12. Burnout Isn’t What You Think: Recognize the Real Signs
If you’ve been feeling exhausted, unmotivated, or stuck in a training rut, you might be thinking you're burned out. But here’s the thing: most ultra runners who feel this way actually aren’t experiencing true burnout. Instead, you might be dealing with fatigue, stress, or temporary dips in motivation.
In this episode, I’m breaking down exactly what burnout is and, more importantly, what it isn’t. You'll learn to distinguish real burnout from its common impersonators and discover why thinking everything is burnout can keep you stuck. You’ll also learn how to recognize when you’re really on the edge of burnout, so you can take action before it takes over.
When you know what burnout really is and how to spot it early, you can reset and keep pushing forward with clarity and confidence. Don’t let burnout be a mystery that derails your training.
If you’re loving the show, please take a moment to follow, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts today!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why mislabeling a rough patch as burnout holds you back from reaching your potential.
The five costs of calling everything burnout.
Why burnout is emotional depletion, not physical weakness.
The three main causes of burnout.
How to reset and rebuild your motivation, energy, and love for ultra running.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you’re loving the show, please take a moment to follow, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts today!
Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Unstoppable Ultra Runner, the podcast for ultra runners 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.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 12. Today, we're talking about how to identify burnout.
And I want to start with this. Most runners who say they're burned out probably aren't. They're tired, stressed, overloaded, or just bored, but not actually burned out. And treating every rough patch like it's burnout? That's what's actually keeping them stuck. Because when you worry about getting burned out, you pull back, and you question yourself. You get cautious with your goals. You play it safe, not because you need to, but because you're scared of getting burned out.
I see this all the time in coaching, where a runner hits a low patch. Training feels heavy, their motivation dips, life gets busy, which is super common, and suddenly, they panic. They think they're burned out, so they back off. They don't want to ruin their love for the sport, which I totally understand, so they scale back on their training and races. But the truth is, they weren't burned out to begin with. They were just confused.
That confusion is the real problem. And today, we're going to clear it up so you can stop holding back, stop second-guessing every low week, and start trusting yourself again.
The real problem isn't burnout. It's mislabeling everything as burnout. Most runners don't know what burnout actually looks like or feels like. We throw the term around so much that it seems everywhere. So when we hit a low patch, a sluggish week, a bad long run, or a string of just meh workouts, we panic and call it burnout. But calling everything burnout just creates more fear and less clarity. And that fear is what leads to holding back.
So, there's a cost to calling everything burnout. When every off week feels like a warning sign, several things can happen. First, you can misread normal fatigue as a red flag. The soreness after a big training block or long run isn't burnout. It's just training, doing its job.
Second, you can get scared to go for hard goals. You start picking smaller goals and holding back, not out of need, but out of fear you'll fall out of love with the sport.
Third, you can forget how to train big. Training cautiously, if you do it long enough, becomes your default setting. And that, over time, slowly drains your confidence in your ability instead of building it.
Fourth, you avoid hard work by calling it burnout. This one's really sneaky. If it's really procrastination, fear, or laziness, just slapping the burnout label on it won't solve the problem or get you ready for a race. It just gives you an out.
And last, you miss the real signs of burnout. If everything feels like burnout, then you miss addressing real burnout early, and you end up fully in it.
So let's clear this up. The fix is simple: learn to tell the difference between real burnout and burnout impersonators. When you know what burnout isn't, you stop fearing it. And when you know what it is, you can spot it early and take the right steps quickly to get out of it.
So here's what burnout is not. Burnout isn't a bad or a slow long run. It's not stress from life or a packed schedule. It's not physical fatigue after a tough training block. It's not a few days of low motivation. It's not boredom with your current routine, and it's not feeling like you can't juggle life and training well right now. These are normal. They're not great, but they're normal. They come with the territory, and they don't mean anything is wrong.
Think about it this way: training and life is always a mix of highs and lows. So expecting every run to feel great is like expecting every race to be perfect.
What burnout is is when you stop caring, even though you're physically capable. You try to get excited about signing up for another race, but you can't. Or you scroll past race posts and you just don't care. There's no spark inside. There's not even any FOMO. There's just no pull to sign up for a race.
You look at your training plan, and you don't just want to take a day off. You just want to walk away from it. You honestly don't care if you're trained or not. And you're emotionally numb about a race that you were really super excited to sign up for. You just don't care if you finish it or not. You don't care if you even go.
And last, you want to take a break, and you want to take a break so badly that you're not even sure you really feel like coming back. Burnout sounds like, "I should be interested in racing and training, but I just don't care." And that kind of numbness, thankfully, doesn't come out of nowhere. It builds up over time from things like perfectionism, pressure to meet expectations, constantly chasing results, and trying to control every little detail of what is truly an uncontrollable sport.
Eventually, if you do this long enough, joy turns into a chore, and your passion gets smothered by pressure, and your brain just checks out. Burnout isn't weakness, and it's definitely not physical weakness, it's emotional depletion. One of the clearest signs is that you can't find the desire for it. You just don't care.
So, let's look at what causes burnout because you can better understand burnout when you know what causes it. And here are three common causes of burnout that I see all the time. The first is perfectionism: an intolerance for mistakes or bad days and feeling like anything less than perfect is failure.
The second is pressure to perform. High self-expectations or external pressure to achieve a specific outcome, that's pressure to perform.
And the third is outcome fixation: fixation or obsession about the outcome of the race, focusing so much on race results that the process stops feeling meaningful. Constant overthinking about it and trying to control every variable and feeling overwhelmed by the uncertainty.
Burnout doesn't happen overnight. It builds, and you don't all of a sudden end up burned out. These three things, if you do these long enough, they can lead to burnout.
And here's an example from a client of mine. She trained for a full year for a race that she DNF'd twice before, and she was, understandably, terrified of not finishing a third time. So she did what so many of us do, and she tried to outwork the fear. She trained harder than usual, and she dialed in every detail, and she decided she had to finish this time. No mistakes allowed. Hear the perfectionism there?
And since she had a DNF history, she thought a perfect race was her only path to a finish. She's tough and she excels and she runs really well. So she naturally worked hard at it. That came easy to her. But over the months, that pressure built, and she slowly lost the joy of it and stopped being curious about it.
It was like she had to do all the things that needed doing and do them all right. She couldn't leave anything to chance. Race day had to go exactly as expected because in her mind, there was no room for adjusting, no gray area because there shouldn't even be a need to adapt.
And it worked. She finished. She crossed the well-deserved finish line. She put in a lot of hard work, and she earned it. And it takes confidence to come back after two DNFs and finish the race. So that took a true effort, and she did it beautifully.
But afterwards, she couldn't get herself interested in racing again. She thought she should feel motivated, but she didn't. And she hated the idea that she might be burned out because again, we tend to think of that as a weakness, and the label feels like failure, but nothing really sparked for her. She just couldn't find the desire for it.
Every idea for a race fell flat, and she started to worry that her drive might be gone for good. So, we designed something completely different: a break with purpose, not just time off, but space for her to reconnect to running with joy. She didn't need more mileage or another race. She really needed room to remember why she loved the sport in the first place.
That's what emotional recovery looks like, and that's how burnout gets healed, not by pushing harder through it, but by hitting pause to recenter yourself again.
So here's how to tell what's really going on. Let's separate out four different things I often hear confused together, and only one of these is burnout.
The first is physical fatigue and overtraining. And this is when you physically wear yourself out. Your body's worn out, but you're mentally still in. And the signs here are you have a slower recovery, maybe it interrupts your sleep, you have poor sleep, or a higher resting heart rate, and your performance typically drops. You have heavy legs and nagging aches that just don't go away. That's the physical side of things.
And what helps here, obviously, is just backing off the training load a little bit, prioritizing sleep, nutrition, hydration, and rest, all the things we know we need to do, and just letting your body catch up.
The second thing I hear confused with burnout is life overload. You still want to train, but it's competing with other life priorities. And the signs that it's life overload are that you're stressed and overwhelmed and short on time, and training sometimes gets squeezed out not by choice, but by necessity. And what helps here is just adjusting your expectations. Lowering your life stress, simplifying your schedule, giving yourself breathing room without quitting the goal. Training doesn't have to be absolutely perfect.
And one note here: if left unchecked, chronic life overload like this, trying to cram everything in and feeling overwhelmed and stressed all the time, chronically, can be a contributor to burnout. So you definitely want to take care of this one.
The third thing that I hear confused with burnout is, I'm just going to call it avoidance or lack of discipline. It's where you want the goal, but you're avoiding the work. And the signs that it's lack of discipline are that you keep putting it off, even though you do have the energy to do it. You know you should train, but you distract yourself instead. And you could get the training in, but there always seems to be a good excuse not to. This sounds like, "Yeah, I know I could. I just don't feel like it right now."
What helps here is some structure and support and consistency, not punishment, but building honest momentum and not waiting on motivation to just show up.
And of course, the fourth one in my list is burnout. And this is where you've pushed too hard for too long with no emotional recovery. And the signs here to distinguish it from the other three are that you just don't care about training, and you're feeling very emotionally disconnected from why, from your why, why you're running. You feel emotional numbness, maybe even irritability.
You're not physically overworked. It's not physical. You're mentally checked out. And you think, "Even if life got easier tomorrow, I just don't want to run right now. I don't want to race right now."
What helps here is, obviously, letting go of any of that critical, judgmental pressure to be perfect that you might be placing on yourself. It's good to check for that and to start reconnecting with what you love about running and why you're running ultras in the first place. It's mental and emotional. So take a break that gives your mind and your heart a rest, not just your legs. Reconnect to meaning, to why you're running ultras, to why you want to run this big, crazy long distance. Rebuild your emotional energy first.
So, bottom line, if you're mentally drained, emotionally flat, and can't remember the last time you enjoyed running or desired going to a race, it's probably not a rough patch. It's probably burnout, and it needs a real reset, not just a day off.
So let's wrap this up. Burnout isn't random. It's not going to just appear out of nowhere. And it's also not a trap you suddenly land in. It builds slowly, which is a good thing because then you can identify it and prevent it before you get into full burnout if you know what to look for. And it's not that your body's worn out. It's that your mind and heart are.
When you understand what burnout really is, you can stop worrying about the bad run or the slow long run, and you can stop avoiding big goals to stay safe. And you can respect it instead of using it as an excuse. You trust yourself to know when you're heading that way. You rest when you need to. You go big when it's time to go big again.
Burnout isn't something we want, but it also doesn't have to be this mysterious threat or the end of your motivation. It's simply a signal to address the perfectionism and self-imposed pressure and outcome obsession behind it. And now you know how to read that signal.
All right. Next week, I'm going to follow this episode with one on how to rebuild mental freshness, not just by cutting down your mileage, but by giving your heart and mind the kind of break they actually need. And until then, remember that learning to understand yourself and take care of what you find is part of what makes you unstoppable. See you 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.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 12. Today, we're talking about how to identify burnout.
And I want to start with this. Most runners who say they're burned out probably aren't. They're tired, stressed, overloaded, or just bored, but not actually burned out. And treating every rough patch like it's burnout? That's what's actually keeping them stuck. Because when you worry about getting burned out, you pull back, and you question yourself. You get cautious with your goals. You play it safe, not because you need to, but because you're scared of getting burned out.
I see this all the time in coaching, where a runner hits a low patch. Training feels heavy, their motivation dips, life gets busy, which is super common, and suddenly, they panic. They think they're burned out, so they back off. They don't want to ruin their love for the sport, which I totally understand, so they scale back on their training and races. But the truth is, they weren't burned out to begin with. They were just confused.
That confusion is the real problem. And today, we're going to clear it up so you can stop holding back, stop second-guessing every low week, and start trusting yourself again.
The real problem isn't burnout. It's mislabeling everything as burnout. Most runners don't know what burnout actually looks like or feels like. We throw the term around so much that it seems everywhere. So when we hit a low patch, a sluggish week, a bad long run, or a string of just meh workouts, we panic and call it burnout. But calling everything burnout just creates more fear and less clarity. And that fear is what leads to holding back.
So, there's a cost to calling everything burnout. When every off week feels like a warning sign, several things can happen. First, you can misread normal fatigue as a red flag. The soreness after a big training block or long run isn't burnout. It's just training, doing its job.
Second, you can get scared to go for hard goals. You start picking smaller goals and holding back, not out of need, but out of fear you'll fall out of love with the sport.
Third, you can forget how to train big. Training cautiously, if you do it long enough, becomes your default setting. And that, over time, slowly drains your confidence in your ability instead of building it.
Fourth, you avoid hard work by calling it burnout. This one's really sneaky. If it's really procrastination, fear, or laziness, just slapping the burnout label on it won't solve the problem or get you ready for a race. It just gives you an out.
And last, you miss the real signs of burnout. If everything feels like burnout, then you miss addressing real burnout early, and you end up fully in it.
So let's clear this up. The fix is simple: learn to tell the difference between real burnout and burnout impersonators. When you know what burnout isn't, you stop fearing it. And when you know what it is, you can spot it early and take the right steps quickly to get out of it.
So here's what burnout is not. Burnout isn't a bad or a slow long run. It's not stress from life or a packed schedule. It's not physical fatigue after a tough training block. It's not a few days of low motivation. It's not boredom with your current routine, and it's not feeling like you can't juggle life and training well right now. These are normal. They're not great, but they're normal. They come with the territory, and they don't mean anything is wrong.
Think about it this way: training and life is always a mix of highs and lows. So expecting every run to feel great is like expecting every race to be perfect.
What burnout is is when you stop caring, even though you're physically capable. You try to get excited about signing up for another race, but you can't. Or you scroll past race posts and you just don't care. There's no spark inside. There's not even any FOMO. There's just no pull to sign up for a race.
You look at your training plan, and you don't just want to take a day off. You just want to walk away from it. You honestly don't care if you're trained or not. And you're emotionally numb about a race that you were really super excited to sign up for. You just don't care if you finish it or not. You don't care if you even go.
And last, you want to take a break, and you want to take a break so badly that you're not even sure you really feel like coming back. Burnout sounds like, "I should be interested in racing and training, but I just don't care." And that kind of numbness, thankfully, doesn't come out of nowhere. It builds up over time from things like perfectionism, pressure to meet expectations, constantly chasing results, and trying to control every little detail of what is truly an uncontrollable sport.
Eventually, if you do this long enough, joy turns into a chore, and your passion gets smothered by pressure, and your brain just checks out. Burnout isn't weakness, and it's definitely not physical weakness, it's emotional depletion. One of the clearest signs is that you can't find the desire for it. You just don't care.
So, let's look at what causes burnout because you can better understand burnout when you know what causes it. And here are three common causes of burnout that I see all the time. The first is perfectionism: an intolerance for mistakes or bad days and feeling like anything less than perfect is failure.
The second is pressure to perform. High self-expectations or external pressure to achieve a specific outcome, that's pressure to perform.
And the third is outcome fixation: fixation or obsession about the outcome of the race, focusing so much on race results that the process stops feeling meaningful. Constant overthinking about it and trying to control every variable and feeling overwhelmed by the uncertainty.
Burnout doesn't happen overnight. It builds, and you don't all of a sudden end up burned out. These three things, if you do these long enough, they can lead to burnout.
And here's an example from a client of mine. She trained for a full year for a race that she DNF'd twice before, and she was, understandably, terrified of not finishing a third time. So she did what so many of us do, and she tried to outwork the fear. She trained harder than usual, and she dialed in every detail, and she decided she had to finish this time. No mistakes allowed. Hear the perfectionism there?
And since she had a DNF history, she thought a perfect race was her only path to a finish. She's tough and she excels and she runs really well. So she naturally worked hard at it. That came easy to her. But over the months, that pressure built, and she slowly lost the joy of it and stopped being curious about it.
It was like she had to do all the things that needed doing and do them all right. She couldn't leave anything to chance. Race day had to go exactly as expected because in her mind, there was no room for adjusting, no gray area because there shouldn't even be a need to adapt.
And it worked. She finished. She crossed the well-deserved finish line. She put in a lot of hard work, and she earned it. And it takes confidence to come back after two DNFs and finish the race. So that took a true effort, and she did it beautifully.
But afterwards, she couldn't get herself interested in racing again. She thought she should feel motivated, but she didn't. And she hated the idea that she might be burned out because again, we tend to think of that as a weakness, and the label feels like failure, but nothing really sparked for her. She just couldn't find the desire for it.
Every idea for a race fell flat, and she started to worry that her drive might be gone for good. So, we designed something completely different: a break with purpose, not just time off, but space for her to reconnect to running with joy. She didn't need more mileage or another race. She really needed room to remember why she loved the sport in the first place.
That's what emotional recovery looks like, and that's how burnout gets healed, not by pushing harder through it, but by hitting pause to recenter yourself again.
So here's how to tell what's really going on. Let's separate out four different things I often hear confused together, and only one of these is burnout.
The first is physical fatigue and overtraining. And this is when you physically wear yourself out. Your body's worn out, but you're mentally still in. And the signs here are you have a slower recovery, maybe it interrupts your sleep, you have poor sleep, or a higher resting heart rate, and your performance typically drops. You have heavy legs and nagging aches that just don't go away. That's the physical side of things.
And what helps here, obviously, is just backing off the training load a little bit, prioritizing sleep, nutrition, hydration, and rest, all the things we know we need to do, and just letting your body catch up.
The second thing I hear confused with burnout is life overload. You still want to train, but it's competing with other life priorities. And the signs that it's life overload are that you're stressed and overwhelmed and short on time, and training sometimes gets squeezed out not by choice, but by necessity. And what helps here is just adjusting your expectations. Lowering your life stress, simplifying your schedule, giving yourself breathing room without quitting the goal. Training doesn't have to be absolutely perfect.
And one note here: if left unchecked, chronic life overload like this, trying to cram everything in and feeling overwhelmed and stressed all the time, chronically, can be a contributor to burnout. So you definitely want to take care of this one.
The third thing that I hear confused with burnout is, I'm just going to call it avoidance or lack of discipline. It's where you want the goal, but you're avoiding the work. And the signs that it's lack of discipline are that you keep putting it off, even though you do have the energy to do it. You know you should train, but you distract yourself instead. And you could get the training in, but there always seems to be a good excuse not to. This sounds like, "Yeah, I know I could. I just don't feel like it right now."
What helps here is some structure and support and consistency, not punishment, but building honest momentum and not waiting on motivation to just show up.
And of course, the fourth one in my list is burnout. And this is where you've pushed too hard for too long with no emotional recovery. And the signs here to distinguish it from the other three are that you just don't care about training, and you're feeling very emotionally disconnected from why, from your why, why you're running. You feel emotional numbness, maybe even irritability.
You're not physically overworked. It's not physical. You're mentally checked out. And you think, "Even if life got easier tomorrow, I just don't want to run right now. I don't want to race right now."
What helps here is, obviously, letting go of any of that critical, judgmental pressure to be perfect that you might be placing on yourself. It's good to check for that and to start reconnecting with what you love about running and why you're running ultras in the first place. It's mental and emotional. So take a break that gives your mind and your heart a rest, not just your legs. Reconnect to meaning, to why you're running ultras, to why you want to run this big, crazy long distance. Rebuild your emotional energy first.
So, bottom line, if you're mentally drained, emotionally flat, and can't remember the last time you enjoyed running or desired going to a race, it's probably not a rough patch. It's probably burnout, and it needs a real reset, not just a day off.
So let's wrap this up. Burnout isn't random. It's not going to just appear out of nowhere. And it's also not a trap you suddenly land in. It builds slowly, which is a good thing because then you can identify it and prevent it before you get into full burnout if you know what to look for. And it's not that your body's worn out. It's that your mind and heart are.
When you understand what burnout really is, you can stop worrying about the bad run or the slow long run, and you can stop avoiding big goals to stay safe. And you can respect it instead of using it as an excuse. You trust yourself to know when you're heading that way. You rest when you need to. You go big when it's time to go big again.
Burnout isn't something we want, but it also doesn't have to be this mysterious threat or the end of your motivation. It's simply a signal to address the perfectionism and self-imposed pressure and outcome obsession behind it. And now you know how to read that signal.
All right. Next week, I'm going to follow this episode with one on how to rebuild mental freshness, not just by cutting down your mileage, but by giving your heart and mind the kind of break they actually need. And until then, remember that learning to understand yourself and take care of what you find is part of what makes you unstoppable. See you 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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