1. The Missing Piece in Your Ultra Training
Have you ever followed your training plan perfectly, logged all the miles, and still felt like something was missing when race day arrived? I've been there too. After nearly three decades as an ultra runner, I've discovered that the difference between DNFing and crossing the finish line often has little to do with physical preparation.
I'm Susan Donnelly, and I coach ultra runners who want to challenge their limits and turn seemingly impossible goals into reality. Mental training was the missing piece that transformed my running, and if you take your training seriously but you’re still DNFing, it can do the same for you.
Tune in this week to learn about the foundational missing piece in your ultra training. I discuss the common patterns that stop ultra runners from making it to the finish line, and you’ll walk away with a mindset tool you can use right away to start shifting your training and race-day results.
To celebrate the launch of the show, I'm going to be giving away a personalized, pre-recorded pep talk to three lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show. Click here to learn more and enter by May 2, 2025 at 11:59pm PT.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How to recognize when negative thinking is sabotaging your performance.
Why mental training should happen alongside physical training, not after it.
The common ultra runner’s pattern of pre-race anxiety, comparison, and mid-race surrender.
The importance of taking control of your thoughts instead of letting them run on autopilot.
Why mindset training isn't just for elite runners but is essential for everyone who wants to reach their potential.
How to identify negative thoughts by noticing your emotional responses during training and racing.
The simple first step to mental training that you can implement immediately on your next run.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
To celebrate the launch of the show, I'm going to be giving away a personalized, pre-recorded pep talk to three lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show. Click here to learn more and enter by May 2, 2025 at 11:59pm PT.
Full Episode Transcript:
You've followed the training plan. You logged the miles. But even if you do everything right, why does it still feel so hard to run the way you know you're capable of? If you've ever wondered what's missing, you're not alone, and this podcast might just be the piece you've been looking for.
Welcome to Unstoppable Ultra Runner, the podcast for ultrarunners who refuse to let anything hold them back. I’m your host, Susan Donnelly, veteran of over 150 100-mile races, and a coach who helps runners like you break through mental roadblocks, push past doubt, and run with confidence. Let’s go.
I'm Susan Donnelly and I've spent close to 3 decades as an ultra runner, learning how to run smarter, not just harder. I coach ultra runners who want to challenge their limits and turn impossible looking goals into reality, but are mentally stuck, because that was me.
I knew in my heart I could do more, but I kept DNFing, so I set out to find out why. And training my mind was the missing piece that made the difference. So I'm here to give you solutions you can use; things I give my coaching clients that you can actually use when the race gets hard and your goal seems impossible. Most ultra runners think they need more mileage or a better training plan or the right crew, but what they're missing is mental strength and the self-confidence in their ability.
You can have the best training in the world. But if you doubt yourself, the training won't matter. Your mind will still limit and even sabotage what you can do. You have to have the mindset capacity to rise above that and run your best, even when problems arise, you're exhausted, and finishing looks impossible. Mental strength means knowing how to think, not just how to try harder, and then thinking that way. It means intentionally choosing to think in a way that gets you to your goal.
It's about making decisions, solving problems, staying focused, being resilient, trusting yourself, and managing your thoughts when things go sideways because in ultras, they do.
For example, you've probably been at a point in your race where the goal seems out of reach. You're slower than you expected to be, your feet are blistered, you're exhausted, and you have so many miles and hours still to go, it seems like there's just no way it's going to happen. You can't do it. You've done the math, and there's no way you'll make cutoff.
But, instead of deciding it's impossible, giving up and dropping, you decide, "Yes, it looks grim, but it's still possible. And I'm going to grab that possibility and go for it. I'm going to give it everything I have. I am not giving up. I'm going to fight for it." That flips a switch, and suddenly you're like a new person. You find another gear you didn't even know you had, you find yourself pushing harder than you were before, and you make cutoff and finish.
The good news is you don't need to become a different runner to do this. You just need access to the mental tools you've never been taught. Mindset limits you in training, races, and even after the race. Here's a typical scenario. Once the excitement of signing up for the race wears off, you get overwhelmed by the size of the race and everything you think you have to do and get right to have a chance at finishing. You're not going to be able to do it all, so you start procrastinating and skipping runs.
Or, you second guess your training incessantly, and you change it so often, you can't even tell what's working and what's not. And you spend months of training worrying you can't finish the race, and that worry wears you out, so that by race day, the excitement's gone, and you just want the race to be over one way or the other. Then pre-race anxiety hits. In panic, you start thinking about dropping down in distance or deferring the race to next year, and on race day, if you get there, you end up looking around at everybody else and comparing.
They look more fit, more confident, and faster, and it feels to you like everybody else knows what they're doing except you. You feel like you don't belong and you shouldn't even be here, which pre-paves the way for you giving up on your goal and dropping. And in the race, you also think you're going to be lucky to finish, and you can't afford a mistake. So you start to run hesitantly and over-carefully, which just slows you down. You spend the race worrying about problems, the distance ahead, and cutoff, which wastes the mental and emotional energy you actually need to run.
Then, you do ultra math, as we do, which, of course, proves there's no way you're going to make cutoff. So you give up and slow down because it doesn't matter anyway. You're just going to get pulled. And of course, you do.
Then, after the race, you realize you had energy left and you could have finished, so you kick yourself. You think of all the things you should have done differently, and you beat yourself up for it. Races like this can convince you that you have to settle for mediocre results that you know are less than you're capable of, and you'll never be able to reach your potential. You're just stuck here, and you just lose the joy you once had in ultra running and the challenge.
If you're ready to turn this around and train your mind like you train your body, you're in the right place. Ultra running is more than a casual hobby. You fit all that time and effort it takes to train for an ultra into your real life—a life with a job, and family, and commitments—and you deserve to have all the mindset skills you need to make that training pay off.
Mindset training is not a luxury reserved for elite runners. Everybody can learn these skills, and they make an equally big difference to everyone. They can save your race.
We all deserve to run what's possible, and we all deserve to have these skills. Mindset also isn't something that can wait until you've got your body trained. You need to train your mind now while you're training your body so that this stuff is natural for you on race day.
And if you think about it, your mind is making decisions all the time about what's possible and impossible for you, what you should and shouldn't do, when to push and when to quit, and you can't afford to let it do this anymore on autopilot. You have to be in charge of it if you're going to become the ultra runner you know you can be. If you want to know that you did everything you could to have the race of your dreams, then mindset is absolutely essential.
And here's a quick one you can use today. And that is to start recognizing negative thinking instead of letting it operate on autopilot. This matters because you can turn negative thinking around. But first, you have to know it's even happening. And most of the time, we don't. We're just reacting to it.
So, on your next run or during your day, start noticing when you're thinking negative thoughts by noticing how you feel. Look for the emotion. When you feel doubt, or fear, or overwhelm, or helplessness, or defeat, ask yourself why. And then boil that answer down to a sentence or two. Because when you ask yourself why, you're going to want to have a paragraph here. But go ahead and boil it down to a sentence or two. And here's an example.
Let's say you feel discouraged. And when you ask yourself why, you think to yourself, "If I'm feeling like this on a short 6-mile run, how on earth am I going to do the 100-miler that I have in 3 weeks? I've trained so hard for this. What if I've trained wrong? Maybe I should have added more vert, or more speed work, or more miles. Ugh. I should have started strength training like I promised myself. I never follow through on that. I need to be more disciplined..." and on and on that goes. That's a paragraph.
Boiling that paragraph down to a sentence might look like: "The way I feel right now makes me worry I won't be able to finish my hundred." All summed up in one sentence. And if you were going to boil it down even further, it might be simply, "I'm worried I won't be able to finish my hundred." That is the sentence that's the negative thought. That is the nut of it. That negative thought is something we're going to talk about how to handle in another episode.
But the most important, impactful step of all, and the reason I'm talking about this on the first episode, is simply to learn how to see what's going on in your mind, because now that you've identified it, you're in control. You got to see it, but once you see it, you're in control. Alright. That's it for this first episode. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you again next week. Bye. Thanks for listening to Unstoppable Ultra Runner. If you want more ultra talk, mindset tools, and strategies for running with confidence, visit www.susanidonnelly.com. This podcast receives production support from the team at Digital Freedom Productions. That’s it for today’s episode. See you next week.
Welcome to Unstoppable Ultra Runner, the podcast for ultrarunners who refuse to let anything hold them back. I’m your host, Susan Donnelly, veteran of over 150 100-mile races, and a coach who helps runners like you break through mental roadblocks, push past doubt, and run with confidence. Let’s go.
I'm Susan Donnelly and I've spent close to 3 decades as an ultra runner, learning how to run smarter, not just harder. I coach ultra runners who want to challenge their limits and turn impossible looking goals into reality, but are mentally stuck, because that was me.
I knew in my heart I could do more, but I kept DNFing, so I set out to find out why. And training my mind was the missing piece that made the difference. So I'm here to give you solutions you can use; things I give my coaching clients that you can actually use when the race gets hard and your goal seems impossible. Most ultra runners think they need more mileage or a better training plan or the right crew, but what they're missing is mental strength and the self-confidence in their ability.
You can have the best training in the world. But if you doubt yourself, the training won't matter. Your mind will still limit and even sabotage what you can do. You have to have the mindset capacity to rise above that and run your best, even when problems arise, you're exhausted, and finishing looks impossible. Mental strength means knowing how to think, not just how to try harder, and then thinking that way. It means intentionally choosing to think in a way that gets you to your goal.
It's about making decisions, solving problems, staying focused, being resilient, trusting yourself, and managing your thoughts when things go sideways because in ultras, they do.
For example, you've probably been at a point in your race where the goal seems out of reach. You're slower than you expected to be, your feet are blistered, you're exhausted, and you have so many miles and hours still to go, it seems like there's just no way it's going to happen. You can't do it. You've done the math, and there's no way you'll make cutoff.
But, instead of deciding it's impossible, giving up and dropping, you decide, "Yes, it looks grim, but it's still possible. And I'm going to grab that possibility and go for it. I'm going to give it everything I have. I am not giving up. I'm going to fight for it." That flips a switch, and suddenly you're like a new person. You find another gear you didn't even know you had, you find yourself pushing harder than you were before, and you make cutoff and finish.
The good news is you don't need to become a different runner to do this. You just need access to the mental tools you've never been taught. Mindset limits you in training, races, and even after the race. Here's a typical scenario. Once the excitement of signing up for the race wears off, you get overwhelmed by the size of the race and everything you think you have to do and get right to have a chance at finishing. You're not going to be able to do it all, so you start procrastinating and skipping runs.
Or, you second guess your training incessantly, and you change it so often, you can't even tell what's working and what's not. And you spend months of training worrying you can't finish the race, and that worry wears you out, so that by race day, the excitement's gone, and you just want the race to be over one way or the other. Then pre-race anxiety hits. In panic, you start thinking about dropping down in distance or deferring the race to next year, and on race day, if you get there, you end up looking around at everybody else and comparing.
They look more fit, more confident, and faster, and it feels to you like everybody else knows what they're doing except you. You feel like you don't belong and you shouldn't even be here, which pre-paves the way for you giving up on your goal and dropping. And in the race, you also think you're going to be lucky to finish, and you can't afford a mistake. So you start to run hesitantly and over-carefully, which just slows you down. You spend the race worrying about problems, the distance ahead, and cutoff, which wastes the mental and emotional energy you actually need to run.
Then, you do ultra math, as we do, which, of course, proves there's no way you're going to make cutoff. So you give up and slow down because it doesn't matter anyway. You're just going to get pulled. And of course, you do.
Then, after the race, you realize you had energy left and you could have finished, so you kick yourself. You think of all the things you should have done differently, and you beat yourself up for it. Races like this can convince you that you have to settle for mediocre results that you know are less than you're capable of, and you'll never be able to reach your potential. You're just stuck here, and you just lose the joy you once had in ultra running and the challenge.
If you're ready to turn this around and train your mind like you train your body, you're in the right place. Ultra running is more than a casual hobby. You fit all that time and effort it takes to train for an ultra into your real life—a life with a job, and family, and commitments—and you deserve to have all the mindset skills you need to make that training pay off.
Mindset training is not a luxury reserved for elite runners. Everybody can learn these skills, and they make an equally big difference to everyone. They can save your race.
We all deserve to run what's possible, and we all deserve to have these skills. Mindset also isn't something that can wait until you've got your body trained. You need to train your mind now while you're training your body so that this stuff is natural for you on race day.
And if you think about it, your mind is making decisions all the time about what's possible and impossible for you, what you should and shouldn't do, when to push and when to quit, and you can't afford to let it do this anymore on autopilot. You have to be in charge of it if you're going to become the ultra runner you know you can be. If you want to know that you did everything you could to have the race of your dreams, then mindset is absolutely essential.
And here's a quick one you can use today. And that is to start recognizing negative thinking instead of letting it operate on autopilot. This matters because you can turn negative thinking around. But first, you have to know it's even happening. And most of the time, we don't. We're just reacting to it.
So, on your next run or during your day, start noticing when you're thinking negative thoughts by noticing how you feel. Look for the emotion. When you feel doubt, or fear, or overwhelm, or helplessness, or defeat, ask yourself why. And then boil that answer down to a sentence or two. Because when you ask yourself why, you're going to want to have a paragraph here. But go ahead and boil it down to a sentence or two. And here's an example.
Let's say you feel discouraged. And when you ask yourself why, you think to yourself, "If I'm feeling like this on a short 6-mile run, how on earth am I going to do the 100-miler that I have in 3 weeks? I've trained so hard for this. What if I've trained wrong? Maybe I should have added more vert, or more speed work, or more miles. Ugh. I should have started strength training like I promised myself. I never follow through on that. I need to be more disciplined..." and on and on that goes. That's a paragraph.
Boiling that paragraph down to a sentence might look like: "The way I feel right now makes me worry I won't be able to finish my hundred." All summed up in one sentence. And if you were going to boil it down even further, it might be simply, "I'm worried I won't be able to finish my hundred." That is the sentence that's the negative thought. That is the nut of it. That negative thought is something we're going to talk about how to handle in another episode.
But the most important, impactful step of all, and the reason I'm talking about this on the first episode, is simply to learn how to see what's going on in your mind, because now that you've identified it, you're in control. You got to see it, but once you see it, you're in control. Alright. That's it for this first episode. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you again next week. Bye. Thanks for listening to Unstoppable Ultra Runner. If you want more ultra talk, mindset tools, and strategies for running with confidence, visit www.susanidonnelly.com. This podcast receives production support from the team at Digital Freedom Productions. That’s it for today’s episode. See you next week.
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