Air Force runner completes 100-mile race: Captain Shannon Johnson, Little Rock, Arkansas, trains for the 100-mile foot race.

Run, Forest! Run? Well, not quite, but to finish a 100-mile run, an instructor pilot from the 53rd Airlift Squadron here needed all the motivation he could get.

"You're running for 30 hours," said Capt. Shannon Johnson. "You start in the dark, the sun comes up, you run all day, the sun sets, the stars come out, the moon comes out, you run all night long, the sun comes up and you're still running.

"At the 92-mile mark, somewhere in the mountains around Perryville, Ark., Johnson realized he might not make the 30-hour time limit in the Arkansas Traveller 100-Mile Foot Race, held Oct. 6 and 7 in Perryville. Then something started burning inside. He had come too far not to make the final time limit, he said.

"So even though it really hurt, I just sucked it up and started running," he said. He was the last to make the time limit, crossing the finish line in 29:52:20.

The Traveller, which is one of five "ultraruns" held annually in America, is not just a long road race. "The whole time you're on fire roads, which is a one-way rutted gravel road, or it's on a trail; and it's constantly up and down mountains," he said.

This is just one in a slew of physical challenges runners face during the race, Johnson said. "The big danger in these is your kidneys," he said. "What happens is your body starts breaking down your muscle tissue because you can't eat enough food, and that muscle tissue collects on your kidneys.

"To combat this, Johnson said he kept a hydration unit on his back and ate whenever possible at the various checkpoints, where he also received a lot of encouragement from his wife and other spectators.

"Throughout the whole race, you'd eat something at a checkpoint; 10 minutes later you'd be starving," he said. He said shoes were another problem. Johnson suffered bruises on the bottom of his feet, even though he was wearing high-quality running shoes. "I didn't realize most ultrarunners use three pairs of shoes, and they'll swap out like every 30 miles," he said. However, all of these physical problems are not even half the battle, he said.

"You can train up to a certain physical level to be able to do it, but the biggest thing about these races is it's mental," Johnson said.

There were many times when he wanted to quit because most of the race he was running alone, he said. Many runners dropped out or were forced to quit because of injury, or they could not make the checkpoints in time, he said. Johnson was the last of 85 runners who finished the race. The race started with 125 people.

This was Johnson's first 100-mile ultrarun. He has run in eight marathons, but wanted a different type of challenge. "The only challenge for me there was to get my time down lower and lower, and I really wasn't doing that," he said. "I'm more of a long-distance, endurance-type person, so I wanted to find something that was longer, "I didn't know if I could make 100 miles or not, but I knew I wasn't going to give up."