59. The 5 Mental Skills Every Ultra Runner Needs
Every ultra runner faces the same mental challenges in a race: lows, distractions, problems, pain, and difficult decisions. The difference between runners who consistently struggle and runners who consistently finish strong often comes down to whether they know how to handle those moments effectively.
In this episode, I’m breaking down the five mental skills I believe every ultra runner needs to race well and finish reliably. These are not abstract mindset ideas or motivational concepts. They are practical race skills developed over decades of racing and coaching runners through the same predictable situations over and over again.
You’ll discover how these five skills work together as a complete race system and why mastering them changes the way you race. Instead of fearing what might happen out there, you’ll learn how to prepare for it, respond to it, and keep moving forward with confidence. If you want to finish more races, waste less energy, and run closer to your true potential, these are the skills that make it possible.
My 1:1 Mental Mastery Coaching for Ultrarunners is a six-month coaching program where we build the mental skills experienced ultrarunners use to handle difficult races well. Schedule a consult call to learn more here.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
The five mental skills every ultra runner needs to race well.
How to recognize and recover from lows faster.
Why attention is one of your most valuable race assets.
How to solve race problems without spiraling emotionally.
The difference between fearing pain and controlling it.
Why decision fatigue leads runners to lose time and races.
How these five skills work together to help you finish stronger and race with more confidence.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
The Ultrarunner’s Mastery Debrief Template helps you evaluate your races like experienced ultrarunners do - identifying what worked, what didn’t work, and what to do differently next time. Download yours for free here.
If you’re loving the show, please take a moment to follow, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts today!
Episodes Related to the 5 Mental Skills Every Ultra Runner Needs:
Full Episode Transcript:
Every ultra throws the same mental challenges at you. Lows, distractions, problems, pain, and tough decisions. Every race, every time. So, today, I'm sharing the five race skills that handle all of them.
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.
Welcome to episode 59. Today, I want to introduce the five race skills that I teach. I've talked about these individually, but I don't think I've shared how they work together for you in a race. It's time I did because you lose time and even races if you aren't using these skills. These are skills that every ultra runner needs to become great at finishing races.
And I didn't just dream these up. I developed them organically over time. The first few came from answering all the questions I kept getting about how I finished so many hundreds, year in and year out, without DNF-ing. Like, "How do you do that?" question. The other skills came from adding things over time that clients kept needing, situations where I was teaching the same skill over and over to every client. Clearly, a skill, a universal skill.
And I wanted to keep these skills pared down to just the essentials, not 20 skills or 50 skills. That's not portable in a race. That's just way too much. So I really kept it pared down to the essentials.
So, I thought long and hard about each skill. Was it something that could help everyone? Was it something that applied in every race format at every distance? And was it necessary if you wanted to finish and hit your goals reliably? And I only added it as a skill if the answer to all these questions was a yes. So what I'm sharing today are the five mental situations that predictably derail runners and a skill for handling each one of these.
Like, when you're in a low, you handle it. When your attention drifts, you focus it. When something goes wrong, you solve it. When you fear pain, you control it. And when your brain offers you an easy out, you make a clear decision. That's a system. I see it as a system that works together, not steps, not a checklist. It's a set of skills matched to the situations every ultra is going to throw at you.
Because these situations aren't random, they're predictable. Like I said, I was teaching them to client after client. They kept showing up in everybody's races all the time. So you know that they're coming. So, instead of hoping that you get lucky and avoid these situations in a race, it makes way more sense to actually prepare for them. And that's exactly what these five skills do.
All right. Before I share them, I do want to make one thing clear. These are skills, which means you can learn them. They're not things that you're just either naturally good at or not. These are things also that are going to trip you up in a race. And that's not bad. We expect that in ultras. But the point here is that they're fixable. You're going to encounter them and they are fixable.
So as I go through these five skills, you may hear one of them and think, "Ooh, I don't do that one well. I have real problems with that." And that might be so right now where you are. But these aren't failings or character flaws that you're just stuck with. These are skills that you can build. They're the same type of skills as learning how to train and how to hydrate and fuel. You learn those, you can learn these. And I can help you do it. So, get a console call at the link in the show notes and talk to me about coaching.
But first, listen up to these skills and see where in these five skills you need to be a little stronger. The first of the five is handling lows. Now, a low, in case you don't know, is that low point in a race where you feel like your race is falling apart or the wheels are falling off, or it's just not your day. It has a name. It's called a low.
This is when you're tired and your pace is slowed and moving forward seems like you're trying to just plow through mud. It is so hard. And most runners when they're in a low, they think the going is just going to keep getting worse at the rate it's going, the rate it's getting worse now or faster. Like it's definitely not going to get better. Which means, if you're thinking that story, there's just no way if it's going to get worse, there's no way that you're going to get through the next 20 or 40 or whatever miles. Certainly not ahead of cutoff. It's going to be super difficult and super hard.
So where your mind goes here is obviously, "I made a mistake and you're paying for it. This is the payback that you have to endure." And so you start looking for something to pin the blame on like going out too fast or not training enough, but none of that has to be true. A low is just a low. Just as you get in it, you can also get right back out of it. And it doesn't have to get worse.
If you picture a graph in your head, I draw this for my clients in sessions. If you picture a graph in your head and you picture like a straight horizontal line, a low is just a dip in that line. It's just like a little valley in your path forward. You fall into that little valley, but you can also climb out on the other side. You don't have to give up on your race just because you're in that valley.
So I teach clients how to recognize a low because that's not always clear, how to stop letting it push them into giving up, and how to get out of it faster so that the time they spend there has minimal impact on their race and their body. Like, think about that little dip in the line that I draw for my clients, that horizontal line. The shallower you make that low, the sooner you start moving out of it, the less impact it has on your pace and your cushion on cutoff and on your energy.
So, when you learn the skill, it helps you keep your average pace higher. You get out of that low faster, you recognize it and then you get out of it faster. You keep your average pace higher and you keep more of the energy that the low would have consumed, energy that you need ahead to finish the race. And there's less emotional toll too. If you've been in a low, you know how defeating it can feel. Like all of a sudden this glorious race you were having is just so hard. So there's an emotional component to it too, and if you get out of it faster, that is less impactful on you. One client of mine greets a low like it's an old friend that they're expecting to see, but not necessarily going to hang out with.
All right. The next skill up is focusing your attention. Attention is one of the most valuable mental assets that you have in a race. And you want to be very intentional about what you spend it on. When I say attention, most runners are going to think, "Oh, she's talking about staying in the moment," but this is way more than that. It's about where you aim your attention, where you spend it, what you put your attention on even in the moment. Like you can be present, but you still got to decide what to put your attention on.
And when you're not intentional with it, you're likely to waste your attention here and there on various distractions, like joining up with another runner and just chatting a section away, or ruminating on a situation at work that you can't do anything about while you're in the race, or obsessing about cutoff in the finish line, things you didn't plan to spend your race focusing on. When you spend your attention on distractions like that, you often find yourself walking along, strolling along, meandering along, with your mind off in la-la land, not eating, not drinking, not running your race pace, and definitely not racing.
In other words, running inefficiently, not focusing on what you need to do, the minimum things you need to do to finish. And most runners don't realize how much they're doing this. They may catch themselves lost in thought once or twice, but don't realize how much time distractions, little ones here and there, take away from their race. Not keeping your attention on the things that get you to the finish leads to slower races, disappointing performances, and believe me, I have been there, frustration with yourself.
That's why I teach clients how to spot distractions and use their attention like the precious commodity that it is. How to choose where to put your attention and when to allow a distraction. Distractions aren't necessarily bad. You just have to be intentional with them. When you learn this skill, you're in control of your attention. You're not getting distracted like you're a victim of distractions. You're either allowing a distraction or staying focused and you know when you're doing both. Notice, by the way, the difference in how that feels between getting distracted and allowing a distraction or staying focused. Those two things feel very different.
So, if you learn the skill of focusing your attention and you use it, it helps you stay on pace, focused, and on pace, eating and drinking on schedule, which we sometimes have trouble with, and you run the race that you intended to run, not the race that you just happen to run.
All right. The next skill, one that we all know and love, is problem-solving under pressure, not just solving problems, but solving problems under pressure. If you've run an ultra, you know about problems in a race. They don't come when you want them to. They're often unexpected, they're in the way. I envision them in my head like boulders, this giant boulder in my way blocking me from the finish. And you can't plan for every problem that you might have in a race. Like, I've had clients who want to do that, who want to build an encyclopedia of solutions in their head that is all encompassing. And you simply can't anticipate all the things that can possibly go wrong in a race.
There are always things that you would never in a million years have imagined. I can't tell you how many times I've thought in the middle of a race, "Well, that's never happened to me in 100." And I've done 153 of them. It cracks me up every time. What most runners do is react to the problem. Like, "Why me? Why now? I was afraid of this. I knew this would happen. There goes my race." And they try one or two ways that they know to fix the problem and then give up thinking it can't be solved. They can't solve it.
So instead, I teach clients to focus on the solution. That's a way better place to put your brain power. Like how to decide also which problem gets solved first when you have multiple problems going on, and how to think when solving the problem because there are always more ways to solve something. Instead, I teach clients to focus on the solution, which is a way better place to put your brain power. How to decide which problem gets solved first when there's multiple problems going on and how to think when solving it because there are always more ways to solve something than you initially think.
This lets you spend less of your race time complaining about the problem and more time solving it, which is way more productive. And solving it in maybe new ways that you haven't thought of before. Like maybe in new ways that no one has thought of before. And most importantly, you get past that boulder standing in your path that's blocking the way between you and the finish line.
Once you're deeper into the miles of a race, the next skill you need is how to control pain. This skill is how you interpret the physical signals that your body sends, like your cramping quad or the bruises and scrapes and shock from a fall, or the high level of effort and high heart rate you feel when you're pushing as hard as you can up a technical long climb. It's mostly discomfort and usually less actual pain. But to keep things simple here in this episode, I'm just going to call it all pain here.
And what most runners do is fear it. They fear it before the race and it freaks them out in the race because they don't know how much pain they're going to feel and it might be more than they can actually handle. And that's understandable when you see pain as something that happens to you, something painful that you have no control over. And it can happen at any time. Fear of uncontrollable pain and discomfort ahead that might lie in the miles ahead can intimidate you into slowing down, running conservatively, and even dropping out because of how it might feel.
But that doesn't have to be. I teach clients that they're actually in full control of how much pain they take on and how to do that. You might know Courtney Dauwalter's method of doing this with her pain cave. When you learn to use the power that you have to control the amount of pain that you take on, it frees you to stop running conservatively out of fear. And frees you to run your best. You run faster with more daring and don't even consider dropping to avoid the pain that you think you might experience in the miles ahead because you know you can control it if it does show up. And most importantly, you start enjoying pushing the pace, just for the fun of it.
Last, but definitely not least, is the skill of making clear decisions. An ultra is really made up of a series of small and large decisions. Small as in, "Where am I placing my foot here between these rocks and these roots? Do I want to eat one handful or two of pretzels at the aid station? And what pace do I want to run right this second?" And then large decisions like, of course, "Do I stay in the race or drop?" Small decisions add up, and big ones can obviously end a race.
So most runners fear making a wrong decision. But fearing that doesn't prepare you to make smart decisions. So decision-making then is left to how you're feeling in the moment. And when your brain is fatigued by the time you get to that moment, you waffle around with decisions even more than you would have in a normal moment because it's more challenging to make clear decisions. You sit in an aid station and wait for an answer to somehow become clear to you, waiting for somebody to talk you into or out of continuing on in the race. And sometimes you do it long enough that you time out and the decision is made for you. You don't actually have to make it.
This decision paralysis wastes a ton of precious moving time. So I teach clients how to create decision criteria to make important decisions ahead of time, how to base their decisions on what's going to do the best job of getting them to the finish line, and how to make clear decisions even when fatigue starts to set in, because it sets in for all of us. That way, when you learn this skill, you save time making even the most important decisions. Those decisions are also clearer and easier to make. You're not sitting there waiting for some divine revelation. You make the decisions that get you to the finish on time, and you make them clearer and easier.
So even if, even if you drop out of the race, you're clear why you made that decision, and you know you didn't quit on yourself, and you don't just say that you made the right decision, you feel it.
So, let's recap the five skills you need to race your best. Handling lows, focusing your attention, problem-solving under pressure, controlling pain, and making clear decisions. These aren't random skills. Every single one of the situations that they cover will show up in your race, every time. So instead of fearing them, instead of fearing these situations and hoping that you can avoid them, the smarter, stronger approach is to just master them. If they're going to happen, and they are, let's get really good at them.
And you can. These are learnable skills. When you build them, a few things start to change. You stop losing time to indecision and doubt and overreaction, so you run faster and more efficiently, and you stop quitting on yourself, so you finish more consistently. But maybe the biggest shift is this. You know that you're not helplessly at the mercy of these things the whole race anymore. You know you're in control. You know how to handle whatever shows up. So now you have the freedom to decide how you want to run the race, not just try to survive the race. And that makes racing feel a lot more solid and more sure and a lot more predictable in the ways that matter.
And get this, a lot more enjoyable too. And that's really the goal here, to not just get through races and survive them, but to become the runner who masters them and has the freedom to run whatever race you dream of running. This can be you.
All right, you all. That's this week's episode. Thanks for listening. If you know someone who could use this, share it with them. It might be exactly what they need to hear. See you all 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 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.
Welcome to episode 59. Today, I want to introduce the five race skills that I teach. I've talked about these individually, but I don't think I've shared how they work together for you in a race. It's time I did because you lose time and even races if you aren't using these skills. These are skills that every ultra runner needs to become great at finishing races.
And I didn't just dream these up. I developed them organically over time. The first few came from answering all the questions I kept getting about how I finished so many hundreds, year in and year out, without DNF-ing. Like, "How do you do that?" question. The other skills came from adding things over time that clients kept needing, situations where I was teaching the same skill over and over to every client. Clearly, a skill, a universal skill.
And I wanted to keep these skills pared down to just the essentials, not 20 skills or 50 skills. That's not portable in a race. That's just way too much. So I really kept it pared down to the essentials.
So, I thought long and hard about each skill. Was it something that could help everyone? Was it something that applied in every race format at every distance? And was it necessary if you wanted to finish and hit your goals reliably? And I only added it as a skill if the answer to all these questions was a yes. So what I'm sharing today are the five mental situations that predictably derail runners and a skill for handling each one of these.
Like, when you're in a low, you handle it. When your attention drifts, you focus it. When something goes wrong, you solve it. When you fear pain, you control it. And when your brain offers you an easy out, you make a clear decision. That's a system. I see it as a system that works together, not steps, not a checklist. It's a set of skills matched to the situations every ultra is going to throw at you.
Because these situations aren't random, they're predictable. Like I said, I was teaching them to client after client. They kept showing up in everybody's races all the time. So you know that they're coming. So, instead of hoping that you get lucky and avoid these situations in a race, it makes way more sense to actually prepare for them. And that's exactly what these five skills do.
All right. Before I share them, I do want to make one thing clear. These are skills, which means you can learn them. They're not things that you're just either naturally good at or not. These are things also that are going to trip you up in a race. And that's not bad. We expect that in ultras. But the point here is that they're fixable. You're going to encounter them and they are fixable.
So as I go through these five skills, you may hear one of them and think, "Ooh, I don't do that one well. I have real problems with that." And that might be so right now where you are. But these aren't failings or character flaws that you're just stuck with. These are skills that you can build. They're the same type of skills as learning how to train and how to hydrate and fuel. You learn those, you can learn these. And I can help you do it. So, get a console call at the link in the show notes and talk to me about coaching.
But first, listen up to these skills and see where in these five skills you need to be a little stronger. The first of the five is handling lows. Now, a low, in case you don't know, is that low point in a race where you feel like your race is falling apart or the wheels are falling off, or it's just not your day. It has a name. It's called a low.
This is when you're tired and your pace is slowed and moving forward seems like you're trying to just plow through mud. It is so hard. And most runners when they're in a low, they think the going is just going to keep getting worse at the rate it's going, the rate it's getting worse now or faster. Like it's definitely not going to get better. Which means, if you're thinking that story, there's just no way if it's going to get worse, there's no way that you're going to get through the next 20 or 40 or whatever miles. Certainly not ahead of cutoff. It's going to be super difficult and super hard.
So where your mind goes here is obviously, "I made a mistake and you're paying for it. This is the payback that you have to endure." And so you start looking for something to pin the blame on like going out too fast or not training enough, but none of that has to be true. A low is just a low. Just as you get in it, you can also get right back out of it. And it doesn't have to get worse.
If you picture a graph in your head, I draw this for my clients in sessions. If you picture a graph in your head and you picture like a straight horizontal line, a low is just a dip in that line. It's just like a little valley in your path forward. You fall into that little valley, but you can also climb out on the other side. You don't have to give up on your race just because you're in that valley.
So I teach clients how to recognize a low because that's not always clear, how to stop letting it push them into giving up, and how to get out of it faster so that the time they spend there has minimal impact on their race and their body. Like, think about that little dip in the line that I draw for my clients, that horizontal line. The shallower you make that low, the sooner you start moving out of it, the less impact it has on your pace and your cushion on cutoff and on your energy.
So, when you learn the skill, it helps you keep your average pace higher. You get out of that low faster, you recognize it and then you get out of it faster. You keep your average pace higher and you keep more of the energy that the low would have consumed, energy that you need ahead to finish the race. And there's less emotional toll too. If you've been in a low, you know how defeating it can feel. Like all of a sudden this glorious race you were having is just so hard. So there's an emotional component to it too, and if you get out of it faster, that is less impactful on you. One client of mine greets a low like it's an old friend that they're expecting to see, but not necessarily going to hang out with.
All right. The next skill up is focusing your attention. Attention is one of the most valuable mental assets that you have in a race. And you want to be very intentional about what you spend it on. When I say attention, most runners are going to think, "Oh, she's talking about staying in the moment," but this is way more than that. It's about where you aim your attention, where you spend it, what you put your attention on even in the moment. Like you can be present, but you still got to decide what to put your attention on.
And when you're not intentional with it, you're likely to waste your attention here and there on various distractions, like joining up with another runner and just chatting a section away, or ruminating on a situation at work that you can't do anything about while you're in the race, or obsessing about cutoff in the finish line, things you didn't plan to spend your race focusing on. When you spend your attention on distractions like that, you often find yourself walking along, strolling along, meandering along, with your mind off in la-la land, not eating, not drinking, not running your race pace, and definitely not racing.
In other words, running inefficiently, not focusing on what you need to do, the minimum things you need to do to finish. And most runners don't realize how much they're doing this. They may catch themselves lost in thought once or twice, but don't realize how much time distractions, little ones here and there, take away from their race. Not keeping your attention on the things that get you to the finish leads to slower races, disappointing performances, and believe me, I have been there, frustration with yourself.
That's why I teach clients how to spot distractions and use their attention like the precious commodity that it is. How to choose where to put your attention and when to allow a distraction. Distractions aren't necessarily bad. You just have to be intentional with them. When you learn this skill, you're in control of your attention. You're not getting distracted like you're a victim of distractions. You're either allowing a distraction or staying focused and you know when you're doing both. Notice, by the way, the difference in how that feels between getting distracted and allowing a distraction or staying focused. Those two things feel very different.
So, if you learn the skill of focusing your attention and you use it, it helps you stay on pace, focused, and on pace, eating and drinking on schedule, which we sometimes have trouble with, and you run the race that you intended to run, not the race that you just happen to run.
All right. The next skill, one that we all know and love, is problem-solving under pressure, not just solving problems, but solving problems under pressure. If you've run an ultra, you know about problems in a race. They don't come when you want them to. They're often unexpected, they're in the way. I envision them in my head like boulders, this giant boulder in my way blocking me from the finish. And you can't plan for every problem that you might have in a race. Like, I've had clients who want to do that, who want to build an encyclopedia of solutions in their head that is all encompassing. And you simply can't anticipate all the things that can possibly go wrong in a race.
There are always things that you would never in a million years have imagined. I can't tell you how many times I've thought in the middle of a race, "Well, that's never happened to me in 100." And I've done 153 of them. It cracks me up every time. What most runners do is react to the problem. Like, "Why me? Why now? I was afraid of this. I knew this would happen. There goes my race." And they try one or two ways that they know to fix the problem and then give up thinking it can't be solved. They can't solve it.
So instead, I teach clients to focus on the solution. That's a way better place to put your brain power. Like how to decide also which problem gets solved first when you have multiple problems going on, and how to think when solving the problem because there are always more ways to solve something. Instead, I teach clients to focus on the solution, which is a way better place to put your brain power. How to decide which problem gets solved first when there's multiple problems going on and how to think when solving it because there are always more ways to solve something than you initially think.
This lets you spend less of your race time complaining about the problem and more time solving it, which is way more productive. And solving it in maybe new ways that you haven't thought of before. Like maybe in new ways that no one has thought of before. And most importantly, you get past that boulder standing in your path that's blocking the way between you and the finish line.
Once you're deeper into the miles of a race, the next skill you need is how to control pain. This skill is how you interpret the physical signals that your body sends, like your cramping quad or the bruises and scrapes and shock from a fall, or the high level of effort and high heart rate you feel when you're pushing as hard as you can up a technical long climb. It's mostly discomfort and usually less actual pain. But to keep things simple here in this episode, I'm just going to call it all pain here.
And what most runners do is fear it. They fear it before the race and it freaks them out in the race because they don't know how much pain they're going to feel and it might be more than they can actually handle. And that's understandable when you see pain as something that happens to you, something painful that you have no control over. And it can happen at any time. Fear of uncontrollable pain and discomfort ahead that might lie in the miles ahead can intimidate you into slowing down, running conservatively, and even dropping out because of how it might feel.
But that doesn't have to be. I teach clients that they're actually in full control of how much pain they take on and how to do that. You might know Courtney Dauwalter's method of doing this with her pain cave. When you learn to use the power that you have to control the amount of pain that you take on, it frees you to stop running conservatively out of fear. And frees you to run your best. You run faster with more daring and don't even consider dropping to avoid the pain that you think you might experience in the miles ahead because you know you can control it if it does show up. And most importantly, you start enjoying pushing the pace, just for the fun of it.
Last, but definitely not least, is the skill of making clear decisions. An ultra is really made up of a series of small and large decisions. Small as in, "Where am I placing my foot here between these rocks and these roots? Do I want to eat one handful or two of pretzels at the aid station? And what pace do I want to run right this second?" And then large decisions like, of course, "Do I stay in the race or drop?" Small decisions add up, and big ones can obviously end a race.
So most runners fear making a wrong decision. But fearing that doesn't prepare you to make smart decisions. So decision-making then is left to how you're feeling in the moment. And when your brain is fatigued by the time you get to that moment, you waffle around with decisions even more than you would have in a normal moment because it's more challenging to make clear decisions. You sit in an aid station and wait for an answer to somehow become clear to you, waiting for somebody to talk you into or out of continuing on in the race. And sometimes you do it long enough that you time out and the decision is made for you. You don't actually have to make it.
This decision paralysis wastes a ton of precious moving time. So I teach clients how to create decision criteria to make important decisions ahead of time, how to base their decisions on what's going to do the best job of getting them to the finish line, and how to make clear decisions even when fatigue starts to set in, because it sets in for all of us. That way, when you learn this skill, you save time making even the most important decisions. Those decisions are also clearer and easier to make. You're not sitting there waiting for some divine revelation. You make the decisions that get you to the finish on time, and you make them clearer and easier.
So even if, even if you drop out of the race, you're clear why you made that decision, and you know you didn't quit on yourself, and you don't just say that you made the right decision, you feel it.
So, let's recap the five skills you need to race your best. Handling lows, focusing your attention, problem-solving under pressure, controlling pain, and making clear decisions. These aren't random skills. Every single one of the situations that they cover will show up in your race, every time. So instead of fearing them, instead of fearing these situations and hoping that you can avoid them, the smarter, stronger approach is to just master them. If they're going to happen, and they are, let's get really good at them.
And you can. These are learnable skills. When you build them, a few things start to change. You stop losing time to indecision and doubt and overreaction, so you run faster and more efficiently, and you stop quitting on yourself, so you finish more consistently. But maybe the biggest shift is this. You know that you're not helplessly at the mercy of these things the whole race anymore. You know you're in control. You know how to handle whatever shows up. So now you have the freedom to decide how you want to run the race, not just try to survive the race. And that makes racing feel a lot more solid and more sure and a lot more predictable in the ways that matter.
And get this, a lot more enjoyable too. And that's really the goal here, to not just get through races and survive them, but to become the runner who masters them and has the freedom to run whatever race you dream of running. This can be you.
All right, you all. That's this week's episode. Thanks for listening. If you know someone who could use this, share it with them. It might be exactly what they need to hear. See you all 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.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you listen to podcasts!