold as early as their final teenage years, a question mark hangs over how psychologically prepared they are to deal with the pressure, pain and passion that top level sport can throw at them. 

But, by waiting until well into his 30s before moving into the competitive circuit, William ensured he had a wise head on a relatively young and energetic body.  And he uses psychology to take him through literally every gruelling minute of his fiendishly long races.

“I always think you need really clear goals.  You need to really understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.  I have what I call ‘a three goal trick’ for my races.  There is the basic goal, where even if you have problems in the race, you would hope to achieve that particular distance.  Then there is an intermediate goal where you have a distance you hope to achieve, and then there is the barrier breaking goal, which is more than you’ve ever done before, which is your dream outcome.

“But then I have a lot of intermediate goals in between as well.  The whole thing is about breaking the race up into small pieces, and you move from one to the next as the race develops.  Nobody stands on the start line of a 24 or 48-hour race or a six-dayer thinking about the whole event.  They will be thinking about the next twenty minutes, the next forty minutes.”

Sichel takes these mentak challenges a step further with the help of Norwegian sports psychologist, Nils Vikander, who advised him on other techniques to get through a race.  “One of the things he taught me is that you have a series of ‘mood’ words you can use.  It is a bit like a programme of psychological skills you can use through an event.  You segment the race, and then you have mood words associated with each segment. 

“So two thirds of my thoughts will be on a series of phrases, like ‘Look out 50 metres ahead’ ‘Look up and back 50 metres’ ‘Push from the elbow, pull from the wrist’.  It forces you to concentrate on the way you are running.  You are running the phrases through your head and ensuring that you are running as economically and smoothly as you can during the race.

“Then you have positive words and phrases like ‘William you are doing really well, the race is going better than planned’.  It’s about making yourself feel good about yourself.” 

His mental toughness is testament to a sport that requires not only the grit and grunt to dig in, but the presence of mind to maintain form for extreme periods of time.  But then again, Sichel is a man who doesn’t only excel in his sport, but in everything he does.

Never more-so has this strength of mind and body been apparent than when, ten years ago, William was diagnosed with testicular cancer.  A life threatening condition and, to most, just reason to take a break from the rigours of daily life.

But not for William.  Diagnosed on June 26th 1997 and undergoing surgery on July 3rd, within a fortnight William was back in training, and by August he was fully fit and selected for the Great Britain team for the World 100km Road Championships in September.

A decade later and William is not only still an ultra runner, but an ultra person, proving that anyone of any age in any situation can be winner.  We may not all become world champions, but in Sichel’s story we should all find something to aspire to.

RO

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William is sponsored by www.myprotein.co.uk