48. What Ultra Runners Can Learn from Olympic Champion Eileen Gu
What if the key to running your best race is not training harder, but training your mind? When things get tough deep into an ultra, the real challenge is not your legs. It is the thoughts in your head and how you respond to them.
In this episode, I share what ultra runners can learn from Olympic champion Eileen Gu. She approaches her mind the same way she approaches her sport, as something she studies, tinkers with, and improves over time. Instead of trying to get out of her head, she intentionally examines her thinking and works with it. This same approach can completely change how you experience difficult moments during an ultra.
If you have ever tried to distract yourself from negative thoughts during a race or wished you could just get out of your head, this episode will show you a different path. You will learn why avoiding your thoughts actually makes them stronger and how developing a deliberate mindset practice can help you run with more confidence, clarity, and resilience when it matters most.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why trying to get out of your head during a race often makes things harder.
What Olympic champion Eileen Gu teaches us about building mental strength.
The difference between avoiding your thoughts and examining them intentionally.
Why surviving a race is different from running it well.
The mindset practice that helps ultra runners handle doubt and fear.
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Full Episode Transcript:
What if the key to running your best race isn't training harder? It's mastering your mindset. In this episode, I'm showing you how Olympic gold medalist Eileen Gu approaches her mind as a craft and how you can do exactly the same thing with your ultra running.
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 48. Today, I'm going to show you how to approach your mind the same way you approach your training, as something you build and tinker with and get better at over time.
If you were watching the Winter Olympics this year, you may have seen Eileen Gu. She's the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history and she didn't get there by accident. At 18, she became the youngest Olympic freestyle skiing champion ever, winning gold in big air and halfpipe and a silver in slopestyle at the 2022 Beijing games. The first freestyle skier to take three medals at a single Winter Olympics. And at this year's Milan Cortina games, she added more gold and silver, extending a record no other freestyle skier, man or woman, has come close to. And two world championships and three X Games titles and two youth Olympic golds and you have an athlete who doesn't just compete at the top of her sport, she keeps redefining what's possible there.
Those results don't come from physical training alone either. Behind every one of those medals is the mental work that she's been doing just as deliberately as her time on the mountain. And that's what we're here to talk about today. It would be easy, of course, to look at all of that and think, well, she was just born for this. It's talent. She has some rare, natural born winning mind that the rest of us just don't have. But that's not her story, and she's willing to tell you so herself. What Eileen Gu has, though, is a practice, a deliberate, ongoing, never finished practice of getting inside her own thinking and making it better.
And the reason we're talking about her today is that she's one of very few elite athletes who talks about this publicly and in a way that I think every ultra runner needs to hear. You may have seen the viral video clip on social media where a reporter asks her whether she thinks before she speaks because she answers questions so quickly and so completely, whether the topic is geopolitics or aerodynamics or her sport. And I'm going to read her response here and I want you to listen to it with your ultra running in mind. And here it goes.
"I think overall, I'm just a pensive person. I'm a very introspective young woman. I spend a lot of time in my head and it's not a bad place to be. I journal a lot. I break down all of my thought processes. I think I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking and I kind of modify it because it's so interesting. You can control what you think. You can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are. And especially as a young person, like I'm 22, so with neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be. How cool is that? Like how empowering is that, right?
“And so the fact is, I get to become every day the kind of person that me at age eight would revere. I would be obsessed with me today. Are you kidding? I would love me. And I think that's the biggest flex of all time, that you can have a little younger you be proud of you today. So I guess for me, I spend a lot of time in my own head. Yes, I think a lot, but it's not really like an egotistical kind of thought. It's in like a tinkering, like a scientist kind of way. I'm always trying to modify. I'm trying to think, how can I be better? How can I approach my own brain the way that I approach my craft of free skiing so that I can be better tomorrow than I was today."
Now, that's her quote. And did you catch the key thing she said? She spends a lot of time in her own head on purpose. And it's not a bad place to be. That is not someone who was just born mentally strong or gifted this way. That's somebody who's built it, who is still building it. She's in her head like a scientist in a lab, looking at her thinking and tinkering with it and modifying it and always asking, "How can I make this a little bit better and a little bit better?"
And that's how I talk about the mind. That's how I think of it, as a mastery practice. It's what I teach my clients to do and that's available to you 100% because this isn't something you either have or you don't or you're born with or you're not. It's a practice, and practices are built. No one is born knowing how to do this. But here's what I actually hear from most runners, and it's almost the exact opposite of what Eileen is saying. What I hear them say is, I just need to get out of my head. I'm not going to think about how many miles I have left. I'm trying not to think about dropping.
They talk about their brain like it's a wild animal that can attack at any moment. They're just hoping they'll get lucky and it'll stay out of sight and leave them alone during the race. If they can just avoid their brain long enough, they can make it to the finish line. And I get it because that's what it feels like when you haven't been in your head doing the work. I was that way once too. Your mind feels unpredictable and unsafe, something to be avoided rather than to use. But here's the thing. Eileen Gu's mind likely wasn't always the well-trained instrument it is now. She made it that way.
The difference between her and a runner who's trying to outrun their own thoughts isn't talent or speed or finesse, it's practice. So, instead of going into their head, what most runners try and do instead is go around their thoughts. They try to pretend that they don't notice those dark thoughts, even when that's all they can think about, because they're trying so hard not to think about them that they can't help but think about it. They tell themselves they feel strong when they don't or they plug in their earbuds or grab a pacer or fall in line with another runner to talk to. Anything to keep from being alone with their own mind.
Now, these aren't bad strategies. They can get you to the finish line, but they're survival strategies. And surviving a race is not the same thing as running it well. And surviving it is not going to make you stronger or get you better at it. I mean, the doubts and the fears are still there when the race gets tough. You can't outrun them or drown them out or distract yourself past mile 70. Suppressing those thoughts and those doubts and fears just confirms that there's something to fear. It makes them bigger and scarier. So, you go deeper into the race more afraid of your own head than you are of the miles. Think about that. And you finish, if you finish, with that nagging feeling that there's more in you, that you could have done better if you could have just dealt with everything in your head and gotten out of your own way.
And Eileen Gu is not getting out of her own way. Think about what she said. She's built a relationship with her mind so that when it matters most, when she's at the top of the halfpipe at the Olympics and staring down at the course, her mind is working with her, not against her. And again, that didn't happen by accident. And it's not something that she was born with either. It's something she practices constantly.
I have a client who trained hard for her first 100-mile race. She did all the training, and she DNF'd. And then she trained again, and she DNF'd again. And she had the fitness. She even trained harder that second year. She had the mileage, but somewhere out on that course, the thoughts would come and she had no way to deal with them. And then each DNF she got made her more afraid of her own mind than she actually was of the race. The answer she kept coming back to was, I just need to get out of my head. I need a way to get out of my head.
And there's a way better way to do that and it starts with one counterintuitive move. Stop trying to get out of your head. Instead, get in it on purpose. Here's what Eileen Gu does differently, and it's what I do and it's what I teach my clients because I know from experience that it creates real mental strength. It makes your mind the best tool you have instead of the thing that you're trying to avoid and survive. And that is approach your mind the way you approach your training.
You don't ignore your fitness and hope that your legs are just going to magically somehow cooperate on race day. You build them, you train them, you test them, you tinker with them. You learn what they need. You build muscle strength when you're weak. And your mind is no different. The runners who show up mentally strong on race day aren't the ones who were just magically born that way or lucky. They're the ones who did the work beforehand. And this is 100% available to you. It's exactly what I coach.
What Eileen Gu is describing and what I teach is the opposite of avoiding your mind. It's intentional self-examination. It's getting into your thinking on purpose, looking at the story you're telling yourself, thinking about how you talk about yourself to yourself in your own mind and deciding whether that story is actually serving you or not.
So get into your head. Notice what's going on in there. It's okay. Do you think of yourself as slow as a back of the packer? What are you telling yourself about yourself? That you'll be lucky to stay ahead of cutoff? That everything has to go absolutely perfect for you to finish? Or that you're not capable? Look at that thinking. Be willing to confront it and look at it because how you think is how you run.
And here's an important distinction. I am not talking here about forcing yourself into always thinking positive or happy rainbow unicorn daisy thoughts, some kind of toxic positivity, or trying to stop the negative thoughts either. Both of those approaches are just the avoidance I just talked about dressed up differently. Both of those approaches, either trying to think positively all the time or trying to never think negatively, are like trying to wallpaper over what you actually do think, not change it.
Tinkering with your thoughts is different. It means you actually do look at what you actually do think. Confront it, examine it honestly and find a story that's just as true, but one that works for you and for what you're trying to do. And I guarantee that story is out there if you're willing to look for it. That's the skill. I call it the Mind-Shift Process and it's the most foundational work I do with every client.
It's not cheerleading, it's not mantras, it's not hacks and it is definitely not tips. It's a real process, real examining, the same kind of thing that Eileen Gu does. Because she figured out that mental strength isn't a fixed trait that you're born with or lucky to stumble upon. It's a skill you can learn and skills are built by the people who practice them.
Eileen Gu has built a mind that she actually enjoys living in and inhabiting. That's what she's telling you in that video clip. Not that it's easy and definitely not that doubt never shows up or the things never go wrong, but that she's learned how to work with that to always do better. And that's why her success keeps compounding.
Now, I enjoy being in my mind too. And like Eileen, I'm still tinkering. I think it's fun like her. I think it's fascinating. It's like a puzzle to solve. Across all my ultras and my 153 hundred-mile races all around the world, the difference between my worst races and my best ones was never my legs or my cardio or anything like that. It was what I was doing and not doing inside my head, the skill I had to build before I started having successes.
And my clients, the ones who commit to this weekly practice, this regular practice, they show up on race day differently. Not fearless and not without doubts, but equipped to deal with that. Not trying to silence their minds or avoid negative thinking, but knowing how to work with their minds and even with that negative thinking. They didn't develop that by being born talented or having the right mental wiring. They built it the same way that Eileen Gu built hers, one better thought at a time.
Now, that client I mentioned, remember her? She had plenty of evidence on a runnable course, close to home, that she couldn't do it. Like a course that she should have been able to do in her mind. But she had plenty of evidence that she couldn't do it. And she wanted what we would all love to have, concrete proof before you even start the race that you're going to finish. And working with her thoughts felt soft and uncomfortable and really, honestly, too intangible compared to just training harder and running more miles.
But getting out of her head wasn't working. And when she was willing to confront that and face that, she tried the opposite. She got in her head. She looked at what she was actually thinking and she questioned it, and started building something different. And today, I'm happy to tell you that she has finished her first 100 and not only that, she has finished a 200-mile race in tornado conditions, a multiple course changes. She finished a 200-mile race in all of that. And to top that off, she's lining up for her first 300-mile race. And not because the miles got easier for her, because her mind did.
Remember that question that Eileen asks herself, "How can I approach my own brain the way that I approach my craft of free skiing so that I can be better tomorrow than I was today?" That question, I want it to be yours too. You can approach your brain the same way she does, as a craft that you're always honing. You aren't born with it and you don't have to be. You build it by stopping the avoidance and getting into your head on purpose. By looking at how you think about yourself and you're running, by tinkering like a scientist, like an Olympian, until the story you're telling becomes one that actually serves you. That's the work. It's not complicated and you can absolutely do it. But it is intentional and it doesn't happen by accident, which is exactly why I do it with clients every single week.
And one last thing, that eight-year-old version of you, she's still watching.
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 48. Today, I'm going to show you how to approach your mind the same way you approach your training, as something you build and tinker with and get better at over time.
If you were watching the Winter Olympics this year, you may have seen Eileen Gu. She's the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history and she didn't get there by accident. At 18, she became the youngest Olympic freestyle skiing champion ever, winning gold in big air and halfpipe and a silver in slopestyle at the 2022 Beijing games. The first freestyle skier to take three medals at a single Winter Olympics. And at this year's Milan Cortina games, she added more gold and silver, extending a record no other freestyle skier, man or woman, has come close to. And two world championships and three X Games titles and two youth Olympic golds and you have an athlete who doesn't just compete at the top of her sport, she keeps redefining what's possible there.
Those results don't come from physical training alone either. Behind every one of those medals is the mental work that she's been doing just as deliberately as her time on the mountain. And that's what we're here to talk about today. It would be easy, of course, to look at all of that and think, well, she was just born for this. It's talent. She has some rare, natural born winning mind that the rest of us just don't have. But that's not her story, and she's willing to tell you so herself. What Eileen Gu has, though, is a practice, a deliberate, ongoing, never finished practice of getting inside her own thinking and making it better.
And the reason we're talking about her today is that she's one of very few elite athletes who talks about this publicly and in a way that I think every ultra runner needs to hear. You may have seen the viral video clip on social media where a reporter asks her whether she thinks before she speaks because she answers questions so quickly and so completely, whether the topic is geopolitics or aerodynamics or her sport. And I'm going to read her response here and I want you to listen to it with your ultra running in mind. And here it goes.
"I think overall, I'm just a pensive person. I'm a very introspective young woman. I spend a lot of time in my head and it's not a bad place to be. I journal a lot. I break down all of my thought processes. I think I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking and I kind of modify it because it's so interesting. You can control what you think. You can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are. And especially as a young person, like I'm 22, so with neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be. How cool is that? Like how empowering is that, right?
“And so the fact is, I get to become every day the kind of person that me at age eight would revere. I would be obsessed with me today. Are you kidding? I would love me. And I think that's the biggest flex of all time, that you can have a little younger you be proud of you today. So I guess for me, I spend a lot of time in my own head. Yes, I think a lot, but it's not really like an egotistical kind of thought. It's in like a tinkering, like a scientist kind of way. I'm always trying to modify. I'm trying to think, how can I be better? How can I approach my own brain the way that I approach my craft of free skiing so that I can be better tomorrow than I was today."
Now, that's her quote. And did you catch the key thing she said? She spends a lot of time in her own head on purpose. And it's not a bad place to be. That is not someone who was just born mentally strong or gifted this way. That's somebody who's built it, who is still building it. She's in her head like a scientist in a lab, looking at her thinking and tinkering with it and modifying it and always asking, "How can I make this a little bit better and a little bit better?"
And that's how I talk about the mind. That's how I think of it, as a mastery practice. It's what I teach my clients to do and that's available to you 100% because this isn't something you either have or you don't or you're born with or you're not. It's a practice, and practices are built. No one is born knowing how to do this. But here's what I actually hear from most runners, and it's almost the exact opposite of what Eileen is saying. What I hear them say is, I just need to get out of my head. I'm not going to think about how many miles I have left. I'm trying not to think about dropping.
They talk about their brain like it's a wild animal that can attack at any moment. They're just hoping they'll get lucky and it'll stay out of sight and leave them alone during the race. If they can just avoid their brain long enough, they can make it to the finish line. And I get it because that's what it feels like when you haven't been in your head doing the work. I was that way once too. Your mind feels unpredictable and unsafe, something to be avoided rather than to use. But here's the thing. Eileen Gu's mind likely wasn't always the well-trained instrument it is now. She made it that way.
The difference between her and a runner who's trying to outrun their own thoughts isn't talent or speed or finesse, it's practice. So, instead of going into their head, what most runners try and do instead is go around their thoughts. They try to pretend that they don't notice those dark thoughts, even when that's all they can think about, because they're trying so hard not to think about them that they can't help but think about it. They tell themselves they feel strong when they don't or they plug in their earbuds or grab a pacer or fall in line with another runner to talk to. Anything to keep from being alone with their own mind.
Now, these aren't bad strategies. They can get you to the finish line, but they're survival strategies. And surviving a race is not the same thing as running it well. And surviving it is not going to make you stronger or get you better at it. I mean, the doubts and the fears are still there when the race gets tough. You can't outrun them or drown them out or distract yourself past mile 70. Suppressing those thoughts and those doubts and fears just confirms that there's something to fear. It makes them bigger and scarier. So, you go deeper into the race more afraid of your own head than you are of the miles. Think about that. And you finish, if you finish, with that nagging feeling that there's more in you, that you could have done better if you could have just dealt with everything in your head and gotten out of your own way.
And Eileen Gu is not getting out of her own way. Think about what she said. She's built a relationship with her mind so that when it matters most, when she's at the top of the halfpipe at the Olympics and staring down at the course, her mind is working with her, not against her. And again, that didn't happen by accident. And it's not something that she was born with either. It's something she practices constantly.
I have a client who trained hard for her first 100-mile race. She did all the training, and she DNF'd. And then she trained again, and she DNF'd again. And she had the fitness. She even trained harder that second year. She had the mileage, but somewhere out on that course, the thoughts would come and she had no way to deal with them. And then each DNF she got made her more afraid of her own mind than she actually was of the race. The answer she kept coming back to was, I just need to get out of my head. I need a way to get out of my head.
And there's a way better way to do that and it starts with one counterintuitive move. Stop trying to get out of your head. Instead, get in it on purpose. Here's what Eileen Gu does differently, and it's what I do and it's what I teach my clients because I know from experience that it creates real mental strength. It makes your mind the best tool you have instead of the thing that you're trying to avoid and survive. And that is approach your mind the way you approach your training.
You don't ignore your fitness and hope that your legs are just going to magically somehow cooperate on race day. You build them, you train them, you test them, you tinker with them. You learn what they need. You build muscle strength when you're weak. And your mind is no different. The runners who show up mentally strong on race day aren't the ones who were just magically born that way or lucky. They're the ones who did the work beforehand. And this is 100% available to you. It's exactly what I coach.
What Eileen Gu is describing and what I teach is the opposite of avoiding your mind. It's intentional self-examination. It's getting into your thinking on purpose, looking at the story you're telling yourself, thinking about how you talk about yourself to yourself in your own mind and deciding whether that story is actually serving you or not.
So get into your head. Notice what's going on in there. It's okay. Do you think of yourself as slow as a back of the packer? What are you telling yourself about yourself? That you'll be lucky to stay ahead of cutoff? That everything has to go absolutely perfect for you to finish? Or that you're not capable? Look at that thinking. Be willing to confront it and look at it because how you think is how you run.
And here's an important distinction. I am not talking here about forcing yourself into always thinking positive or happy rainbow unicorn daisy thoughts, some kind of toxic positivity, or trying to stop the negative thoughts either. Both of those approaches are just the avoidance I just talked about dressed up differently. Both of those approaches, either trying to think positively all the time or trying to never think negatively, are like trying to wallpaper over what you actually do think, not change it.
Tinkering with your thoughts is different. It means you actually do look at what you actually do think. Confront it, examine it honestly and find a story that's just as true, but one that works for you and for what you're trying to do. And I guarantee that story is out there if you're willing to look for it. That's the skill. I call it the Mind-Shift Process and it's the most foundational work I do with every client.
It's not cheerleading, it's not mantras, it's not hacks and it is definitely not tips. It's a real process, real examining, the same kind of thing that Eileen Gu does. Because she figured out that mental strength isn't a fixed trait that you're born with or lucky to stumble upon. It's a skill you can learn and skills are built by the people who practice them.
Eileen Gu has built a mind that she actually enjoys living in and inhabiting. That's what she's telling you in that video clip. Not that it's easy and definitely not that doubt never shows up or the things never go wrong, but that she's learned how to work with that to always do better. And that's why her success keeps compounding.
Now, I enjoy being in my mind too. And like Eileen, I'm still tinkering. I think it's fun like her. I think it's fascinating. It's like a puzzle to solve. Across all my ultras and my 153 hundred-mile races all around the world, the difference between my worst races and my best ones was never my legs or my cardio or anything like that. It was what I was doing and not doing inside my head, the skill I had to build before I started having successes.
And my clients, the ones who commit to this weekly practice, this regular practice, they show up on race day differently. Not fearless and not without doubts, but equipped to deal with that. Not trying to silence their minds or avoid negative thinking, but knowing how to work with their minds and even with that negative thinking. They didn't develop that by being born talented or having the right mental wiring. They built it the same way that Eileen Gu built hers, one better thought at a time.
Now, that client I mentioned, remember her? She had plenty of evidence on a runnable course, close to home, that she couldn't do it. Like a course that she should have been able to do in her mind. But she had plenty of evidence that she couldn't do it. And she wanted what we would all love to have, concrete proof before you even start the race that you're going to finish. And working with her thoughts felt soft and uncomfortable and really, honestly, too intangible compared to just training harder and running more miles.
But getting out of her head wasn't working. And when she was willing to confront that and face that, she tried the opposite. She got in her head. She looked at what she was actually thinking and she questioned it, and started building something different. And today, I'm happy to tell you that she has finished her first 100 and not only that, she has finished a 200-mile race in tornado conditions, a multiple course changes. She finished a 200-mile race in all of that. And to top that off, she's lining up for her first 300-mile race. And not because the miles got easier for her, because her mind did.
Remember that question that Eileen asks herself, "How can I approach my own brain the way that I approach my craft of free skiing so that I can be better tomorrow than I was today?" That question, I want it to be yours too. You can approach your brain the same way she does, as a craft that you're always honing. You aren't born with it and you don't have to be. You build it by stopping the avoidance and getting into your head on purpose. By looking at how you think about yourself and you're running, by tinkering like a scientist, like an Olympian, until the story you're telling becomes one that actually serves you. That's the work. It's not complicated and you can absolutely do it. But it is intentional and it doesn't happen by accident, which is exactly why I do it with clients every single week.
And one last thing, that eight-year-old version of you, she's still watching.
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.
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