37. Coming Back from a Break from Running
Coming back after a break in your training can feel like staring up at an impossible mountain. Whether it’s from the holidays or life getting in the way, the first run back can feel overwhelming.
In this episode, I tackle the mental hurdle of returning to training after time off. A lot of runners fear they’re starting from scratch, but that mindset keeps you stuck. I’ll break down three common thought errors that make it harder than it needs to be.
You’ll learn why your pre-break fitness wasn’t actually your peak and how your experience can help you come back stronger and smarter. Instead of seeing your return as a desperate attempt to "get back," we’ll shift your focus to getting better.
That first run back is just one run, not the start of recreating your old training. Let’s make it count.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why you literally can't lose all your fitness and experience from taking a break.
The three thought errors that make coming back feel impossible.
How to use your gained knowledge to shortcut mistakes and train smarter.
What four elite runners' comeback stories reveal about returning stronger.
How to turn dread about returning into curiosity and excitement.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Episodes Related to Coming Back from a Break:
Full Episode Transcript:
Dreading coming back from a break? What if I told you that the way you come back could actually make you stronger than before the break? Stay tuned because that's exactly what I'm talking about today.
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 37. When you hear this episode, we'll be in the middle of all the winter holidays, when it's especially easy to break routine or take a break from active training to spend time on family and travel and other priorities. So, it's the perfect time to also talk about coming back from a break. I recorded a podcast earlier, Episode 13, on how to take planned breaks and structure them so that they actually help you instead of hurt you. So, if you're thinking of taking a break, make sure you listen to that episode too.
But today, I'm talking about the other side of a break, the part that's actually harder for most runners. How to come back from a break in a way that's easy and natural and something you look forward to instead of dread. How to come back in a way that actually makes you a better runner than you were before.
Here's what you want: you want to come back from a break easily and quickly and painlessly. To look forward to it with excitement and eagerness instead of dread. But the problem is that whether it's a planned break or not, you're reluctant to come back because you think it's going to be hard and take forever to get back to the level of fitness that you were at, if ever.
You think about all those weeks and all those months, all the miles and the cross-training and the hours, and focusing on nutrition that you put into your ultra running, all of it just gone. And how you'll never be able to do that work all over again and get back to where you were.
It was so hard, and you put everything into it. You just can't do that all over again. So, you put off coming back. But the longer you put off coming back, the worse and more stressful it gets to do it. You know that you're putting it off, and you can feel the stress level rising, and the rising stress makes you want to put it off even longer, so it turns into this negative cycle. And underneath all that stress is probably some regret. You feel like you let yourself down by taking the break in the first place or you didn't take the break right.
Like you should have been stronger and more disciplined and more committed like everybody else, and other runners aren't struggling to get back like you are. So when you see other runners posting their training and racing all the fabulous runs that they have while you're taking a break, it's easy to feel even more behind. And this cycle is why runners come back with, we'll just say, less than full enthusiasm. Or they don't come back at all. Getting back to where you were seems like the biggest mountain, a huge mountain to climb. And you know how hard it was to climb that mountain the first time.
So when you do start back, the temptation is to lower your expectations and expect less of yourself so you feel better about starting back. But still, when you do that, all you see is what you can't do anymore like you used to. Here's what you need to know. The real problem here isn't coming back from the break or how long of a break you took or anything like that. It's how you're thinking about coming back. You think you lost everything you gained. That where you were in fitness before the break was your peak, and you have to get back there. And it's going to take the same hard work and time.
And look, I know this seems true. It seems like a fact of the world. But it's not. And there are three common thought errors hidden in this thinking that are keeping you from coming back, or they're making coming back way harder than it has to be. So, let's clear them out of the way one by one.
The first thought error is that you lost all your fitness and you have to get it back. And this thinking focuses on loss. All you see is the gap between where you were and where you think you are now, and how bad it feels to lose it all, and how far away you feel from where you were. And trying to get it back feels like a desperation. And here's what I want you to know about this: you can't lose it all. It's literally impossible.
On the mindset side, think about this. You can't lose the experience you gained. All the lessons you've lived and learned. Everything you learned about how it feels in your body to run an ultra and what your body needs. All the questions you answered about how it would feel to run that far and all the unknowns you learned to adapt to. You're permanently different as a result of running ultras.
You know more about yourself. How to get your training done in the middle of a real life. How to actually run an ultra. How to get past obstacles that look insurmountable. How to solve problems when they pile up on each other. How to believe that you can do it, this thing that looks impossible, and how to manage all those thoughts and emotions that come up in a race. You can't unknow this. So you will never go back to square one ever again.
That's the mental side. But on the physical side of it, consider this. You don't have to get back. And it's healthy to acknowledge that you always do have a choice. And you can decide that you want to walk away and you don't want to get in that kind of shape again. So it's just good to recognize that you don't have to do it and you do have a choice. But that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm saying on the physical side is that you don't have to get it back. You don't have to replicate that exact level and type of fitness. That balance of muscle and endurance, that you can, listen to this, go a different route. That you can choose instead to pursue your best fitness.
What I'm saying is that you can clear the slate about what you want to get back to. Consider that you might not have reached your best yet. And now, coming back from a nice break, you have the chance to put all that experience and knowledge that you have to good use and go for something even better than you had before. Even more sustainable. Reaching a target, climbing a shiny new mountain instead of the same old mountain because you choose to, is tantalizing and exciting. It's a fun challenge.
Thought error number two: that was your pinnacle. Where you were before the break, that was your peak. Where you were before the break is the best you can ever hope to do. It's a big assumption that because you put a lot of work in, that was your best. That you can't do better than that. But that might not be your best. And here's why. When I think back to a race I've done a lot, like 22-ish finishes at Massanutten 100, I started when I was 39. And today, I'm 62. That's a lot of changes in my body over time, believe me.
But here's what I know when I look back at that time span. The running might have been easier back then because I was younger, but I didn't know as much about what I was doing, and I made a lot of mistakes. It's actually easier to run better by running smarter than by simply possessing good fitness. You can be in great shape, but if you don't manage aid station stops well or you need to find somebody else to run with even though they're running slower than you because you're not confident in yourself, that slows you down.
To get to the level of performance that you were at when you took a break, you at the time just kept pushing to see if you could go further and then further and run better. You didn't know what that peak would look like. You were just curious to see what you could do if you pushed a little more and a little more. You wanted to see what was around the next performance corner. This is the same thing. Your new, smarter best is still ahead of you.
And here's the third thought error. It'll take too much time and effort to get back to where I was. This is another big assumption. That you'll have to put in at least the same amount of effort all over again to get back. But it's not true. But you know more now, and you can use that to your advantage. You can shortcut the mistakes you made the first time and skip the cross-training that didn't actually help and fix the weaknesses that you now know held you back.
You didn't just magically get to that level of fitness. You had to learn how to do it. You had to learn what your body needed and how to fit training into your life and manage priorities. And you made some mistakes along the way, and you tried things that didn't work, and you learned how to get yourself out the door and fit a quality run into your schedule. You blazed that trail for yourself, and now that you've done it, you know how to repeat it, faster and easier.
And another thing. You don't have to do it all right now, all at once. You don't have to get back there all at once. You do it one run at a time. When do you want to be back? Pick a date. List the training you need to do, reverse engineer it into a training plan, and then just do the next run. Here's the advantage you get when you come back this way with this thinking. When you take time to see everything you've gained and the real possibilities that opens up ahead. First of all, you finally have perspective on everything you've built that you can't lose.
All the learning and the experience and the skills that you've developed day after day, race after race, you might have missed seeing that in the middle of daily training and racing. But stepping back on a break lets you see how far you've come and everything that you still have within you. That creates real self-confidence, not the kind that comes from hoping you can do it, but the kind that comes from knowing what you've already done and been through and experienced.
All right, the second advantage this gives you is that you can see that getting back into the fitness you want doesn't mean retracing every step you took the first time. You can get there faster and more efficiently because you know the way now. You know what worked and what didn't. You know what your body actually needs versus what you thought it needed. And third, and this is a big one, you don't have to just get back to where you were. You have the knowledge and muscle memory to run even better than before. You don't have to settle for getting back. You can actually go further.
And in case you think coming back from a break, especially a long one, is impossible, here are four stories that show it's not. The first is Stephanie Case. After placing second at Hardrock in 2022, Stephanie didn't race for 3 years, 3 years. She was dealing with multiple miscarriages and three rounds of IVF before finally having her daughter Pepper in 2024. People questioned whether ultra running had caused her fertility problems and she scaled back training significantly.
But 6 months postpartum, she showed up at Ultra Trail Snowdonia 100K in Wales, and she breastfed Pepper at three aid stations during the race. When they told her she'd won, she was so shocked they had to ask her to run through the finish tape again for the cameras. I get that. Three years away, 6 months postpartum, first race back, a win.
Here's another story. Jasmine Paris went from new mom to Barkley finisher. Jasmine won the 2019 Spine Race just 14 months after giving birth. Beating the previous men's record by 12 hours. But her most remarkable comeback actually came after that one. In 2024, at age 40 and a mother of two, she became the first woman to ever finish the Barkley Marathons with just 99 seconds to spare. Between those two achievements, she took time away from major racing and dealt with injuries and balanced her veterinary work with family, real life. Those in-between years of patience set the foundation for making history.
Here's a third story: Courtney Dauwalter. Courtney's first 100-miler was a DNF in 2012. But in 2019, 7 years later, she actually faced a bigger setback. A hip injury forced her to DNF Western States at mile 78.9. Ouch. And rather than rush back, she took a break and spent a, what she calls, a 'weird summer' focused entirely on recovery, like riding her bike, doing strength and flexibility work, and relearning basics.
She learned the hard way that she wasn't doing enough strength work, and that patient rehabilitation, that break to rehabilitate herself, paid off when she won UTMB just months later. Her willingness to truly rest and rebuild was key to her historic Triple Crown win in 2023: Western States, Hardrock, and UTMB in the same year.
All right, here's one more story: Jim Walmsley. He's won Western States and UTMB, but recently, knee and IT band issues forced him to take 5 days off per week for a month, replacing running with cycling. He wasn't sure if he'd make it to the starting line of Western States, but he came back and not only started but defended his title successfully.
So, those are four very different runners with very different breaks—injury, pregnancy, miscarriage, setbacks—but they all came back from a break. And as good as they were, they all came back stronger than before. Not because the break itself made them stronger, but because of how they thought about coming back and the possibilities ahead. That's what I want you to take away from this.
If you're reluctant to start back from a break, notice what's holding you back and challenge whether it's actually true. You didn't lose everything. You literally can't lose what you've learned. You didn't peak. Your smarter, more experienced self hasn't had a chance to show what it can do yet. There's more ahead. And it won't take as long as you think because now you know the way.
So don't let those assumptions keep you from taking a break when you need one, and don't let them keep you from coming back. The first step back is just one run. That's it. Just one. And the actual best first step you can take is to clean up your thinking about what it will take to get the fitness you want. Because when you clear out these three thought errors, coming back stops being something that you dread and starts being something that you're curious about. Something you look forward to.
All right, you all. That's this week's episode. Thanks for listening. If you know someone who could use this, please 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 37. When you hear this episode, we'll be in the middle of all the winter holidays, when it's especially easy to break routine or take a break from active training to spend time on family and travel and other priorities. So, it's the perfect time to also talk about coming back from a break. I recorded a podcast earlier, Episode 13, on how to take planned breaks and structure them so that they actually help you instead of hurt you. So, if you're thinking of taking a break, make sure you listen to that episode too.
But today, I'm talking about the other side of a break, the part that's actually harder for most runners. How to come back from a break in a way that's easy and natural and something you look forward to instead of dread. How to come back in a way that actually makes you a better runner than you were before.
Here's what you want: you want to come back from a break easily and quickly and painlessly. To look forward to it with excitement and eagerness instead of dread. But the problem is that whether it's a planned break or not, you're reluctant to come back because you think it's going to be hard and take forever to get back to the level of fitness that you were at, if ever.
You think about all those weeks and all those months, all the miles and the cross-training and the hours, and focusing on nutrition that you put into your ultra running, all of it just gone. And how you'll never be able to do that work all over again and get back to where you were.
It was so hard, and you put everything into it. You just can't do that all over again. So, you put off coming back. But the longer you put off coming back, the worse and more stressful it gets to do it. You know that you're putting it off, and you can feel the stress level rising, and the rising stress makes you want to put it off even longer, so it turns into this negative cycle. And underneath all that stress is probably some regret. You feel like you let yourself down by taking the break in the first place or you didn't take the break right.
Like you should have been stronger and more disciplined and more committed like everybody else, and other runners aren't struggling to get back like you are. So when you see other runners posting their training and racing all the fabulous runs that they have while you're taking a break, it's easy to feel even more behind. And this cycle is why runners come back with, we'll just say, less than full enthusiasm. Or they don't come back at all. Getting back to where you were seems like the biggest mountain, a huge mountain to climb. And you know how hard it was to climb that mountain the first time.
So when you do start back, the temptation is to lower your expectations and expect less of yourself so you feel better about starting back. But still, when you do that, all you see is what you can't do anymore like you used to. Here's what you need to know. The real problem here isn't coming back from the break or how long of a break you took or anything like that. It's how you're thinking about coming back. You think you lost everything you gained. That where you were in fitness before the break was your peak, and you have to get back there. And it's going to take the same hard work and time.
And look, I know this seems true. It seems like a fact of the world. But it's not. And there are three common thought errors hidden in this thinking that are keeping you from coming back, or they're making coming back way harder than it has to be. So, let's clear them out of the way one by one.
The first thought error is that you lost all your fitness and you have to get it back. And this thinking focuses on loss. All you see is the gap between where you were and where you think you are now, and how bad it feels to lose it all, and how far away you feel from where you were. And trying to get it back feels like a desperation. And here's what I want you to know about this: you can't lose it all. It's literally impossible.
On the mindset side, think about this. You can't lose the experience you gained. All the lessons you've lived and learned. Everything you learned about how it feels in your body to run an ultra and what your body needs. All the questions you answered about how it would feel to run that far and all the unknowns you learned to adapt to. You're permanently different as a result of running ultras.
You know more about yourself. How to get your training done in the middle of a real life. How to actually run an ultra. How to get past obstacles that look insurmountable. How to solve problems when they pile up on each other. How to believe that you can do it, this thing that looks impossible, and how to manage all those thoughts and emotions that come up in a race. You can't unknow this. So you will never go back to square one ever again.
That's the mental side. But on the physical side of it, consider this. You don't have to get back. And it's healthy to acknowledge that you always do have a choice. And you can decide that you want to walk away and you don't want to get in that kind of shape again. So it's just good to recognize that you don't have to do it and you do have a choice. But that's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm saying on the physical side is that you don't have to get it back. You don't have to replicate that exact level and type of fitness. That balance of muscle and endurance, that you can, listen to this, go a different route. That you can choose instead to pursue your best fitness.
What I'm saying is that you can clear the slate about what you want to get back to. Consider that you might not have reached your best yet. And now, coming back from a nice break, you have the chance to put all that experience and knowledge that you have to good use and go for something even better than you had before. Even more sustainable. Reaching a target, climbing a shiny new mountain instead of the same old mountain because you choose to, is tantalizing and exciting. It's a fun challenge.
Thought error number two: that was your pinnacle. Where you were before the break, that was your peak. Where you were before the break is the best you can ever hope to do. It's a big assumption that because you put a lot of work in, that was your best. That you can't do better than that. But that might not be your best. And here's why. When I think back to a race I've done a lot, like 22-ish finishes at Massanutten 100, I started when I was 39. And today, I'm 62. That's a lot of changes in my body over time, believe me.
But here's what I know when I look back at that time span. The running might have been easier back then because I was younger, but I didn't know as much about what I was doing, and I made a lot of mistakes. It's actually easier to run better by running smarter than by simply possessing good fitness. You can be in great shape, but if you don't manage aid station stops well or you need to find somebody else to run with even though they're running slower than you because you're not confident in yourself, that slows you down.
To get to the level of performance that you were at when you took a break, you at the time just kept pushing to see if you could go further and then further and run better. You didn't know what that peak would look like. You were just curious to see what you could do if you pushed a little more and a little more. You wanted to see what was around the next performance corner. This is the same thing. Your new, smarter best is still ahead of you.
And here's the third thought error. It'll take too much time and effort to get back to where I was. This is another big assumption. That you'll have to put in at least the same amount of effort all over again to get back. But it's not true. But you know more now, and you can use that to your advantage. You can shortcut the mistakes you made the first time and skip the cross-training that didn't actually help and fix the weaknesses that you now know held you back.
You didn't just magically get to that level of fitness. You had to learn how to do it. You had to learn what your body needed and how to fit training into your life and manage priorities. And you made some mistakes along the way, and you tried things that didn't work, and you learned how to get yourself out the door and fit a quality run into your schedule. You blazed that trail for yourself, and now that you've done it, you know how to repeat it, faster and easier.
And another thing. You don't have to do it all right now, all at once. You don't have to get back there all at once. You do it one run at a time. When do you want to be back? Pick a date. List the training you need to do, reverse engineer it into a training plan, and then just do the next run. Here's the advantage you get when you come back this way with this thinking. When you take time to see everything you've gained and the real possibilities that opens up ahead. First of all, you finally have perspective on everything you've built that you can't lose.
All the learning and the experience and the skills that you've developed day after day, race after race, you might have missed seeing that in the middle of daily training and racing. But stepping back on a break lets you see how far you've come and everything that you still have within you. That creates real self-confidence, not the kind that comes from hoping you can do it, but the kind that comes from knowing what you've already done and been through and experienced.
All right, the second advantage this gives you is that you can see that getting back into the fitness you want doesn't mean retracing every step you took the first time. You can get there faster and more efficiently because you know the way now. You know what worked and what didn't. You know what your body actually needs versus what you thought it needed. And third, and this is a big one, you don't have to just get back to where you were. You have the knowledge and muscle memory to run even better than before. You don't have to settle for getting back. You can actually go further.
And in case you think coming back from a break, especially a long one, is impossible, here are four stories that show it's not. The first is Stephanie Case. After placing second at Hardrock in 2022, Stephanie didn't race for 3 years, 3 years. She was dealing with multiple miscarriages and three rounds of IVF before finally having her daughter Pepper in 2024. People questioned whether ultra running had caused her fertility problems and she scaled back training significantly.
But 6 months postpartum, she showed up at Ultra Trail Snowdonia 100K in Wales, and she breastfed Pepper at three aid stations during the race. When they told her she'd won, she was so shocked they had to ask her to run through the finish tape again for the cameras. I get that. Three years away, 6 months postpartum, first race back, a win.
Here's another story. Jasmine Paris went from new mom to Barkley finisher. Jasmine won the 2019 Spine Race just 14 months after giving birth. Beating the previous men's record by 12 hours. But her most remarkable comeback actually came after that one. In 2024, at age 40 and a mother of two, she became the first woman to ever finish the Barkley Marathons with just 99 seconds to spare. Between those two achievements, she took time away from major racing and dealt with injuries and balanced her veterinary work with family, real life. Those in-between years of patience set the foundation for making history.
Here's a third story: Courtney Dauwalter. Courtney's first 100-miler was a DNF in 2012. But in 2019, 7 years later, she actually faced a bigger setback. A hip injury forced her to DNF Western States at mile 78.9. Ouch. And rather than rush back, she took a break and spent a, what she calls, a 'weird summer' focused entirely on recovery, like riding her bike, doing strength and flexibility work, and relearning basics.
She learned the hard way that she wasn't doing enough strength work, and that patient rehabilitation, that break to rehabilitate herself, paid off when she won UTMB just months later. Her willingness to truly rest and rebuild was key to her historic Triple Crown win in 2023: Western States, Hardrock, and UTMB in the same year.
All right, here's one more story: Jim Walmsley. He's won Western States and UTMB, but recently, knee and IT band issues forced him to take 5 days off per week for a month, replacing running with cycling. He wasn't sure if he'd make it to the starting line of Western States, but he came back and not only started but defended his title successfully.
So, those are four very different runners with very different breaks—injury, pregnancy, miscarriage, setbacks—but they all came back from a break. And as good as they were, they all came back stronger than before. Not because the break itself made them stronger, but because of how they thought about coming back and the possibilities ahead. That's what I want you to take away from this.
If you're reluctant to start back from a break, notice what's holding you back and challenge whether it's actually true. You didn't lose everything. You literally can't lose what you've learned. You didn't peak. Your smarter, more experienced self hasn't had a chance to show what it can do yet. There's more ahead. And it won't take as long as you think because now you know the way.
So don't let those assumptions keep you from taking a break when you need one, and don't let them keep you from coming back. The first step back is just one run. That's it. Just one. And the actual best first step you can take is to clean up your thinking about what it will take to get the fitness you want. Because when you clear out these three thought errors, coming back stops being something that you dread and starts being something that you're curious about. Something you look forward to.
All right, you all. That's this week's episode. Thanks for listening. If you know someone who could use this, please 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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