This weekend, I worked an aid station at the Superior 100. The 23-mile aid station.

Superior is a super technical course. It’s not easy to make up time on a course like this so runners have run those 23 miles as smart and fast as they can - or dare.

So this is a point in the race where runners are feeling the miles and want to do more than just breeze through.

I was doing crowd control of the chute the runners pass through so I got to watch all the crews. Crews from the fast to the last runners.

And here’s one of the things I noticed - crews and their runners fell into two camps.

Nutrition and stomach problems look purely physiological. They're not.

Your body sends your mind signals - physical sensations. You have to decide what they mean, and it’s easy to make assumptions about what the signals mean.

Let’s say you feel your stomach tighten. If you’ve had a stomach problem before, you might think:

• I ate at the last aid station, so I don’t need to eat yet. Oh no! I must have eaten something that doesn’t agree with me.

When we’re planning a race and I ask a client where they’re going to save time, the most frequent answer I get by far is, “get in and out of aid stations as fast as I can.”

And that makes sense. It’s the the first thing you think of because when you’re in an aid station, you’re stationary. You’re not getting closer to the finish. And cutoff is getting closer.

So yes, it’s important not to just hang out there. Aid stations can consume a surprising amount of time.

But a problem comes in when you put all the responsibility for saving time, on aid stations. You have no other plan.

You see eating, drinking and pacing, and following your plan as things you have to do to finish on goal. The necessary. And sometimes a chore (me too).

But what if you saw them as taking care of someone you love? Doing the best for them. Making sure their way is clear ahead. Making sure they’ll be healthy and happy in the future.

You’d do this gladly for someone you love. You wouldn’t think twice about taking care of them this way. Because you care about them.

Well, that’s exactly what you’re doing in the race.

You've had that moment when you realize you're close to cutoff.

Or you missed a turn.

Or you forgot your headlamp.

And you panic.

You have a job. Maybe a family. Friends, bills, a house that requires attention. A full, normal life that has nothing to do with ultrarunning.

And then you have this other thing. The thing where you get up before the sun to run twenty miles by lunch. The thing where you plan vacation around a race in a place most people will never see. The thing where you've DNF'd, gotten back up, and signed up for another go at the distance.

Nobody sees both sides of you at once. Your coworkers don't see you power-hiking a steep, technical climb at mile 70 in the dark, middle of nowhere. Your training partners don't see you leading a high-pressure work meeting.

"I don't want to have to start over from zero."

I hear this a lot when clients are worried about an injury. The fear isn't really the injury, or even the pain. It's losing fitness. It's having to start all over again from nothing.

It's the thought of all the work they think they'll have to redo.

But I've come as close as you can get to starting over from nothing. For a month going into hip replacement surgery, I could barely walk a mile. And after surgery, I was doing slow laps around the house with a walker.

You've probably noticed this pattern: the things that worked in your last race stop working in the next one. But the problems? Those seem to repeat just fine.

It makes races feel like a crap shoot. Like you have little real control.

There's always uncertainty in ultras. That's real. But blaming it on bad luck means surrendering control you actually have.

It usually comes down to one moment in your post-race review. One thought you let yourself stop at.

“I don't know.”

You don't want to think about it - but you also can't stop thinking about it.

You want to know how you’re doing in the race as you go along. You don’t want to wait until you get to an aid station to know. That seems too risky.

So you wear your watch, plan for battery life. And no matter how often you check it, you're waiting on it to tell you where you stand.

All’s well for a while. But as the race goes on, what your watch says starts to worry you. You should be further along by now. You look at the numbers and start doing ultra math.

It doesn’t look good.

You don't want to think about it - but you also can't stop thinking about it.

It wakes you up in the middle of the night.

The closer you get to race day, the worse it gets.

It's the "what-if."

Making good time in a race is about efficiency. Efficiently using the hours you have.

That’s why you think your age is a problem. You’re slower now and you might not make cutoff.

You stress about it every race, and even if you finish, you dread the next where you have to face cutoff fear all over again.

You’re just waiting for the day cutoff wins.

But when you’re thinking your age is the problem, you miss seeing how it’s an asset, instead.

Tomorrow morning — actually, by the time you read this, today - I’m having my hip replaced.

I've been dealing with this for six years. Six years of knowing this day was coming. And one of the hardest parts, after absorbing the diagnosis, has been figuring out what it means for someone like me - someone who loves running. And adventuring. Who loves what her body can do.

Here's what I've learned in the last six months of coming to peace with this: resistance to an unwanted reality doesn't protect you from it. It just keeps you in it. It costs you the future.

You know that voice in your head.

All that doubt you feel about your capability. All the ways that comes through in the things you say to yourself, like "I'm slow. I can't do this. I'm just no good at this.”

Negative self talk takes the air out of your sails in a race. It can turn off the switch and you lose power. You find yourself walking. Giving up.

So of course you want to make it stop.

In the back of your mind, there's probably a picture of how training is supposed to go.

You start at A. You progress steadily through training. You arrive at the finish line at B.

If you're doing it right.

You might be approaching race goals backward.

One of my core philosophies is this: your brain is the best tool you have. There's always a way to use it to help you solve any problem and make your goals easier to reach.

Night running is a perfect example.

If you dread trying to stay awake during a night section, this is for you. And if you love night running - same thing. Because you can love it and still hit an unexpected wall with it in a race. I have.

In your upcoming race, you’re determined to avoid mistakes that would jeopardize your finish, especially ‘stupid’ ones. 

Going out too fast is at the top of that list. 

It’s the most basic, common piece of ultra advice given. Everybody knows not to do it…and yet you do.

Late in a race, when you're exhausted and the finish is still too far away to feel real, you're convinced you want out.

You want to be done. You want to see the finish line, or at least the next aid station. You want the race to be over.

But here's what's actually true: you don't want to be done. You want to keep gaining.

You just forgot.

You've done the training. You've logged the miles. You've shown up week after week.

And then, as you taper, you start feeling more doubt. There’s a highlight reel of failures running through your mind on repeat, and it won’t stop.

That's not weakness and it’s not a sign you're not ready. That's a very specific mental glitch that almost every ultrarunner experiences, and once you understand what's actually happening, you can stop letting it run the show.

Picture this: you're at mile 60 of a 100, you're wrecked, and your pacer is telling you what to eat. Your crew is debating whether you should sit down or get out. Everyone has an opinion. And you're just...going along with whatever they tell you. Whoever is the most insistent or loudest.

Over 25 years of ultrarunning, I've watched this happen to countless runners. I see it out on course, and I see it with my coaching clients - often before they can see it themselves. And I want to name what's actually happening in that moment, because most runners don't recognize it until after the race when something feels off and they can't quite say what.

You've handed your race over to your team. And it's hurting you. And them.

My client Michelle recently DNF'd what was supposed to be her first 100-mile finish.

On the face of it, that sounds like defeat. Failure. But it was anything but.

The race started normally — it was supposed to rain, but the rain held off. A good omen.