42. What Missing Training Actually Means for Your Race
Most runners believe they need perfect training to be ready for race day. So when you miss a week, a key long run, or a stretch of workouts, it doesn’t just disrupt your schedule, it rattles your confidence. In this episode, I talk about what’s really happening when missed training starts to feel like a disaster, and why that panic has very little to do with the miles you missed.
I explain how we use training to manufacture certainty about how a race will go, and why that strategy backfires the moment training isn’t perfect. Missing training doesn’t ruin your race, but the story you tell yourself about it absolutely can. I break down the mental pattern that turns missed miles into doubt, disappointment, and half-hearted racing, and why trying to eliminate uncertainty actually makes racing harder, not easier.
This episode will help you rethink what “being ready” really means, let go of the false promise of perfect preparation, and show up to your race with more flexibility, confidence, and curiosity. When you stop fighting uncertainty and start working with it, you free yourself to run the race that’s actually available to you and sometimes, that race turns out better than the one you planned.
If you’re loving the show, please take a moment to follow, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts today!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why missing a week of training feels so scary, even when you know it “shouldn’t.”
The hidden rule you’re using to judge your readiness, and why it creates unnecessary stress.
How trying to control your race outcome through perfect training actually backfires.
What “being ready” really means when uncertainty is unavoidable.
How accepting uncertainty can make you calmer, more capable, and more adaptable on race day.
Why letting go of how the race has to go opens the door to something better than you planned.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you’re loving the show, please take a moment to follow, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts today!
Full Episode Transcript:
Most runners think they need perfect training to be ready for their race. But that belief creates way more problems than it actually solves. So today, I'm showing you why missed training doesn't destroy your race and how accepting uncertainty, instead of trying to eliminate it, makes you both less stressed and more capable on race day.
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 42. So, here's the scenario for today. You missed a week of training, or maybe it was that big peak long run right before your race. And now, you're worried, like really worried about what this means. You know that if you tell others, friends, running partners that you're worried about it, you know what they're going to say, right? They're going to say, don't worry about it. You'll be fine. You're a great runner. You've got a great base. You're going to have a fantastic race. You'll be fine.
But that doesn't help because inside, you're still worried. In your head, you're already playing out the race, imagining it, picturing it, wondering if this is going to be the thing that ruins your race.
Now this scenario has come up for a lot of clients lately for all kinds of reasons: holiday, travel, being sick, weather, all of that. So, let's look at what's actually going on here and how to think about it in a way that actually helps you, because this can happen at any point in your life, in your regular life. We are all running ultras with a regular life where this can happen.
So, let's say that this has happened to you and you're worried that you're not going to be ready for the race. And missing that training has really rattled your confidence. You're disappointed now because you don't have the training you wanted, you're not going to have the race you wanted. So, you start wishing that you could go back and change it and do that week over or that long run over, get that long run in. It shouldn't be this way, right? You dwell there for a while. You should have gotten that training in no matter what. And you probably beat up on yourself a little bit about it.
You think about all the reasons it happened and how it shouldn't have happened, and how you should be in a different place now. You should be confident, feeling more ready with every day of training. And you think about the training plan. You laid that training plan out carefully. You picked it, you laid it out, you put a lot of thought into it. You worked so hard at it. And you were going along with it beautifully. So you weren't supposed to end up in this situation at all where you're now worrying about your race.
And then your brain probably starts playing the movie, what your race will be like now. How much harder it's going to be. It's going to be more of a struggle. Runners are going to be passing you like you're standing still. And you'll have to give up your goal and settle for just finishing, and you're going to be lucky to just do that. And that's what's disappointing you.
You're going to be slow, you're going to be stressed and battling cut off the whole way. You just know it. And you miss the race that you thought you were going to have. You grieve for it. It's not going to be fun anymore. You don't feel any enthusiasm. You don't feel the same enthusiasm, at least that you had for the race when you signed up. And that's where you stay.
Frustration that you missed the training and disappointment about what's left of that race that you were dreaming of, that fabulous race you were dreaming of. Worry about how the race is actually going to go and how hard it's going to feel and how unpleasant. And here's where things can get really destructive. You stop caring as much about the training that you do have left because you've already messed it up, right? What's the point? So, with a sinking stomach, you think, and here's the thought, I'm not going to be ready.
So, once that thought pops in your head, what happens next? You might decide to not even start the race because you're so defeated by missing that training that the only option seems to be rolling over your entry until next year. Or if you can't do that, giving the entry away to somebody else if you can. But let's just say that you do start the race.
Here's what it looks like to go in thinking, I'm not ready. You go in half-hearted. You're already disappointed that you can't have that race that you wanted when you signed up, and you're just going through the motions with minimal energy. You might be even a little resentful, a little angry, because if only you hadn't been sick, if only the weather hadn't stopped you, whatever it is, it's not fair. You shouldn't be having this race. You should have the race that you wanted to have.
So, you're going in there with less energy, feeling hopeless. The race that maybe looked challenging before now looks way harder than the ability that you're bringing to it, and it looks very firmly out of reach. And when things get tough in the race, because they always do, because it's an ultra, you give up easily because you went in knowing that you weren't ready anyway. So you probably weren't going to finish. This was totally expected. So getting this far, hey, good enough. Who cares?
So, in the end, you don't have the race you wanted. You end up right about that. You confirmed exactly what you were afraid of, so you get to be right, but you're still disappointed.
The problem here isn't missing a week of training or missing a key long run. We think that's the problem, but that's not it. That's just the thing that happened. And I want you to go with me here. On its own, missing that week of training is just a neutral fact. It's something that happened. It's not good and it's not bad. It has no label to it. It's just something that happened. You missed some training that you planned to do.
But here's the pattern from that's actually causing all the stress. You're using your training to manufacture certainty about the race. If training is going the way you want, you feel confident that the race will too. You're relaxed and happy, upbeat about it. But if training doesn't go according to plan, now your race is in trouble. Your confidence is shaken. Things are not going to go well in the race.
And here's what causes that pattern. You've made up a rule in your head without even realizing it. And the rule goes like this: How perfectly I train determines how well my race will go. Perfect training equals good race.
So, when training stops being perfect, when you miss a week or a long run, that rule means that your race is in jeopardy. And you panic, of course, because you were using that perfect training to control an outcome that you can't actually control. So suddenly, of course, you feel out of control, and that's really uncomfortable.
Training seems, in our heads, something we should be able to completely control. And it's the obvious way to make a race turn out the way you want. So when it becomes impossible to be perfect, when your training is no longer perfect, you do something really interesting. You pre-disappoint yourself about the race. Before you even get to the starting line, you assume that you're going to fail. And that feels disappointing.
That's why one missed long run or one missed week creates so much panic inside. It's not the run itself or the miles that you're missing. It's that it threatens the false sense of control that you were building. It shakes the confidence that you thought you could manufacture.
So, next question is, how do you solve this? The stronger way to think about all of this is to accept that ultras are inherently uncertain. To let go of that need, like that grasping need you have inside for certainty. Believe me, I feel it. I know. To accept that you can't fully control how the race turns out. You won't know how the race turns out until the race is actually over. Like until you cross that finish line or don't, or the cutoff time has expired. That's it. That's the solution.
And here's why it works. First, you can't control how the race turns out anyway. None of us can. Here's the reality. Uncertainty is going to be there no matter how perfectly you train. That client of mine who missed a week of training, he might not finish his race. But a runner who executed perfect training might not finish either. The outcome is uncertain for both of them, either way they trained.
Every ultramarathon carries the risk of not finishing. That's the sport. And intellectually, in our heads, we know it. And in our hearts, we do too. That's why we line up at the starting line, to test ourselves against a real challenge, something you don't necessarily get to do in everyday life. The question in there is, can you endure the distance on this course and finish within cutoff? Everybody faces that risk. It comes with signing up for the race.
And look, the uncertainty of this is easier to accept if you think about life. Does life go the way you want it to? No. It goes the way it goes. Sometimes that's your way, sometimes that's not. You didn't expect that traffic backup, that meeting that got scheduled, the grocery store being out of avocados. Do you control how life goes? No. If you did, the avocados would always be there, right?
But here's the thing. Things not going the way you want doesn't mean that they always turn out worse. It can also mean that things go better than you expected. Like that traffic backup? You missed an accident. That meeting? It led to an unexpected opportunity. No avocados at the store? You got home and found three that you'd forgotten about that are ready to eat, like right now.
Life is 50/50. Training is 50/50. Races are 50/50. And you can argue in your head that it shouldn't be that way, even while you know, intellectually, you know it should. But you can argue in your head that it shouldn't be that way, that training should be perfect and races should go your way. But as one of my teachers says, you'd be arguing with reality, and you're always going to lose. So, you have a choice. You can argue with reality, or you can learn how to thrive in it.
The second reason to accept uncertainty is that readiness, being ready for a race, is a decision, not a measurement. We don't actually know what being ready looks like. We think we do. We think we'll know on race day. We'll feel it. We think it means completing a training plan to the letter, or that if you finish, well, that proves you were ready.
But there's no measure of being ready. You wouldn't actually know on race morning if you were ready or not. And even if you completed a perfect training plan and got your body perfectly ready, there's still a gap because your mind needs to be ready too.
Ultras are 80% mental. Your body isn't the only thing that needs to show up perfect. So instead of needing perfect training to believe you're ready, you can simply decide. I'm ready to make the most of the training I do have.
The third reason to accept uncertainty is that not trying to control the race outcome, not spending your effort to control the race outcome, actually makes you a better runner. Letting go of the need to control the outcome does something you actually do want. It frees you up to run better and enjoy training more.
Think about it. If perfect training doesn't guarantee that you'll finish the race, then there's no right way to train. And if there's no right way to train, you're free to train your best instead of constantly trying to figure out what's quote-unquote "right."
Now that you're free from a "have to train this way," a "have to," a certain number of miles on specific days, how do you want to train? How do you want to see a missed week or a missed long run? What, if anything, do you want to do about it?
This is why I've never actually had a training plan as an ultra runner. Once I learned the general concept of how to train for a race from Jeff Galloway's book way back in the 1980s, How to Train for My First Marathon, once I did that and ran the marathon and saw how it all worked, I knew how to train. I knew the concept and how it worked. I knew what fit into my life and how I wanted to improve my training, how to fine-tune it for this race or that race.
And it was fun to learn and figure all that out. That's how I figured out how to do 100-milers once a month, even back to back to back, three in a row on three weekends in a row, three 100s, three weekends in a row. And it was so fun to figure that out. I didn't have a training plan telling me how to do it. I got to solve that puzzle. I got to figure that out.
I also figured out how to train for that and recover between races. How much mileage felt right, what my body needed, what fit into my everyday normal person's work life. What training I could get away with and what I actually really did need, what my minimum was, not what some plan said I had to do to succeed.
So when I miss a week or a key long run myself, I'm incredibly flexible about it. I don't waste time worrying about the effect. It actually doesn't occur to me to worry about it because it doesn't do anything useful. Instead, I look at what I want to adjust in my upcoming training. Now that I've missed that week or that key long run, what do I want to adjust?
Maybe make my next long run a little longer or run on an off day or something else. Or whether I'll compensate for it in the race itself. Like, okay, I'm going into the race with a little bit less training than I wanted to, so I'm going to be more focused on my pace and less casual about the race.
Training is always, always, always going to be your best guess and best effort at what prepares you for the race. It's a work in progress. It's not an answer or a point you arrive at. It's always evolving, always improving. There's always more potential to uncover. And that's pretty exciting.
And, speaking of potential, accepting uncertainty does one other very magnificent thing. It creates the possibility that you could have a better race than you imagined.
Here's a story about Superior 100. And this is maybe my second or third time running it. By this time, I started knowing what to expect in the distance, like when the stiffness would set in, what mile 50 felt like, and how it would feel like the second morning when my body didn't want to move, but I knew that it could. So I was starting to know what to expect in the distance.
And the morning of the second day, that second morning, as I ran along, I waited for the usual stiffness and tiredness to set in. I remember thinking it was a little bit late. So I knew it was going to show up, and I thought in my head, it's going to show up, like since it's showing up late, later than I expected, it's probably going to be like, I'm going to be really stiff and really tired. It's going to really hurt. It's going to be concentrated here at the end. So I expected to hurt.
But I didn't. And then not only did I not hurt, I had the most magical experience I will ever have in a race. It took me a moment to actually realize what was happening because I was so expecting the hurt to show up that I actually thought something was wrong. It hadn't occurred to me that I could have that kind of experience in a race.
It was so incredible that I was actually disappointed when I got to the finish line. I wanted to stay in that experience. I did not want to finish the race. And that's one example among many. When you let go of how the race has to be, it can actually go way better than you planned in ways you can't even imagine.
If the race has to turn out the way you wanted to, then that is the only possible acceptable answer. That's the only acceptable outcome. But if you let go and accept that the race won't necessarily turn out the way you want it to, that does allow it to be worse, but also, that's the only way it's going to turn out better than you expect.
So here's what it comes down to. When you miss a week or a long run, you have a choice. You can keep trying to make training perfect so you feel certain about the race. But that means that any gap in your training guarantees disappointment. And you'll spend the rest of your training, possibly even your race, worried about what you missed instead of making the most of what you do have.
That's one choice, or you can accept that races are inherently uncertain and decide that you're going to make the most of the training and the other strengths you've got. That is something you control, how you make the most of what you do have. And then you can show up free to run the race that's actually available to you, which, by the way, might be better than anything you planned.
So here's the truth I want you to remember from this episode. The race is uncertain either way, no matter how or how much you train. The only question is whether you'll let that uncertainty limit you or whether you'll let it free you up to see what you're really capable of. That is what I want for you. To show up to your race and discover that you're capable of more than you ever imagined.
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 42. So, here's the scenario for today. You missed a week of training, or maybe it was that big peak long run right before your race. And now, you're worried, like really worried about what this means. You know that if you tell others, friends, running partners that you're worried about it, you know what they're going to say, right? They're going to say, don't worry about it. You'll be fine. You're a great runner. You've got a great base. You're going to have a fantastic race. You'll be fine.
But that doesn't help because inside, you're still worried. In your head, you're already playing out the race, imagining it, picturing it, wondering if this is going to be the thing that ruins your race.
Now this scenario has come up for a lot of clients lately for all kinds of reasons: holiday, travel, being sick, weather, all of that. So, let's look at what's actually going on here and how to think about it in a way that actually helps you, because this can happen at any point in your life, in your regular life. We are all running ultras with a regular life where this can happen.
So, let's say that this has happened to you and you're worried that you're not going to be ready for the race. And missing that training has really rattled your confidence. You're disappointed now because you don't have the training you wanted, you're not going to have the race you wanted. So, you start wishing that you could go back and change it and do that week over or that long run over, get that long run in. It shouldn't be this way, right? You dwell there for a while. You should have gotten that training in no matter what. And you probably beat up on yourself a little bit about it.
You think about all the reasons it happened and how it shouldn't have happened, and how you should be in a different place now. You should be confident, feeling more ready with every day of training. And you think about the training plan. You laid that training plan out carefully. You picked it, you laid it out, you put a lot of thought into it. You worked so hard at it. And you were going along with it beautifully. So you weren't supposed to end up in this situation at all where you're now worrying about your race.
And then your brain probably starts playing the movie, what your race will be like now. How much harder it's going to be. It's going to be more of a struggle. Runners are going to be passing you like you're standing still. And you'll have to give up your goal and settle for just finishing, and you're going to be lucky to just do that. And that's what's disappointing you.
You're going to be slow, you're going to be stressed and battling cut off the whole way. You just know it. And you miss the race that you thought you were going to have. You grieve for it. It's not going to be fun anymore. You don't feel any enthusiasm. You don't feel the same enthusiasm, at least that you had for the race when you signed up. And that's where you stay.
Frustration that you missed the training and disappointment about what's left of that race that you were dreaming of, that fabulous race you were dreaming of. Worry about how the race is actually going to go and how hard it's going to feel and how unpleasant. And here's where things can get really destructive. You stop caring as much about the training that you do have left because you've already messed it up, right? What's the point? So, with a sinking stomach, you think, and here's the thought, I'm not going to be ready.
So, once that thought pops in your head, what happens next? You might decide to not even start the race because you're so defeated by missing that training that the only option seems to be rolling over your entry until next year. Or if you can't do that, giving the entry away to somebody else if you can. But let's just say that you do start the race.
Here's what it looks like to go in thinking, I'm not ready. You go in half-hearted. You're already disappointed that you can't have that race that you wanted when you signed up, and you're just going through the motions with minimal energy. You might be even a little resentful, a little angry, because if only you hadn't been sick, if only the weather hadn't stopped you, whatever it is, it's not fair. You shouldn't be having this race. You should have the race that you wanted to have.
So, you're going in there with less energy, feeling hopeless. The race that maybe looked challenging before now looks way harder than the ability that you're bringing to it, and it looks very firmly out of reach. And when things get tough in the race, because they always do, because it's an ultra, you give up easily because you went in knowing that you weren't ready anyway. So you probably weren't going to finish. This was totally expected. So getting this far, hey, good enough. Who cares?
So, in the end, you don't have the race you wanted. You end up right about that. You confirmed exactly what you were afraid of, so you get to be right, but you're still disappointed.
The problem here isn't missing a week of training or missing a key long run. We think that's the problem, but that's not it. That's just the thing that happened. And I want you to go with me here. On its own, missing that week of training is just a neutral fact. It's something that happened. It's not good and it's not bad. It has no label to it. It's just something that happened. You missed some training that you planned to do.
But here's the pattern from that's actually causing all the stress. You're using your training to manufacture certainty about the race. If training is going the way you want, you feel confident that the race will too. You're relaxed and happy, upbeat about it. But if training doesn't go according to plan, now your race is in trouble. Your confidence is shaken. Things are not going to go well in the race.
And here's what causes that pattern. You've made up a rule in your head without even realizing it. And the rule goes like this: How perfectly I train determines how well my race will go. Perfect training equals good race.
So, when training stops being perfect, when you miss a week or a long run, that rule means that your race is in jeopardy. And you panic, of course, because you were using that perfect training to control an outcome that you can't actually control. So suddenly, of course, you feel out of control, and that's really uncomfortable.
Training seems, in our heads, something we should be able to completely control. And it's the obvious way to make a race turn out the way you want. So when it becomes impossible to be perfect, when your training is no longer perfect, you do something really interesting. You pre-disappoint yourself about the race. Before you even get to the starting line, you assume that you're going to fail. And that feels disappointing.
That's why one missed long run or one missed week creates so much panic inside. It's not the run itself or the miles that you're missing. It's that it threatens the false sense of control that you were building. It shakes the confidence that you thought you could manufacture.
So, next question is, how do you solve this? The stronger way to think about all of this is to accept that ultras are inherently uncertain. To let go of that need, like that grasping need you have inside for certainty. Believe me, I feel it. I know. To accept that you can't fully control how the race turns out. You won't know how the race turns out until the race is actually over. Like until you cross that finish line or don't, or the cutoff time has expired. That's it. That's the solution.
And here's why it works. First, you can't control how the race turns out anyway. None of us can. Here's the reality. Uncertainty is going to be there no matter how perfectly you train. That client of mine who missed a week of training, he might not finish his race. But a runner who executed perfect training might not finish either. The outcome is uncertain for both of them, either way they trained.
Every ultramarathon carries the risk of not finishing. That's the sport. And intellectually, in our heads, we know it. And in our hearts, we do too. That's why we line up at the starting line, to test ourselves against a real challenge, something you don't necessarily get to do in everyday life. The question in there is, can you endure the distance on this course and finish within cutoff? Everybody faces that risk. It comes with signing up for the race.
And look, the uncertainty of this is easier to accept if you think about life. Does life go the way you want it to? No. It goes the way it goes. Sometimes that's your way, sometimes that's not. You didn't expect that traffic backup, that meeting that got scheduled, the grocery store being out of avocados. Do you control how life goes? No. If you did, the avocados would always be there, right?
But here's the thing. Things not going the way you want doesn't mean that they always turn out worse. It can also mean that things go better than you expected. Like that traffic backup? You missed an accident. That meeting? It led to an unexpected opportunity. No avocados at the store? You got home and found three that you'd forgotten about that are ready to eat, like right now.
Life is 50/50. Training is 50/50. Races are 50/50. And you can argue in your head that it shouldn't be that way, even while you know, intellectually, you know it should. But you can argue in your head that it shouldn't be that way, that training should be perfect and races should go your way. But as one of my teachers says, you'd be arguing with reality, and you're always going to lose. So, you have a choice. You can argue with reality, or you can learn how to thrive in it.
The second reason to accept uncertainty is that readiness, being ready for a race, is a decision, not a measurement. We don't actually know what being ready looks like. We think we do. We think we'll know on race day. We'll feel it. We think it means completing a training plan to the letter, or that if you finish, well, that proves you were ready.
But there's no measure of being ready. You wouldn't actually know on race morning if you were ready or not. And even if you completed a perfect training plan and got your body perfectly ready, there's still a gap because your mind needs to be ready too.
Ultras are 80% mental. Your body isn't the only thing that needs to show up perfect. So instead of needing perfect training to believe you're ready, you can simply decide. I'm ready to make the most of the training I do have.
The third reason to accept uncertainty is that not trying to control the race outcome, not spending your effort to control the race outcome, actually makes you a better runner. Letting go of the need to control the outcome does something you actually do want. It frees you up to run better and enjoy training more.
Think about it. If perfect training doesn't guarantee that you'll finish the race, then there's no right way to train. And if there's no right way to train, you're free to train your best instead of constantly trying to figure out what's quote-unquote "right."
Now that you're free from a "have to train this way," a "have to," a certain number of miles on specific days, how do you want to train? How do you want to see a missed week or a missed long run? What, if anything, do you want to do about it?
This is why I've never actually had a training plan as an ultra runner. Once I learned the general concept of how to train for a race from Jeff Galloway's book way back in the 1980s, How to Train for My First Marathon, once I did that and ran the marathon and saw how it all worked, I knew how to train. I knew the concept and how it worked. I knew what fit into my life and how I wanted to improve my training, how to fine-tune it for this race or that race.
And it was fun to learn and figure all that out. That's how I figured out how to do 100-milers once a month, even back to back to back, three in a row on three weekends in a row, three 100s, three weekends in a row. And it was so fun to figure that out. I didn't have a training plan telling me how to do it. I got to solve that puzzle. I got to figure that out.
I also figured out how to train for that and recover between races. How much mileage felt right, what my body needed, what fit into my everyday normal person's work life. What training I could get away with and what I actually really did need, what my minimum was, not what some plan said I had to do to succeed.
So when I miss a week or a key long run myself, I'm incredibly flexible about it. I don't waste time worrying about the effect. It actually doesn't occur to me to worry about it because it doesn't do anything useful. Instead, I look at what I want to adjust in my upcoming training. Now that I've missed that week or that key long run, what do I want to adjust?
Maybe make my next long run a little longer or run on an off day or something else. Or whether I'll compensate for it in the race itself. Like, okay, I'm going into the race with a little bit less training than I wanted to, so I'm going to be more focused on my pace and less casual about the race.
Training is always, always, always going to be your best guess and best effort at what prepares you for the race. It's a work in progress. It's not an answer or a point you arrive at. It's always evolving, always improving. There's always more potential to uncover. And that's pretty exciting.
And, speaking of potential, accepting uncertainty does one other very magnificent thing. It creates the possibility that you could have a better race than you imagined.
Here's a story about Superior 100. And this is maybe my second or third time running it. By this time, I started knowing what to expect in the distance, like when the stiffness would set in, what mile 50 felt like, and how it would feel like the second morning when my body didn't want to move, but I knew that it could. So I was starting to know what to expect in the distance.
And the morning of the second day, that second morning, as I ran along, I waited for the usual stiffness and tiredness to set in. I remember thinking it was a little bit late. So I knew it was going to show up, and I thought in my head, it's going to show up, like since it's showing up late, later than I expected, it's probably going to be like, I'm going to be really stiff and really tired. It's going to really hurt. It's going to be concentrated here at the end. So I expected to hurt.
But I didn't. And then not only did I not hurt, I had the most magical experience I will ever have in a race. It took me a moment to actually realize what was happening because I was so expecting the hurt to show up that I actually thought something was wrong. It hadn't occurred to me that I could have that kind of experience in a race.
It was so incredible that I was actually disappointed when I got to the finish line. I wanted to stay in that experience. I did not want to finish the race. And that's one example among many. When you let go of how the race has to be, it can actually go way better than you planned in ways you can't even imagine.
If the race has to turn out the way you wanted to, then that is the only possible acceptable answer. That's the only acceptable outcome. But if you let go and accept that the race won't necessarily turn out the way you want it to, that does allow it to be worse, but also, that's the only way it's going to turn out better than you expect.
So here's what it comes down to. When you miss a week or a long run, you have a choice. You can keep trying to make training perfect so you feel certain about the race. But that means that any gap in your training guarantees disappointment. And you'll spend the rest of your training, possibly even your race, worried about what you missed instead of making the most of what you do have.
That's one choice, or you can accept that races are inherently uncertain and decide that you're going to make the most of the training and the other strengths you've got. That is something you control, how you make the most of what you do have. And then you can show up free to run the race that's actually available to you, which, by the way, might be better than anything you planned.
So here's the truth I want you to remember from this episode. The race is uncertain either way, no matter how or how much you train. The only question is whether you'll let that uncertainty limit you or whether you'll let it free you up to see what you're really capable of. That is what I want for you. To show up to your race and discover that you're capable of more than you ever imagined.
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.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you listen to podcasts!
Next
Next