66. Making Big Race Decisions When There Is No Right Answer
You've been training hard for a race when suddenly, an unexpected setback forces you to rethink your plans and you’re faced with a decision that feels impossible. Do you push through an injury and hope for the best? Downgrade your distance? Skip an event you've been training for all year? Every option has risks, the clock is ticking, and the pressure to make the "right" choice leaves you feeling completely stuck in decision paralysis.
In this episode, I explain why the problem isn't that you're bad at making decisions. The real problem is believing there's one "right" choice waiting to be found. I show you why that search keeps you stuck, and how letting go of the need for certainty can help you move forward with the best choice for you, instead of spinning in indecision.
Whether you're deciding how and when to train, whether to race at all, or need to make a tough call in the middle of an ultra, this episode will give you a practical way to break free from decision paralysis and move forward with far less wasted mental energy. You'll discover how to make big race decisions with confidence, stop second-guessing every option, and choose the path that moves you closer to your goals.
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 believing there's a "right" race decision keeps you stuck.
The hidden cause of decision paralysis in ultra running.
How to make peace with the decisions you make for your race.
How to stop waiting for certainty before moving forward.
A simple framework for making difficult race decisions with confidence.
How to commit to your choice without constantly second-guessing yourself.
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:
What if the reason you can't make a decision isn't that you don't have enough information? And what if it's not that you're indecisive, or the stakes are too high, or that you just need more time to think? What if the real problem is that you're trying to do something that's actually impossible?
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 66. This episode is for anybody who has been paralyzed with making a big decision in training or in a race. Last week, I talked to you about how you're using your mind to make hundreds of small decisions in a race, thousands of small decisions, really, without even knowing it. To run better, you need to become aware that you're making those little micro decisions and get good at the skill of making them consciously on purpose.
This week, I'm talking about a different kind of decision. The one where you know you're facing the decision, you're extremely aware of it, and you're stuck trying to make the right decision. These are the types of individual decisions I help clients make day in and day out. Decisions like, how often should I race? Can I do two big races this close together? Should I do this race or that one? How should I train? Which distance should I run? Can I make cutoff or should I give up? Can I finish or am I done?
And often, because we run ultras in the middle of a real life, it's this kind of decision. I have this situation in my life, something like an injury or a move or a big new job or an ailing family member. And the question is, do I race or not? Trying to make any of these decisions can put you in a state of indecision that you can't seem to break out of. You're paralyzed by it. Indecision paralysis like this makes you stoppable.
You can't move forward and do the next thing because you don't know which way to go. You're standing at a clear fork in the road. If you choose one thing, you pass the other choices up. So the bigger the stakes of the decision, the more pressure to make the right decision and the more paralyzed you get.
I've helped a lot of clients in very difficult situations see their thinking, make the decision they wanna make and get out of that paralysis. I know what a difference that makes to move forward to your goal with a clear mind. So let's talk about what's really keeping you stuck here and how to break the paralysis faster with less wasted energy so you can stop spinning and move forward.
And let's use a recent client example. This client rolled her ankle a couple of months before her big 100-mile A race, a tough mountain race with aggressive cutoffs and serious elevation. And every time she thought she was safely past the rolled ankle, she did it again. And she kept on doing it. She told me, I'm still struggling with rolling my stupid ankle, like every other run now.
I've been rolling it on flat, rock-free trails and regular trails, and today I actually rolled it again on buttery smooth trail with my support brace on. She was worried about her race, with good reason. And she didn't want to waste her time or her crew and pacer's time. As she saw it, she had three choices.
Number one, downgrade her race distance from the 100 mile to the 50 mile. Number two, stop training now, a couple of weeks before the race, and just rest and heal until race day. Or number three, keep training in spite of the ankle and just go for it. And she didn't know what to do. She was stuck and under pressure. This is a huge race for her. She has been planning for months.
So she was scared of making the wrong choice. And there's no clear answer here. The weeks were ticking away faster and faster, and she was now down to a handful of weeks before the race. And the pressure to make a decision, if you've ever been there, you know what it feels like. It was quickly becoming intolerable. And here's what she thought had her stuck, not knowing the right decision. She didn't want to make a mistake and find out later that it was the wrong decision.
This was far too important a race to throw away. But what happens if she stays stuck in this decision paralysis like this, like unable to make a decision, feeling the rising panic as the clock ticks down to race day, not sleeping because of the pressure to decide? What happens? What happens is she'll reach a point where she makes an impulsive decision under pressure without thought, just to get the decision over with and to silence that stupid ticking clock. To get some relief from that pressure.
And then, she'll second-guess that decision forever after. Feeling she made the wrong decision, and telling people I should have done this other thing instead. And that becomes the story of her race. It also becomes a reason she thinks she has to trust herself even less than before to make these big decisions. It's proof that she makes wrong decisions.
But inability to make the right decision isn't what's keeping her stuck. What's really keeping her stuck is that there's no right answer, and there never will be. She's not indecisive. She just thinks she needs an answer to a question and doesn't realize that the question can't be answered. There isn't a right decision.
Any of her three choices can be the right decision for her. They're all equally right. She's assuming, like we all do, that one of the three is the right answer, and the other two choices are wrong, and she can't tell which is which. That's what's keeping her stuck. But there's no right or wrong choice here. There are just three choices. They're all neutral options, not right or wrong. Any of them can move her forward. Any of them is better than staying in that paralysis, for sure.
Think of it this way. There's no option on her list of three that can't work. Each one has advantages. Each one can work in her favor. She can't choose wrong, because wrong isn't even on the menu. But even if, think about it this way, even if there was a right answer, you can never know which one it is, even in hindsight, because you can't know how all the choices would have played out. You might imagine a story in your head about how each one of those would work out, but you'll never know.
If she keeps training and races anyway, then rolls her ankle worse at mile 30 and drops out, that choice didn't give her the finish she wanted, true, but she'll never know if one of the other two choices would have either. You don't know what would have happened in those other parallel universes. You only know the way your choice has worked out, so far. Because even if you try and guess how each one of those choices would have worked out, you're only imagining how it would have worked out in the short term.
You have no way of knowing how that choice would play out, any of those choices would play out, over the course of your life. I have seen this over and over in my life, and it's there if you look for it. What often looks like a bad thing, like DNFs, can end up being the best thing that could have ever happened to you. You wouldn't be listening to this podcast if I hadn't had my early string of incredibly demoralizing DNFs.
So you can't know. And you'll never know. Not even after the race is over. Not even years later. And that means that second-guessing your decision or wishing you'd chosen one of those other options on your list is a complete and utter waste of your thinking, time, and energy. It does nothing for you except keep you stuck in that decision long after it's been made and you've moved on and it is old news.
So I really want you to hear this. You can't make the right choice because there is no right choice. So let the need to make the right choice go. It is doing nothing for you but holding you back. Just let it go. Here's what to do instead. What will make you unstoppable in decision-making. Give yourself permission to choose any of the options without it being wrong, and then make the decision that you want to make.
Go for the one that feels most exciting or interesting. The one that opens doors instead of requiring you to fight every step of the way. The one that gets you closer to your goal. And then, and I do this all the time, this is a superpower, turn it into the best choice. Find every reason you can think of that your choice is gonna work for you. They're there for any option that you pick. It doesn't matter.
She could pick any of those three options on her list and she can find reasons that it is the best choice for her. And when you do this, the more reasons you find that this is the best choice ever, the more confident you're gonna feel moving forward. And then, when you've found all those reasons it's the best, be at peace with your choice, no more looking at other choices, and move on to what's next.
You can always change your mind later if you need to. You have permission to do that too. This is a skill. Getting comfortable making the decisions you want instead of agonizing over the right one and then making it work to your advantage, it's a skill. And it pays to get good at this skill. Because this trap doesn't just show up once, it shows up constantly in ultra-running. In different forms, in different decisions.
In fact, it showed up again right away for our runner. She's already stuck again, because she doesn't know now what she wants to do. She's back in the same trap, agonizing over the right answer, just to a different question. Maybe you've been stuck in this decision too, not knowing what you want, because there are so many outside voices telling you that there's a right answer that you don't trust yourself to choose, because you're still believing there is a right answer. It's just wearing different clothes.
This isn't a confidence problem. You just don't have much practice in knowing what you actually want or in giving yourself permission to acknowledge it and choose it. You believe there's a right decision, and that's the way to answer the question. So you spend your time trying to figure out what's right and what you should do. And the trap is exactly the same here, trying to find the “right answer.”
And the solution is the same, for the same reasons. Just as there's no right answer among her three options, there's no right answer to what she wants, either. Just as there's no right decision, there's no right thing to want. So if this is you, stop asking which option is the correct one to prefer, and notice which one you actually prefer. That's enough. You get to choose what you want.
What you want is usually pretty clear when you get honest about it. It's the option that's going to get you closest to your goal, your dream, the thing that got you into this race or into ultra running in the first place. You don't wanna let that go and you don't have to.
So what our runner did choose was to pare down her long runs in the two peak training weeks she had left and still race the full distance. And here are her reasons for why this is the absolute best, most awesome choice in the world for her. She knows the course, she has a great base and she decided she can still do well with one peak long run instead of two.
In fact, when we talked about it, it might actually keep her from overtraining right before the race because she's so nervous about the race, it's tempting to add more miles, throw more miles in there at the last minute and overtrain. So this is gonna keep her from doing that. Plus, she can use the extra free time to pack earlier and brief her crew and pacer better. And my favorite reason of all, the best one, is she didn't want to walk away from the real possibility that she can finish.
She didn't want to go drop down from the 100 to the 50 to be safe on the finish. She wanted to keep that real possibility that she can finish and to go for it. So there you go, bingo, relieved out of paralysis and moving forward, decision made. This trap of needing the right answers shows up everywhere in ultrarunning. Training plans, pacer decisions, race selection, whether to drop at mile 70, the decisions all change, but the trap is always the same, needing the right answer.
And the solution is the same too. Give yourself permission to choose. Make it the best choice and let the other options go and move forward, that is the skill. It sounds simple, it can be hard to do when you're very attached to the idea that there is a right answer.
This is one of the skills we build in mental mastery coaching, getting comfortable making big decisions without needing them to be right so that you can move forward faster with less wasted energy and enjoy your ultra running even more. So if you want to find out what that looks like for you, grab a spot on my calendar for a free consult call. The link is in the show notes.
All right, you've probably been stuck trying to make the right decision and feeling more and more pressure to make that decision and then finally grabbing for a decision just to get unstuck, but never really feeling in control of it, never really feeling like you decided. The problem is caused by assuming that there's a right decision to make. You don't have to do that anymore, because there isn't a right decision. It simply doesn't exist.
When you exit this cycle, you stop wasting time there. You get out of that pressure that you've been putting on yourself without realizing it, which means you save energy and you enjoy running more. You stop being afraid to find out that your choice was wrong. If you don't like the outcome, you change your mind or make a different choice the next time you can. And you start making big decisions faster and cleaner.
In training, in races, aid stations at 3 a.m. when you're exhausted and dirty and everything hurts. I don't know yet how our runner’s race turns out. The race hasn't happened yet. But that's actually the point. She made a decision. She's moving forward. And whatever happens next, she'll handle it. That's what getting out of paralysis does for you.
Uncertainty about the future is part of ultrarunning and life. You don't need certainty to be unstoppable. You just need the ability to move forward without it. 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 66. This episode is for anybody who has been paralyzed with making a big decision in training or in a race. Last week, I talked to you about how you're using your mind to make hundreds of small decisions in a race, thousands of small decisions, really, without even knowing it. To run better, you need to become aware that you're making those little micro decisions and get good at the skill of making them consciously on purpose.
This week, I'm talking about a different kind of decision. The one where you know you're facing the decision, you're extremely aware of it, and you're stuck trying to make the right decision. These are the types of individual decisions I help clients make day in and day out. Decisions like, how often should I race? Can I do two big races this close together? Should I do this race or that one? How should I train? Which distance should I run? Can I make cutoff or should I give up? Can I finish or am I done?
And often, because we run ultras in the middle of a real life, it's this kind of decision. I have this situation in my life, something like an injury or a move or a big new job or an ailing family member. And the question is, do I race or not? Trying to make any of these decisions can put you in a state of indecision that you can't seem to break out of. You're paralyzed by it. Indecision paralysis like this makes you stoppable.
You can't move forward and do the next thing because you don't know which way to go. You're standing at a clear fork in the road. If you choose one thing, you pass the other choices up. So the bigger the stakes of the decision, the more pressure to make the right decision and the more paralyzed you get.
I've helped a lot of clients in very difficult situations see their thinking, make the decision they wanna make and get out of that paralysis. I know what a difference that makes to move forward to your goal with a clear mind. So let's talk about what's really keeping you stuck here and how to break the paralysis faster with less wasted energy so you can stop spinning and move forward.
And let's use a recent client example. This client rolled her ankle a couple of months before her big 100-mile A race, a tough mountain race with aggressive cutoffs and serious elevation. And every time she thought she was safely past the rolled ankle, she did it again. And she kept on doing it. She told me, I'm still struggling with rolling my stupid ankle, like every other run now.
I've been rolling it on flat, rock-free trails and regular trails, and today I actually rolled it again on buttery smooth trail with my support brace on. She was worried about her race, with good reason. And she didn't want to waste her time or her crew and pacer's time. As she saw it, she had three choices.
Number one, downgrade her race distance from the 100 mile to the 50 mile. Number two, stop training now, a couple of weeks before the race, and just rest and heal until race day. Or number three, keep training in spite of the ankle and just go for it. And she didn't know what to do. She was stuck and under pressure. This is a huge race for her. She has been planning for months.
So she was scared of making the wrong choice. And there's no clear answer here. The weeks were ticking away faster and faster, and she was now down to a handful of weeks before the race. And the pressure to make a decision, if you've ever been there, you know what it feels like. It was quickly becoming intolerable. And here's what she thought had her stuck, not knowing the right decision. She didn't want to make a mistake and find out later that it was the wrong decision.
This was far too important a race to throw away. But what happens if she stays stuck in this decision paralysis like this, like unable to make a decision, feeling the rising panic as the clock ticks down to race day, not sleeping because of the pressure to decide? What happens? What happens is she'll reach a point where she makes an impulsive decision under pressure without thought, just to get the decision over with and to silence that stupid ticking clock. To get some relief from that pressure.
And then, she'll second-guess that decision forever after. Feeling she made the wrong decision, and telling people I should have done this other thing instead. And that becomes the story of her race. It also becomes a reason she thinks she has to trust herself even less than before to make these big decisions. It's proof that she makes wrong decisions.
But inability to make the right decision isn't what's keeping her stuck. What's really keeping her stuck is that there's no right answer, and there never will be. She's not indecisive. She just thinks she needs an answer to a question and doesn't realize that the question can't be answered. There isn't a right decision.
Any of her three choices can be the right decision for her. They're all equally right. She's assuming, like we all do, that one of the three is the right answer, and the other two choices are wrong, and she can't tell which is which. That's what's keeping her stuck. But there's no right or wrong choice here. There are just three choices. They're all neutral options, not right or wrong. Any of them can move her forward. Any of them is better than staying in that paralysis, for sure.
Think of it this way. There's no option on her list of three that can't work. Each one has advantages. Each one can work in her favor. She can't choose wrong, because wrong isn't even on the menu. But even if, think about it this way, even if there was a right answer, you can never know which one it is, even in hindsight, because you can't know how all the choices would have played out. You might imagine a story in your head about how each one of those would work out, but you'll never know.
If she keeps training and races anyway, then rolls her ankle worse at mile 30 and drops out, that choice didn't give her the finish she wanted, true, but she'll never know if one of the other two choices would have either. You don't know what would have happened in those other parallel universes. You only know the way your choice has worked out, so far. Because even if you try and guess how each one of those choices would have worked out, you're only imagining how it would have worked out in the short term.
You have no way of knowing how that choice would play out, any of those choices would play out, over the course of your life. I have seen this over and over in my life, and it's there if you look for it. What often looks like a bad thing, like DNFs, can end up being the best thing that could have ever happened to you. You wouldn't be listening to this podcast if I hadn't had my early string of incredibly demoralizing DNFs.
So you can't know. And you'll never know. Not even after the race is over. Not even years later. And that means that second-guessing your decision or wishing you'd chosen one of those other options on your list is a complete and utter waste of your thinking, time, and energy. It does nothing for you except keep you stuck in that decision long after it's been made and you've moved on and it is old news.
So I really want you to hear this. You can't make the right choice because there is no right choice. So let the need to make the right choice go. It is doing nothing for you but holding you back. Just let it go. Here's what to do instead. What will make you unstoppable in decision-making. Give yourself permission to choose any of the options without it being wrong, and then make the decision that you want to make.
Go for the one that feels most exciting or interesting. The one that opens doors instead of requiring you to fight every step of the way. The one that gets you closer to your goal. And then, and I do this all the time, this is a superpower, turn it into the best choice. Find every reason you can think of that your choice is gonna work for you. They're there for any option that you pick. It doesn't matter.
She could pick any of those three options on her list and she can find reasons that it is the best choice for her. And when you do this, the more reasons you find that this is the best choice ever, the more confident you're gonna feel moving forward. And then, when you've found all those reasons it's the best, be at peace with your choice, no more looking at other choices, and move on to what's next.
You can always change your mind later if you need to. You have permission to do that too. This is a skill. Getting comfortable making the decisions you want instead of agonizing over the right one and then making it work to your advantage, it's a skill. And it pays to get good at this skill. Because this trap doesn't just show up once, it shows up constantly in ultra-running. In different forms, in different decisions.
In fact, it showed up again right away for our runner. She's already stuck again, because she doesn't know now what she wants to do. She's back in the same trap, agonizing over the right answer, just to a different question. Maybe you've been stuck in this decision too, not knowing what you want, because there are so many outside voices telling you that there's a right answer that you don't trust yourself to choose, because you're still believing there is a right answer. It's just wearing different clothes.
This isn't a confidence problem. You just don't have much practice in knowing what you actually want or in giving yourself permission to acknowledge it and choose it. You believe there's a right decision, and that's the way to answer the question. So you spend your time trying to figure out what's right and what you should do. And the trap is exactly the same here, trying to find the “right answer.”
And the solution is the same, for the same reasons. Just as there's no right answer among her three options, there's no right answer to what she wants, either. Just as there's no right decision, there's no right thing to want. So if this is you, stop asking which option is the correct one to prefer, and notice which one you actually prefer. That's enough. You get to choose what you want.
What you want is usually pretty clear when you get honest about it. It's the option that's going to get you closest to your goal, your dream, the thing that got you into this race or into ultra running in the first place. You don't wanna let that go and you don't have to.
So what our runner did choose was to pare down her long runs in the two peak training weeks she had left and still race the full distance. And here are her reasons for why this is the absolute best, most awesome choice in the world for her. She knows the course, she has a great base and she decided she can still do well with one peak long run instead of two.
In fact, when we talked about it, it might actually keep her from overtraining right before the race because she's so nervous about the race, it's tempting to add more miles, throw more miles in there at the last minute and overtrain. So this is gonna keep her from doing that. Plus, she can use the extra free time to pack earlier and brief her crew and pacer better. And my favorite reason of all, the best one, is she didn't want to walk away from the real possibility that she can finish.
She didn't want to go drop down from the 100 to the 50 to be safe on the finish. She wanted to keep that real possibility that she can finish and to go for it. So there you go, bingo, relieved out of paralysis and moving forward, decision made. This trap of needing the right answers shows up everywhere in ultrarunning. Training plans, pacer decisions, race selection, whether to drop at mile 70, the decisions all change, but the trap is always the same, needing the right answer.
And the solution is the same too. Give yourself permission to choose. Make it the best choice and let the other options go and move forward, that is the skill. It sounds simple, it can be hard to do when you're very attached to the idea that there is a right answer.
This is one of the skills we build in mental mastery coaching, getting comfortable making big decisions without needing them to be right so that you can move forward faster with less wasted energy and enjoy your ultra running even more. So if you want to find out what that looks like for you, grab a spot on my calendar for a free consult call. The link is in the show notes.
All right, you've probably been stuck trying to make the right decision and feeling more and more pressure to make that decision and then finally grabbing for a decision just to get unstuck, but never really feeling in control of it, never really feeling like you decided. The problem is caused by assuming that there's a right decision to make. You don't have to do that anymore, because there isn't a right decision. It simply doesn't exist.
When you exit this cycle, you stop wasting time there. You get out of that pressure that you've been putting on yourself without realizing it, which means you save energy and you enjoy running more. You stop being afraid to find out that your choice was wrong. If you don't like the outcome, you change your mind or make a different choice the next time you can. And you start making big decisions faster and cleaner.
In training, in races, aid stations at 3 a.m. when you're exhausted and dirty and everything hurts. I don't know yet how our runner’s race turns out. The race hasn't happened yet. But that's actually the point. She made a decision. She's moving forward. And whatever happens next, she'll handle it. That's what getting out of paralysis does for you.
Uncertainty about the future is part of ultrarunning and life. You don't need certainty to be unstoppable. You just need the ability to move forward without it. 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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