Drexel Professor Runs 100 Miles, Helps Science

Tim Gorichanaz (second from left) with his family during the Western States 100. Photo courtesy of Tim Gorichanaz.

When Tim Gorichanaz ran his first 5K in 2010, no one in his family did any sports. But he was enchanted from the start. His mom signed the whole family up for a fun run, not knowing what she was getting her son into. He ran an 8-kilometer race soon after, then jumped into training for the Chicago Marathon.

“To this day, she doesn’t actually know why she did it, but I was just electrified,” Gorichanaz, PhD, associate teaching professor of information science in Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics, said. “I remember what enchanted me was that in training for a marathon, you only ever run up to 20 miles. But the marathon is 26.2 miles. I was like, how is that? It’s been curiosity and seeing how far I can go.”

In training for shorter races, you often run longer than the distances you’ll race, but once you get to the marathon distance, it doesn’t make sense to put the strain of 26.2 miles on your body before race day, so there’s always a curiosity of if you’ll be able to do what you’ve never done before. The professor and associate department head for graduate affairs has continued to be curious to see what the limit might be, finding himself drawn to longer and longer distances until he found his favorite “discomfort” zone at the 100-mile mark.

Ultramarathons are any race that’s longer than the 26.2 miles of a marathon, and during an ultramarathon, runners often have a crew that follows them down the course in a vehicle to give them fresh clothes and help at aid stations. They typically are raced on trails, up mountains and across rivers and streams, adding in an extra technical element beyond just completing the distance. For more than 10 years, Gorichanaz has been competing in ultramarathons from 50 kilometers up to 100 miles, all the while hoping to get his name drawn so he could run the world’s oldest 100-mile trail race, the Boston Marathon of ultramarathons — the Western States 100.

This year, he finally had that chance.

Western States is the oldest 100-mile race in the world. It starts in California’s Olympic Valley and ends in the town of Auburn, following the route of the Tevis Cup, a horse race that was first put on in 1955 to prove that horses could go 100 miles in a day. In 1974, Gordy Ainsleigh joined the Tevis Cup horses on foot and proved that humans, too, could go 100 miles in a day. It officially became its own race in 1977 and has attracted the top talent in ultrarunning over the years, with a lottery system developing due to the high demand and low capacity — only 369 runners are allowed into Western States every year, and they get 30 hours to complete the course.

Runners must run a qualifying ultrarunning-distance race to put their name in the hat, and every year they’re not selected, they get double the tickets the next year and double the chances to get picked. Gorichanaz had been waiting a decade to get the chance to run the famed course. In the meantime, he’s run other ultramarathons, including the Eastern States 100, which takes place right here in Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Plateau. It’s extremely rugged and technical, but it’s been one of Gorichanaz’s favorites on his ultrarunning journey. 

“It’s been about seeing what the body can do,” Gorichanaz said.

Finally, Gorichanaz’s name was drawn when he had more than 500 tickets entered. He was battling an ankle impingement after his previous ultramarathon last fall, and was stressing about not being able to run the race he’d waited years for. He didn’t get as much time training as he wanted, but made the most of it with swimming and the elliptical until March, when he began long runs, stair climber workouts, and “mountain training” — walking backwards on a fully inclined treadmill to stimulate the muscles you’ll need going downhill. Most of his miles are run on the Schuylkill River Trail, with one a week at Wissahickon Valley Park to get some trail time. Unlike most contemporary runners, Gorichanaz runs without a GPS watch, and doesn’t use the popular running social platform Strava.

“I used to, when I first started running, but it wasn’t fully accurate. I was like, ‘Well, if it’s not going to be accurate, then what’s the point?’” Gorichanaz said. “Even if it was 100% accurate, I don’t like the impulse of quantifying everything and measuring everything. You go for a coffee nowadays and it’s like, this is an 8 out of 10 coffee. My job is sitting on the computer pushing buttons a lot of the time. One of the big reasons I run is to have something different, a different way of being.”

During his first 100-mile race, Gorichanaz was still a PhD student at Drexel, and he did a study on his own experience, answering interview prompts every 90 minutes. He’s also helped some of his students conduct research based around running, including one student studying Strava and its privacy, but since his PhD student days, he’s put his own running researching behind him.

However, this year he did participate in a research study during Western States about the effect of heat on endurance runners. A research group at Loughborough University has been studying how people respond to heat, which could inform new nutrition recommendations or coaching strategies. Western States is the most researched ultramarathon, and the race director encourages scientists to conduct studies during the race.

“I heard about it through an email from the Western States race director and for me, having done research for many years, I know it’s sometimes hard to get participants, so it seemed like a way to pay it forward,” Gorichanaz said. “It’s for the benefit of science, and I’m in a position to be able to offer this usefulness, so why not?”

Gorichanaz swallowed a pill before the race so his internal temperature could be studied throughout and gave a urine sample and weigh-in. Typically, aid stations where runners refuel, change clothes and hydrate occur about every five miles, and he had to check in at various aid stations to report what he’d eaten and drank, plus answer a questionnaire.

“They read our temperature, and the questions included current level of exertion, how hot or cold you were, and if you were having any heat-related issues like with your digestion or headaches,” Gorichanaz said. “They’re going to send each of us our individual results and the links to the paper when they’re out. I can look at the course map and remember that it was a crazy climb, or hot at 2 p.m. when I see temperature spikes.”

Tim Gorichanaz smiles during the race. Photo courtesy of Tim Gorichanaz.

The race starts high in the California mountains, where temperatures dip to 40 degrees in the morning. Later, in the low desert climates, it gets up into the 90s and stays hot throughout the day and night. The beginning was the most beautiful, he said, when you hit peak elevation.

“The first three or four miles is just straight uphill, and then you start to go down, and it’s timed perfectly with sunrise,” Gorichanaz said. “You’re cresting this hill, and you look down and you can see Lake Tahoe and all these beautiful pine trees and wildflowers, and the air is crisp and cool. Later on, it became hard to appreciate because I was so tired and dizzy.”

Ultramarathons are often jokingly referred to as eating contests rather than running contests, because of the sheer amount of fuel you need to keep your body going through all 100 miles. At each aid station, which occurred about every five miles, Gorichanaz reached for whatever was calling his name, whether it was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, quesadillas or cubes of boiled potatoes dipped in salt.

“At some point, especially in the heat of the day, you don’t want to eat anything because you feel nauseous,” Gorichanaz said. “But if you don’t eat, that’s what will make you not finish. You just need to keep eating even if you don’t want to.”

Gorichanaz was going much slower than he had anticipated, so he had to adjust his race plan in order to finish. He doesn’t often run with a crew, but his mom, husband and a few friends acted as his crew for Western States. He also ran with a pacer after mile 55, acquiescing to using a GPS watch to stay on track and avoid getting timed out.

“I always look forward to the second sunrise if I'm going to run that long, because something clicks and I feel like I just woke up,” Gorichanaz said. “But this was not like that at all. I just got more tired and hotter. But then we got to the final aid station with one hour to go and only 1.3 miles, I was like, “I can crawl this and I’ll finish.’”

Gorichanaz nears the finish line. Photo courtesy of Tim Gorichanaz.

The final hour of the race is called Golden Hour, because so many people are finishing at that time. Western States ends on a high school track, and the streets leading up to it are filled with spectators. Gorichanaz was tired and wired at the same time, having taken in a lot of caffeine to be able to finish. The ending was surreal, he said.

“My mind was completely empty, but as soon as I entered the track, I could run again a little bit,” Gorichanaz said. “Somehow, your body will unlock when people are watching.”

After he crossed the finish line, he found some shade by a semitruck parked near the track, so he laid down for about an hour. However, because he’d had so much caffeine, he couldn't sleep until later.

Next, Gorichanaz wants to make it back into Western States, get a strong training season in and try to complete it in under 24 hours, which he’s done before at several other ultramarathons — even if it takes another decade. He also might drop down to regular old marathons for a while, but in the near term, he wants to slay an even bigger beast: a 200-mile race, the Tahoe 200.

Regardless of the mileage he takes on next, running remains an important part of his life, one that helps him become better in all aspects. It provides time to think, to work out problems intellectual and personal, or sometimes, time to turn your brain off completely. He enjoys sharing his running with his students, too.

“I've come to think that as a professor, beyond the subject matter and beyond how you make the classroom feel, one of my jobs is to model a life, and what kinds of things a person can do,” Gorichanaz said. “I always feel weird about ultrarunning because whenever I talk about it, it’s so outlandish that people think I’m bragging. I’m not that good at it. But with some students, it’s like they never thought a person could do such a thing, and in turn they’re like, ‘Wow, I wonder what I could do. What else is there in the world?’ I think that kind of thing is really valuable.”