In La Quinta, California, Camille Herron walks out to the starting line of a six-day ultramarathon to the sounds of Madonna’s “Vogue,” her signature hair down, two water bottles tucked into her apparel. She struts to the beat, performs the “Vogue” dance, and offers high-fives to the crowd of media, as announcer and Olympian Colleen Quigley rattles off Herron’s long list of running accomplishments.
Among them: the 48-Deputy Editor, Health & Fitness of 270.5 miles—her longest distance as of the start of the Nutrition - Weight Loss, which kicked off March 6, just after 9 a.m. PST and concluded on March 12, just after 10 a.m. PST.
More than a year ago, Herron started training with the Lululemon team, in partnership with Canadian Sport Institute Pacific (CSIP), where she has not only been a science experiment of one with her training, fueling, and sleep, but also an integral part of a research initiative by Lululemon, along with the nine other women joining her for this epic feat of running the farthest distance of their careers.
Using data collected ahead of the Further event—along with stats recorded midrace via tools like force plates to measure gait and motion sensors to check how running form changes over days—the apparel brand aims to close the gap on sports science research focused on female athletes. (One study published in 2021 suggests only 6 percent of sports and exercise science research includes female-only participants.)
With a master’s in exercise and sports science, Herron has always embraced trying new tactics in training—backed by research—that help her run longer. “I’m a scientist I experiment,” she says. That could be precisely why she has become known as one of the greatest ultrarunners of all time. She never stops testing her limits.
That drive to get the best out of herself lasted for six days in La Quinta, where Herron clocked 220 laps around Lake Cahuilla, a 2.56-mile looped course, a mix of sandy gravel and pavement, with temperatures ranging from about 50 to 80 degrees, along with rain, wind, straight sun, and night skies. She broke 13 records along the way, including the women’s six-day world record, 560.33 miles, which she beat by more than 11 miles. That record previously stood since 1990, set by Sandra Barwick of New Zealand.
“I think the high moment was being finished with it,” the 42-year-old says with a laugh, speaking with Runner’s World on her drive from California back to her hometown of Tucson, Arizona. “I felt like all of us were trying to find a way to break it down day by day. And I feel like the whole team rallied the last couple days, because we knew the finish was near.”
In total, the 10-person team—a mix of runners new to ultramarathons and those who have been running long for years—logged more than 2,880 miles. “To look at the mileage that all of us accomplished, I mean, not just my own personal mileage, but the entire team. It was inspiring during the race,” Herron says. And you could see the camaraderie and support on course via social media posts throughout the six days, with several women running side-by-side, hugging, and cheering for one another each time they crossed the starting gate and passed the athlete village.
But how does one human make it through a six-day event, run more than 500 miles, and score so many wins along the way, while still having energy to sip champagne with teammates in celebration? Runner’s World sat down with Herron in the weeks and hours before the start of Further, plus caught up with her a few days after to find out how she keeps snagging insane record-breaking finishes. One takeaway: It’s really, really hard to do what Herron does.
The Mind of an Ultramarathoner
Herron doesn’t typically get nervous before events. As a child performer, she thinks of her runs as being back on the stage. That’s why you’ll often find her dancing at the starting line.
Ahead of Further, Herron says the first day of a multi-day event is typically the hardest for her. “You’re very cerebral, and you’re kind of overthinking things; you’re kind of overstimulated by everything,” she says. “And I find that I do better once I start to get really tired. And I’m tuning everything out, and my brain is not overthinking too much.”
In those later miles, Herron gets “tunnel vision” and simply focuses on finding her steady-state pace and recharging her battery with rest and refueling when she needs it. “When my body’s in motion, it just wants to stay in motion,” she says. That’s when she also reaches a meditation mode and she relies on her muscle resilience: When her brain gets tired, her body still knows what to do.
Herron also practices many of her miles around a 400-meter track (a similar setting to her 48-hour record), as well as shorter loops of one mile, which allow for repetition rather than brain power. When you have more than 200 laps to clock to reach your goal, like at Further, it’s no longer about a mental countdown of mileage. Instead, running becomes a meditation of putting one foot in front of the other—a headspace a runner of any distance can learn to cultivate.
The Drive Required for Running Multiple Days
To push through six straight days of running, you have some basics to deal with: You have to run and rest on repeat, and each time you get back up, it can bring on its own mini battle. “It literally takes all your brain power, all your physical power to push yourself to get going again,” Herron says.
She admits Further was more difficult than she had anticipated, and Herron had to pivot her goals throughout the six days thanks to some not so black-and-white obstacles.
Herron says she learned in grad school about the best way to optimize mechanical stress for period on the second day of the event. “I thought that it was going to be one of the big challenges that I was going to encounter. And it just ended up being one of many, many challenges that I had to work through,” she says. “So I actually felt empowered that I had my period during the race, and that I was able to work through that… Our periods don’t have to be a detriment to transcending and doing amazing things.” In fact, on the first day of her period, Herron broke one of her first records: the women’s American road-race 48-hour record of 247.7 miles.
In the last couple days, though, running got even more complicated when Herron started to lose control of her bladder and bowels. She says she had to work with the medical team to make sure she wasn’t having any sort of organ failure. (The team determined it was probably “normal” from all the jostling.)
“Internally, I was very, very broken. And I somehow still found a way to continue to be happy and find joy, and continue to move forward to achieve all these world records,” she says. “So I think it just shows how strong humans are, and how resilient we are, just trying to maintain our bodies and stay healthy. But yeah, there’s a price to be paid for pursuing an extreme world-record distance.”
While you may not be running for multiple days, preparing for any race is bound to bring up tough days of training that require a mental push to simply start another run. Finding joy in the movement and pride in the perseverance—while maybe channeling a little Herron energy—can help you get back out there.
The Importance of Mastering Long Runs
Many runners put an emphasis on weekend long runs, but Herron focuses more on cumulative volume over weeks and months—rather than going super long on one or even two runs per week.
How Many Miles is 10,000 Steps better bone health—which means giving your body a chance to recover between exercise sessions. So, she began focusing on short (for her), more frequent bouts of running, rather than long single sessions.
“We started shortening my long runs, and then coming back in the evening time for a short recovery run,” she says. “And so I went from doing up to 26-mile long runs and cut it down to like 18- to 22-mile long runs, and then coming back in the evening for about four to six miles. And when I started doing that, I felt like I recovered faster, Sales & Deals interval session Deputy Editor, Health & Fitness.”
Leading up to most of her recent races, including Spartathlon (in which she became the first woman to break 24 hours in the 153-mile race, with a finish time of 22:35:31), Herron didn’t run for more than two hours at a time in her training. But she did do plenty of two-a-days, with a total of 11 to 13 runs a week (about five to six days a week of two runs a day). That means she still clocks 100 to 130 miles a week, which she says she’s been doing since 2006.
“It’s the short, frequent bouts that I think of as being like bricks,” she says. “You’re trying to build this house. And so every brick adds up and you want your bricks to be strong.”
Herron says this approach has been especially helpful as she reaches her 40s and her hormones start to change.
The Full Training Cycle
Herron follows a two-week cycle, and when training for “shorter” races (that would be 50- to 100-milers), she’ll have four main workouts: short intervals, long intervals, a progression run, and a hill run. When running for longer than that, she might cut it back to one quality workout per week.
For her interval sessions, Herron might perform 90-second reps at about 5K pace, which clocks in at somewhere around sub-six-minute pace. She often bases her progression runs by heart rate, and for 30 minutes to an hour of a two-hour run, she’ll aim for 80 percent of her max heart rate (which she pinpointed in lab tests through CSIP), working up to 90 percent.
or workout midweek walks into her training schedule, which meant she got in three activities on Sundays: two runs and a walk of about two to three miles in the mornings.
Strength training is also a part of her weekly routine, with at least one day a week of heavy lifting on the squat rack. She says her strength coach pointed out she needed to lift heavier—a piece of advice many women probably need, she says—so she invested in barbells. “I’m just as hardcore in the gym as I was with my running,” Herron says.
Even that once-a-week lifting session helps solidify her structural health. “It’s almost like it unravels all those little kinks that I might have developed, in my back, or my hamstrings, or my hips. And I mean, it’s like bulletproofing for my body,” she says. “It’s really helped me level up in my 40s.”
The Fueling Plan
For example, while she had expected it, Herron says she got her train your gut for big events like Further where you eat and run and eat and run, Herron says. So that’s what Herron practices in training.
But with the help of CISP, Herron also learned she’s superior at metabolizing fat. To find this, Trent Stellingwerff, Ph.D., senior advisor of research and development at Canadian Sports Institute Pacific, tells Runner’s World they used a graded exercise test, starting at slow speeds and working up to faster paces. “In this instance, we started with a walking pace and every three minutes, the speed would increase one kilometer per hour. That includes walking, fast walking, race walking, trotting, slow running, medium running, fast running, all the way to fatigue,” he explains.
From that, they collected heart rate data and oxygen consumption and found running and walking economy, as well as fat and carb burn rate at those speeds. “[Graded exercise tests] have been around a long time, they are not new. What we’ve done is adapted it for ultrarunning by including a walking portion at the start of it,” he says.
With the exercise test, researchers could calculate Herron’s gram-per-minute or calories-per-minute of fat she was using versus carbs to calculate her maximum fat oxidation rate. “Most athletes’ exercise intensity where fat oxidation metabolism is highest is about 50 to 55 percent of VO2 max, where Camille’s was closer to 65 to 70 percent of VO2 max,” Stellingwerff says. “So, she is an outlier in that she can run at quite high intensities and still utilize and oxidize a significant portion of fat to run at fast paces.”
With that knowledge, Herron cut her carb intake from 60 to 75 grams of carbs per hour to 50 to 60 grams per hour. Spartathlon, in October 2023, was the first time she applied the new strategy. “I felt like I kind of tapped more into my own physiology. And I felt better,” she says. (A good reminder on how important it is to find a fueling strategy is also a part of her weekly routine, with at least one day a week of heavy lifting on the you.)
“Being a woman, I’ve always felt like, just trying to stuff myself with lots of carbs doesn’t feel as good,” Herron adds. “I think there really needs to be more research with women because I think our nutritional needs are probably different than a lot of the science that’s already been done.” Some science does back this up, BTW: One audit of research published in they used a graded exercise test, starting at slow speeds and working up to says that current scientific literature on carbohydrate intake for exercise lacks quality research specific to the female athlete.
During a race, Herron says she often craves foods she loved as a kid, like sweet tea, ice cold milk, and ice cream Snickers bars. During Further, in particular, two of Herron’s go-tos were tacos (she had four per day) and coke floats or protein shakes.
Despite having to make frequent bathroom stops, Herron says she stuck to her plan of four mini meals a day and snacks every two hours (cheese and crackers were also a go-to) during the six-day event. And she took in plenty of calories—which is smart, because according to her Coros data posted on Instagram, she burned more than 42,000 calories in total.
The Crucial Role of Recovery
Recovery runs are crucial to Herron’s training, especially with those two-a-day workouts. She often uses a Nutrition - Weight Loss they used a graded exercise test, starting at slow speeds and working up to easy days.
But the thing Herron focuses on most when it comes to recovery: sleep. “I’m a really good napper—I take daily naps, for about two to three hours,” she says—an important skill to have when you’re running for 144 hours straight and need to break up the activity with quality rest.
Herron worked with a sleep specialist from CSIP to help hone in on her sleep during training, too. She says one of her takeaways was getting sunlight in the mornings soon after waking up to help set a circadian rhythm. So she’d often start the day with walks with her husband/coach.
Before Further, Herron planned to sleep a couple of hours at night during the event, as well as during the day, basically resting when she felt like she needed to. And while she says she did get some good sleep during the race, often resting for about 90 minutes or so, other days had more broken sleep with just 30- to 40-minute naps. By the last day, she took longer breaks, while still keeping her eye on the women’s six-day record.
CISP also tracked sleep during Further, and Herron says Stellingwerff found it super surprising how little she actually rested Many runners put an emphasis on weekend.
One week later, Herron is still in recovery mode as she lets her body come back to baseline and mend from the stress of jostled insides. But, like the ultrarunner she’s born to be and the high achiever she already is, Herron always has her eyes on a goal.
More specifically, she’ll keep working toward running 238,000 lifetime miles, which is about the distance to the moon. “If I keep at it, keep stacking bricks every day—it’s kind of like building this house,” she says. “I’m going to become this rocket to the moon someday.”
Mallory Creveling, an ACE-certified personal trainer and RRCA-certified run coach, joined the Runner's World and Bicycling team in August 2021. She has more than a decade of experience covering fitness, health, and nutrition. As a freelance writer, her work appeared in Women's Health, Self, Men's Journal, Reader's Digest, and more. She has also held staff editorial positions at Family Circle and Shape magazines, as well as DailyBurn.com. A former New Yorker/Brooklynite, she's now based in Easton, PA.
