70. What Coaching Really Gives You as an Ultrarunner
For six years, every medical professional I spoke to about running after my hip replacement told me the same thing: no. They were horrified that I'd even suggest running on the new hip. Then one person asked me my goal, believed in the future I wanted, and reminded me of something I'd never fully appreciated before. Sometimes, what changes your running isn't more knowledge or a better plan. It's having someone who helps you believe in what's possible again.
We often think coaching is about learning mental skills, improving race execution, or building better plans. And sure, all of that matters, but this week, I explain why some of the biggest breakthroughs in ultrarunning come from something much harder to measure: having someone who helps you stop holding yourself back, and gives you permission to chase the goals you really want.
Whether you're preparing for your first ultra, returning from a setback, or wondering what's missing in your running, this episode will show you what coaching really gives you as an ultrarunner. I share what my own recovery taught me about the value of coaching, and explain why belief, permission, and consistent support can change far more than your race results.
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:
Why the greatest value of coaching often has nothing to do with training plans.
The true power of coaching for ultrarunners and how it can help you achieve goals you never thought were possible.
Why coaching can transform the way you see yourself as an ultrarunner.
How coaching helps you uncover blind spots that are impossible to see on your own.
Why investing in yourself isn't just about improving your running, but becoming the ultrarunner you want to be.
How the right coach can help you keep moving forward when doubt, setbacks, or fear threaten to hold you back.
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.
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Full Episode Transcript:
For six years, almost everyone I talked to about my running future told me some version of no. Doctors, nurses, my own internal doubt. And then one person, someone I just met, said yes. And I realized how much of my life I'd been holding hostage, waiting for a permission I didn't even know I needed.
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 70. If this is your first time here, I coach clients to master the mental side of ultra running. The 80% of the sport that decides whether all your physical training actually pays off on race day. It's what makes you faster, helps you finish reliably, and helps you enjoy it more. So, in our weekly sessions, I help clients plan races and evaluate long runs and their races and work through the times when they're scared and the doubt seems too much and they don't believe in themselves. Or they have a blind spot that they just can't see on their own.
I also teach a five-part system for mastering that mental side. Skills you've heard me talk about here before: reframing negative thinking, unstoppability with risk and failure, race crafting, the five essential race tools, and becoming the ultra runner you want to be. But what I haven't talked about is the intangible side of what coaching actually delivers. And those results, it turns out, aren't small. They can be just as profound and sometimes more than the tangible ones. It's value that you actually get on top of the skills, not separate from them, and it is a huge part of what makes coaching worth it.
This episode starts with my hip replacement. In the six months before that surgery that I got in June, I talked to a lot of doctors and nurse practitioners and assistants about my hip, and every single one of them, I mean 100% of them, was shocked and horrified that I'd even suggest running on the new hip. What could I be thinking? And that is despite the fact that the implant I went with is the latest technology. And it's an official partner of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, unbelievably. And it's also what my surgeon said that they give 20-year-olds who need hip replacements.
But running wasn't just not recommended or up to you, it was an outright no. Hiking was literally the best I could do. I wasn't even able to have a conversation with them about it. It was just no. You shouldn't even be thinking about running. Are you crazy? That's over. Now, I know, and they know, that people run on hip replacements. And I'm used to finding my own way to do my own thing, but that doesn't mean I want to just ignore what they said and go run my heart out. Because every one of us, every hip patient is different. I've got different hardware.
There are different recoveries, different bodies, different consequences. We're all going into this with different situations. So there's different consequences down the road that you can't see yet. I can take on as much risk as I want, but I just had no way to judge how much risk I was actually taking on. So once I got through the immediate work of recovering from surgery, I was a little lost and worried and directionless. Not sure how much to do, how fast to build back, or really what I was even building back to. I was heading off into recovery and I was getting miles, but I wasn't really sure what I could build to.
There were just too many unknowns. And I had no idea of where to even find the answers. So I took recovery patiently, and I started getting miles, the miles I felt comfortable with, walking miles. I got my muscles back in shape or I am, let me put it this way, I am still getting my muscles back in shape. But I kept putting off any real decision about when and how much to run. Those are the biggies.
But then, along the way, I hit the six-week post-op mark. And I scheduled my first appointment with physical therapy, as directed by my surgeon. And that is where the unexpected happened. I've been going to this PT office for hip issues for years, really decades. The sports chiropractor who runs it has literally kept me running well for decades. I think I'd been through five different offices with him over the years. So working with him and his crew is very familiar territory. But I didn't know my new PT. He's a new one.
And he is who I had my first post-op evaluation with. So I got there for the post-op evaluation, that first session with my new PT. I got there at the end of a busy week on a Friday morning. And by that point, I had been through so many pre- and post-op evaluations and questionnaires that the answers and the questions had all become routine. And I was being very blunt and factual with him, not really thinking about my answers as he typed on his laptop what I said. And half my mind, honestly, was already on the rest of the day ahead and the weekend coming up.
But then he asked the magic question, "What's your goal for physical therapy?" And it just came right out. I blurted it right out. "Run 100-milers again." Like I had said I want to tie my shoelaces again. And he didn't even pause or look up from his laptop. He just said, "Okay," and moved on to the next question. But I didn't move on. I was like, "Wait a minute. I said run 100-milers again, not one, but many. And that's okay?" "Yes," he said, totally chill. He explained that's completely reasonable. That's what you want to get to. That's completely reasonable, and his job was to help me get there.
And believe me, I challenged him on it. Like all these unknowns and reasons to hold back and worries and fears I had that had been rumbling around in my head for six years, really. Like I challenged him on that, and he handed all of those challenges back to me. Running hundreds was perfectly reasonable, normal for me. And he was there to help me get back to it. I walked out of there floating. I mean, I dragged in there and I walked out of there floating. The day outside was brighter, everything was happier, and I was excited for the first time in a long time about what was ahead.
Because he'd given me more than three new exercises. He'd given me permission to believe in myself and my dreams. I'd been given a green light where I didn't even realize I was sitting at a red light. For the first time in six years, since I was told I needed a hip replacement six years ago, someone with real medical expertise who knew my situation and knew what he was talking about told me that what I wanted wasn't crazy. It wasn't unreasonable. I could do this. I could go for it. There was no reason why not, and he was there to help make it happen.
It was so simple and so profound to me because the physical work, the exercises, the plan, I might, maybe, have been able to piece something together, some kind of generic set of recovery exercises I found online. But what I couldn't get anywhere was that permission, belief, somebody willing to stand up for what I wanted instead of what was easy or safe for them and to say it out loud to me. And to know that they were there to support me through it. They weren't just there to tell me it was okay, they were there to support me through it.
That's the part of coaching I haven't talked about, and it's easy to miss the value of it because it's intangible. In the weeks since I have started PT, I've made real, measurable progress. I am getting stronger, with some steps backward along the way, some big ones sometimes because my old hip is still a problem. But the intangible changes, the permission and the support week after week, not just once but week after week, have mattered just as much as the physical changes.
Having somebody unconditionally believe in your crazy ultra stuff and your dream is a gift. Those people aren't everywhere in life. You're lucky when you find one. And having someone who's an expert, like a medical expert, an expert in that field, believe in you this way and be there consistently to support you is something else entirely. We're talking somebody who doesn't just give you a pep talk and get back to their life or their next client. Somebody who gives your ultra running their full attention and who's invested in your goals week in and week out, through the setbacks and the doubts and decisions.
I rest easy knowing that he's got a plan to get me where I want to be. He knows my upcoming races. I have described them honestly and how both hips have felt and performed over the last few days, honest about that too, and what I need next, and he adjusts accordingly. He keeps me calm, knowing I can bring anything to our sessions. I can bring a big, disappointing setback, and I have. I've brought doubt, disappointment, just not believing in it moments, and confusion about what's actually going on in my body, not able to really describe it except this is going on here.
I don't know what's happening. I can bring all that to him without feeling like I'm failing as a patient. I can bring my most honest fear about all of this and get the perspective from him to calm me down and to see my progress clearly. And I can bring confusion. He'll help figure out what's going on, explain it however I need to hear it, as many questions as I need to ask about it, because no question is too many.
And all of this makes it likely that I'm actually going to get there instead of getting lost in the doubt and the setbacks and giving up. It means that instead of quietly restricting myself to the bare minimum and just living a life of trying to get by, I get to spend the years ahead running exactly as big as I want to. It gives me back my dreams and, really, my life. No exaggeration because before this, it was like hip surgery, hip replacement, had put me back on a trail, which was great. Out of pain on that hip and on a trail. But it just wasn't the trail I wanted.
Like here I was on a trail, but all I could have was this flat, short, paved nature trail life, while the technical, rooty, gnarly trail over the mountains with all the scenery that I'd missed for years stayed off limits, and it seemed like it stayed off limits permanently. But that permission he gave me put me back on the trail I actually wanted. And the weekly support is what's keeping me moving on it, not slowing down and not giving up like a good pacer is doing, staying on pace and making progress session to session. I got the hip replaced. That solved the physical side. I was out of pain on that side.
But I was also holding myself back on the mental side, out of caution and fear. The permission and support set me free. And coaching does the same thing for you that my PT has done for me. It gives you a place to bring everything: your goals, your doubts, your setbacks, your crazy fears, all of it, without feeling like you're failing or doing it wrong or you're the only one that's dealing with this. It's unconditional, weekly, personal support for your goal, not a one-time pep talk and not advice that you get once and then have to remember on race day.
It saves you time. Think about it this way, the most expensive way to learn is through experience. You don't have to learn everything, though, the hard way, through years of trial and error of guessing at what works and re-guessing. I use what I already know and what I've learned across thousands of hours of coaching, so you don't have to spend years figuring it out yourself. It gets you out of indecision and overwhelm. Instead of maybe piecing together random tips from videos and articles and hoping they're right for you, you get something built around your goal, your body, your thoughts, your fears, and where you actually are today. You don't have to adapt something generic and hope it works for you.
It's not a set of tips, either, that you get once and are left to figure out alone. You practice what you learn, just like I do in PT, and you come back the next week and we look at what actually happened and we adjust from there. We solve what's in the way. We learn what's next, based on your real training and your real races and your real life. And you get personal attention, like a real human who actually thinks about your ultra running, wants to hear about it, who actually thinks about your training and your races and what's coming up for you, and wants to hear about it every week. Not talking about an algorithm or anything like that.
This is somebody real paying attention to you, to your specific life and your running. It's a partnership. I coach everybody on the same stuff, but I coach everyone individually. I don't hand it to everyone the same way because everybody's different. The coaching shifts as you shift. What we focus on this month isn't what we focused on three months ago, and everybody needs a different order or kind of a different packaging of it because you're not in the same place you were three months ago and you're not the same person as the other client.
And underneath it all is permission, like the permission I got. Permission to dream, permission to plan, permission to see and believe what's possible for you, even when it looks like too much from the outside. That's exactly what I give my clients. The same thing my PT gave me: someone looking at your goal and saying without hesitation, "Yeah, absolutely. Let's go." Not because I'm endlessly positive, some unicorn like that, but because I believe in them and I know what it's worth to have someone see you reaching your goal clearly when you've stopped believing you're able to.
That combination, the skills you learn and the support underneath them, is what makes coaching valuable. It's not one or the other. It's what makes it possible to actually use everything you're learning instead of learning it and still staying stuck. It keeps you on track and on pace. It keeps you in action instead of doubt. It puts you back fully in charge of your own running. And here is what it can look like week to week when you have this kind of support. You sign up for the races you honestly want to run, not the ones that you've just talked yourself into as realistic. You aim for the goal you want because you feel like you have an honest shot at hitting it.
And you plan how you're going to do it instead of just wondering if you can. You enjoy training more because even when a run goes bad, you can get the independent perspective to see it for what it is and figure out what went wrong instead of letting it snowball into a bad week. And you have a place to take your anxiety when you lose belief and you don't see how you're going to pull off your race. You don't get stuck making every training decision alone, like what to do when you have a key long run and a social obligation on the same weekend, or when to switch focus from miles to elevation, things like that, because you've got someone to talk them through with, these decisions through with.
You show up calm at the starting line because you're following a plan that you built and you trust instead of avoiding all the doubt that you never worked through. You put your mental skills into action on race day because you've practiced them, you've troubleshot them, and you've refined them with another person until they are second nature. And you don't wallow in blame when something goes wrong. You look for a solution instead. And you don't let negativity take you out of a race the way it used to, like without you even noticing it happening until it happened.
And over time, with all of this, you become the self-confident runner and confident person in life you want to be. I say this all the time. You can train the physical side of the sport to perfection. You can nail your training, your nutrition, your gear, your miles, your elevation, and still not get where you want to go. Because if the mental side isn't equally strong, you'll only use a fraction of everything that you've built. But what you might not have known until now is that the mental side isn't just tangible skills, it's the intangible stuff too. Permission to stop holding yourself back, being one of the biggest.
My hip is a perfect example. I fixed it. The pain was gone. But I was still holding myself back from my own belief about what was possible for me. It took one person with the right expertise telling me it was okay and showing up for me consistently to change that and to free the future that I honestly thought I'd lost.
It's the same work I do with runners every week, not just mindset skills, not just a race plan, permission and belief, and the long-term support to actually go after what you want and stay in it as long as it takes to get there.
So, if you've spent years like I have hearing some version of, "No, you can't," I can be your, "Yeah, let's go for it." Head to the link in the show notes to book a free consult call about coaching. 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 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 70. If this is your first time here, I coach clients to master the mental side of ultra running. The 80% of the sport that decides whether all your physical training actually pays off on race day. It's what makes you faster, helps you finish reliably, and helps you enjoy it more. So, in our weekly sessions, I help clients plan races and evaluate long runs and their races and work through the times when they're scared and the doubt seems too much and they don't believe in themselves. Or they have a blind spot that they just can't see on their own.
I also teach a five-part system for mastering that mental side. Skills you've heard me talk about here before: reframing negative thinking, unstoppability with risk and failure, race crafting, the five essential race tools, and becoming the ultra runner you want to be. But what I haven't talked about is the intangible side of what coaching actually delivers. And those results, it turns out, aren't small. They can be just as profound and sometimes more than the tangible ones. It's value that you actually get on top of the skills, not separate from them, and it is a huge part of what makes coaching worth it.
This episode starts with my hip replacement. In the six months before that surgery that I got in June, I talked to a lot of doctors and nurse practitioners and assistants about my hip, and every single one of them, I mean 100% of them, was shocked and horrified that I'd even suggest running on the new hip. What could I be thinking? And that is despite the fact that the implant I went with is the latest technology. And it's an official partner of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, unbelievably. And it's also what my surgeon said that they give 20-year-olds who need hip replacements.
But running wasn't just not recommended or up to you, it was an outright no. Hiking was literally the best I could do. I wasn't even able to have a conversation with them about it. It was just no. You shouldn't even be thinking about running. Are you crazy? That's over. Now, I know, and they know, that people run on hip replacements. And I'm used to finding my own way to do my own thing, but that doesn't mean I want to just ignore what they said and go run my heart out. Because every one of us, every hip patient is different. I've got different hardware.
There are different recoveries, different bodies, different consequences. We're all going into this with different situations. So there's different consequences down the road that you can't see yet. I can take on as much risk as I want, but I just had no way to judge how much risk I was actually taking on. So once I got through the immediate work of recovering from surgery, I was a little lost and worried and directionless. Not sure how much to do, how fast to build back, or really what I was even building back to. I was heading off into recovery and I was getting miles, but I wasn't really sure what I could build to.
There were just too many unknowns. And I had no idea of where to even find the answers. So I took recovery patiently, and I started getting miles, the miles I felt comfortable with, walking miles. I got my muscles back in shape or I am, let me put it this way, I am still getting my muscles back in shape. But I kept putting off any real decision about when and how much to run. Those are the biggies.
But then, along the way, I hit the six-week post-op mark. And I scheduled my first appointment with physical therapy, as directed by my surgeon. And that is where the unexpected happened. I've been going to this PT office for hip issues for years, really decades. The sports chiropractor who runs it has literally kept me running well for decades. I think I'd been through five different offices with him over the years. So working with him and his crew is very familiar territory. But I didn't know my new PT. He's a new one.
And he is who I had my first post-op evaluation with. So I got there for the post-op evaluation, that first session with my new PT. I got there at the end of a busy week on a Friday morning. And by that point, I had been through so many pre- and post-op evaluations and questionnaires that the answers and the questions had all become routine. And I was being very blunt and factual with him, not really thinking about my answers as he typed on his laptop what I said. And half my mind, honestly, was already on the rest of the day ahead and the weekend coming up.
But then he asked the magic question, "What's your goal for physical therapy?" And it just came right out. I blurted it right out. "Run 100-milers again." Like I had said I want to tie my shoelaces again. And he didn't even pause or look up from his laptop. He just said, "Okay," and moved on to the next question. But I didn't move on. I was like, "Wait a minute. I said run 100-milers again, not one, but many. And that's okay?" "Yes," he said, totally chill. He explained that's completely reasonable. That's what you want to get to. That's completely reasonable, and his job was to help me get there.
And believe me, I challenged him on it. Like all these unknowns and reasons to hold back and worries and fears I had that had been rumbling around in my head for six years, really. Like I challenged him on that, and he handed all of those challenges back to me. Running hundreds was perfectly reasonable, normal for me. And he was there to help me get back to it. I walked out of there floating. I mean, I dragged in there and I walked out of there floating. The day outside was brighter, everything was happier, and I was excited for the first time in a long time about what was ahead.
Because he'd given me more than three new exercises. He'd given me permission to believe in myself and my dreams. I'd been given a green light where I didn't even realize I was sitting at a red light. For the first time in six years, since I was told I needed a hip replacement six years ago, someone with real medical expertise who knew my situation and knew what he was talking about told me that what I wanted wasn't crazy. It wasn't unreasonable. I could do this. I could go for it. There was no reason why not, and he was there to help make it happen.
It was so simple and so profound to me because the physical work, the exercises, the plan, I might, maybe, have been able to piece something together, some kind of generic set of recovery exercises I found online. But what I couldn't get anywhere was that permission, belief, somebody willing to stand up for what I wanted instead of what was easy or safe for them and to say it out loud to me. And to know that they were there to support me through it. They weren't just there to tell me it was okay, they were there to support me through it.
That's the part of coaching I haven't talked about, and it's easy to miss the value of it because it's intangible. In the weeks since I have started PT, I've made real, measurable progress. I am getting stronger, with some steps backward along the way, some big ones sometimes because my old hip is still a problem. But the intangible changes, the permission and the support week after week, not just once but week after week, have mattered just as much as the physical changes.
Having somebody unconditionally believe in your crazy ultra stuff and your dream is a gift. Those people aren't everywhere in life. You're lucky when you find one. And having someone who's an expert, like a medical expert, an expert in that field, believe in you this way and be there consistently to support you is something else entirely. We're talking somebody who doesn't just give you a pep talk and get back to their life or their next client. Somebody who gives your ultra running their full attention and who's invested in your goals week in and week out, through the setbacks and the doubts and decisions.
I rest easy knowing that he's got a plan to get me where I want to be. He knows my upcoming races. I have described them honestly and how both hips have felt and performed over the last few days, honest about that too, and what I need next, and he adjusts accordingly. He keeps me calm, knowing I can bring anything to our sessions. I can bring a big, disappointing setback, and I have. I've brought doubt, disappointment, just not believing in it moments, and confusion about what's actually going on in my body, not able to really describe it except this is going on here.
I don't know what's happening. I can bring all that to him without feeling like I'm failing as a patient. I can bring my most honest fear about all of this and get the perspective from him to calm me down and to see my progress clearly. And I can bring confusion. He'll help figure out what's going on, explain it however I need to hear it, as many questions as I need to ask about it, because no question is too many.
And all of this makes it likely that I'm actually going to get there instead of getting lost in the doubt and the setbacks and giving up. It means that instead of quietly restricting myself to the bare minimum and just living a life of trying to get by, I get to spend the years ahead running exactly as big as I want to. It gives me back my dreams and, really, my life. No exaggeration because before this, it was like hip surgery, hip replacement, had put me back on a trail, which was great. Out of pain on that hip and on a trail. But it just wasn't the trail I wanted.
Like here I was on a trail, but all I could have was this flat, short, paved nature trail life, while the technical, rooty, gnarly trail over the mountains with all the scenery that I'd missed for years stayed off limits, and it seemed like it stayed off limits permanently. But that permission he gave me put me back on the trail I actually wanted. And the weekly support is what's keeping me moving on it, not slowing down and not giving up like a good pacer is doing, staying on pace and making progress session to session. I got the hip replaced. That solved the physical side. I was out of pain on that side.
But I was also holding myself back on the mental side, out of caution and fear. The permission and support set me free. And coaching does the same thing for you that my PT has done for me. It gives you a place to bring everything: your goals, your doubts, your setbacks, your crazy fears, all of it, without feeling like you're failing or doing it wrong or you're the only one that's dealing with this. It's unconditional, weekly, personal support for your goal, not a one-time pep talk and not advice that you get once and then have to remember on race day.
It saves you time. Think about it this way, the most expensive way to learn is through experience. You don't have to learn everything, though, the hard way, through years of trial and error of guessing at what works and re-guessing. I use what I already know and what I've learned across thousands of hours of coaching, so you don't have to spend years figuring it out yourself. It gets you out of indecision and overwhelm. Instead of maybe piecing together random tips from videos and articles and hoping they're right for you, you get something built around your goal, your body, your thoughts, your fears, and where you actually are today. You don't have to adapt something generic and hope it works for you.
It's not a set of tips, either, that you get once and are left to figure out alone. You practice what you learn, just like I do in PT, and you come back the next week and we look at what actually happened and we adjust from there. We solve what's in the way. We learn what's next, based on your real training and your real races and your real life. And you get personal attention, like a real human who actually thinks about your ultra running, wants to hear about it, who actually thinks about your training and your races and what's coming up for you, and wants to hear about it every week. Not talking about an algorithm or anything like that.
This is somebody real paying attention to you, to your specific life and your running. It's a partnership. I coach everybody on the same stuff, but I coach everyone individually. I don't hand it to everyone the same way because everybody's different. The coaching shifts as you shift. What we focus on this month isn't what we focused on three months ago, and everybody needs a different order or kind of a different packaging of it because you're not in the same place you were three months ago and you're not the same person as the other client.
And underneath it all is permission, like the permission I got. Permission to dream, permission to plan, permission to see and believe what's possible for you, even when it looks like too much from the outside. That's exactly what I give my clients. The same thing my PT gave me: someone looking at your goal and saying without hesitation, "Yeah, absolutely. Let's go." Not because I'm endlessly positive, some unicorn like that, but because I believe in them and I know what it's worth to have someone see you reaching your goal clearly when you've stopped believing you're able to.
That combination, the skills you learn and the support underneath them, is what makes coaching valuable. It's not one or the other. It's what makes it possible to actually use everything you're learning instead of learning it and still staying stuck. It keeps you on track and on pace. It keeps you in action instead of doubt. It puts you back fully in charge of your own running. And here is what it can look like week to week when you have this kind of support. You sign up for the races you honestly want to run, not the ones that you've just talked yourself into as realistic. You aim for the goal you want because you feel like you have an honest shot at hitting it.
And you plan how you're going to do it instead of just wondering if you can. You enjoy training more because even when a run goes bad, you can get the independent perspective to see it for what it is and figure out what went wrong instead of letting it snowball into a bad week. And you have a place to take your anxiety when you lose belief and you don't see how you're going to pull off your race. You don't get stuck making every training decision alone, like what to do when you have a key long run and a social obligation on the same weekend, or when to switch focus from miles to elevation, things like that, because you've got someone to talk them through with, these decisions through with.
You show up calm at the starting line because you're following a plan that you built and you trust instead of avoiding all the doubt that you never worked through. You put your mental skills into action on race day because you've practiced them, you've troubleshot them, and you've refined them with another person until they are second nature. And you don't wallow in blame when something goes wrong. You look for a solution instead. And you don't let negativity take you out of a race the way it used to, like without you even noticing it happening until it happened.
And over time, with all of this, you become the self-confident runner and confident person in life you want to be. I say this all the time. You can train the physical side of the sport to perfection. You can nail your training, your nutrition, your gear, your miles, your elevation, and still not get where you want to go. Because if the mental side isn't equally strong, you'll only use a fraction of everything that you've built. But what you might not have known until now is that the mental side isn't just tangible skills, it's the intangible stuff too. Permission to stop holding yourself back, being one of the biggest.
My hip is a perfect example. I fixed it. The pain was gone. But I was still holding myself back from my own belief about what was possible for me. It took one person with the right expertise telling me it was okay and showing up for me consistently to change that and to free the future that I honestly thought I'd lost.
It's the same work I do with runners every week, not just mindset skills, not just a race plan, permission and belief, and the long-term support to actually go after what you want and stay in it as long as it takes to get there.
So, if you've spent years like I have hearing some version of, "No, you can't," I can be your, "Yeah, let's go for it." Head to the link in the show notes to book a free consult call about coaching. 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 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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