You’ve spent months training for your big ultra. You’ve put in the miles, prepared your body, and invested so much into getting to that starting line. So why are you still feeling anxious about the race? What if the problem isn’t your training, but the fact that you don’t actually have a plan for how you’re going to run it?
Knowing your cutoff times, organizing drop bags, and arranging crew support isn’t the same as having a complete race plan. You also need to know how you’ll handle challenges, make decisions under pressure, and adapt when things don’t go as expected. In this episode, I’m introducing Race Crafting, the race-planning process I’ve developed through more than 150 100-mile finishes and years of coaching other ultrarunners.
I share how Race Crafting helped one of my clients finally finish Superior 100 on her fourth attempt after three DNFs, and why having a plan can make such a difference. You’ll discover how to replace race anxiety with confidence, prepare for the unexpected, and arrive at the starting line knowing exactly how you intend to run your race.
Race Crafting is a four-session coaching process where we work together to build a complete plan for your next ultra, so you can manage race anxiety, prepare for challenges, and approach race day with confidence. Learn more about Race Crafting here.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
What Race Crafting is and how it can help you approach your next ultra with more confidence.
Why race anxiety often comes from not having a clear plan for the race itself.
The difference between knowing your cutoff times and having a complete race strategy.
How to bring your mind, body, and race strategy together into one practical plan.
Why anticipating problems and making decisions before race day can change how you race.
How one runner used Race Crafting to finally complete a race that she had previously DNFed 3 times.
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.
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.
If you’re loving the show, please take a moment to follow, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts today!
Episodes Related to Race Crafting: Plan Your Ultra with Confidence:
Full Episode Transcript:
You're standing at the starting line of the biggest race of your year. Months of your life devoted to it. Untold miles on your body. Everybody knows you're running it. And you have no idea how you're going to do it.
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 79. All right, you all. I am fired up today. I have been waiting for this episode so long because today, I'm launching something new. And it's one of my favorite ways to help runners. It's called Race Crafting. If you're anxious about a big race, it's rarely because you're undertrained. You're anxious because you don't have a plan for how to run it.
Race Crafting is my signature, proven process for planning a race so that you go into it calm instead of anxious. You run the smartest race possible, and you finish more reliably. You won't find this anywhere else. I built it organically over time in my own races, reverse engineering finishes in over 150 100-milers and 100+ other ultras of every distance and format. And then I refined it with client after client, race after race, so that what you get today is the version that's been tested and improved again and again.
Until now, the only way to get it was through my one-on-one mental mastery coaching. That's where you become the mentally strongest runner you can be. It transforms who you are so you run every race to its full potential. It's six months of weekly coaching sessions, training, and support toward your goal, and my clients get Race Crafting for every race they run. But not everybody is ready for that.
Maybe you're ready for the first step. Maybe your race is coming up fast. Maybe you're just now realizing that trying to ignore the race anxiety that's becoming overwhelming isn't working for you. And you need help. And I want you to have this help too. So now, Race Crafting is available on its own. We plan and evaluate one specific race in four sessions, three to build your plan and one after the race to learn from it.
So, if your big race is coming up fast, even three weeks out, this is where you take control of having the race you want. You can get it on my website at susanidonnelly.com/race-crafting, two words with a dash in the middle. And the link is in the show notes. And in this episode, I'm walking you through why Race Crafting takes the anxiety away, what goes into a real race plan, and one thing you can do today to start planning your next race.
All right, here's the situation. Put yourself here. You're going into a big race, one that's really important to you. One where you doubt you can finish. It's a really big challenge. And maybe it's one that you want to hit a challenging goal, like maybe a sub-24 100 or something like that. Or you just want to run your absolute best in this race for whatever reason.
Let's say it's a 100. It's your first 100. It's a new distance. It's your first 50. It's a 100 after some DNFs at that distance, or maybe it's like I said, a sub-24 100. There's a lot on the line for you. You've put in months of training. You've got the entry fee, travel, time off work, and you've told everybody you're doing it. So, you want to make sure that you do everything possible to have the race you want. But the uncertainty of this thing is overwhelming.
I mean, you planned your training thoroughly, down to the mile. You thought about it every day. But the race? It's this big, vague unknown, like driving at night into a thick fog you can't see through. How are you going to do it? You don't even know where to begin answering that question. And every day, the race is getting closer and you're getting more anxious about it, to the point where you wish somebody would just step in and give you a clear path.
Somebody would guide you, tell you what to do, tell you how to plan, and walk you through every step of it. So, what you do in the absence of that person doing that is you look at cutoff times and what you need to do to finish the pace you need to run or to hit your goal. You calculate what that pace is and decide you can stay ahead of that. That's your plan. You try to imagine what the race is going to be like. You ask others for advice. You look for somebody who's done it before.
You look for videos online, maybe. You waffle around about the drop bags, what to put in them, which ones to have, and all of that. And in the end, you make a decision, but that takes up a lot of time. And since this is an important race, let's say maybe you get a crew and a pacer as insurance because they'll make sure you finish. And that's it. That's your planning, cutoff time, drop bags, crew, and pacer. That's your plan.
So, you show up to the starting line still with no idea how you're actually going to do this. No wonder your anxiety is so high. It feels like you're about to jump off a high cliff with no plan, no wings, no parachute, no trampoline below to catch you. By default, you're probably going to result to the strategy that my dear friend Kerry told me decades ago. We were starting Mountain Masochist 50 Miler in Virginia.
And the early morning, it was still dark, and the shotgun, very loud shotgun, signaling the start had just blasted. And Kerry and I were in the sea of runners crossing the bridge about to make a right turn to hit the first climb. I can picture it like it was yesterday. I'd run some ultras before this, but this was the first time that it occurred to me that I didn't know how to run this race. I had no idea what strategy to use other than run.
So, I asked my more experienced friend Kerry who was running alongside me, what's your strategy for this? And he laughed and said, "Run as fast as I can and death march it to the finish." Now, I had a ton of respect for Kerry. He's the person who finally got me into ultra running. But my thought on hearing this was, I can totally see that for you, but that doesn't work for me. And I know I can do better.
But wanting something better and knowing how to do it are two completely different things. So along the way, I had a couple of big, important races overseas, one where not planning almost cost you a finish and a second one where it did. And I'll just say this, frustrating when a big race you poured so much into falls apart at the beginning because you didn't plan how to stay on course on an unmarked course with few participants in another country at night.
Those races and others showed me that it was time to find a better way. Now, the problem I saw that morning running next to Kerry at Mountain Masochist is that I didn't know what I was doing in the race. The thing I most wanted to go right, I didn't know how to do it. How crazy is that? I mean, I'd trained. I was physically capable of 50 miles, but when I got to the starting line, I had no real idea what to do other than run the best I could.
But I didn't even know what that meant. I mean, run the best I could, what does that even look like? How do you actually do that? Like me back then, you might be winging it in races too. You've spent months training but haven't planned how to run this race. And that gap between planning and completing all your training in detail and then having no plan for how to run the race itself, the actual event you've been working toward all this time, that's where your anxiety comes from.
Because when you race without a plan, you have to rely on luck and hope and maybe depend on your crew and pacers if you have them to do and say the "perfect" thing at the "perfect" time. When all you know to do is hope you can survive this race, you're taking my friend Kerry's approach. And if you're lucky, there's a death march to the finish in your future.
There is a better approach, a real race plan, a plan that answers can I do it and how do I do it, not just how fast do I have to run. And when I say plan, I am not talking about an elaborate spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers that I'm going to hand you and expect you to meet. So if you don't love spreadsheets, this is definitely for you. It's a roadmap, a full roadmap of how.
When I ask runners whether they want a plan, a race plan, they typically say no, immediately, because they think a plan is a spreadsheet, and they'll feel worse if they don't meet the times in the plan on that spreadsheet. If they get in the race and they can't meet those times. So they think they don't want a plan because they might fail to meet it.
But a plan, the way I do it, is freedom. It gives you calm, confidence, and space for you to see what you're doing and to make smart decisions when you need to adapt because you know what it's going to affect if you change this or that in the race. My type of plan is a game-changer.
Now, I didn't figure it out that day at Mountain Masochist. I mean, I was already in the race, but the idea that I could do better than that stuck with me. And over time, race after race of my own and client after client, it became the race planning methodology that I use with clients and in my own races today. That methodology is Race Crafting. My signature proven process for planning a race, and this race plan does four things.
One, it combines the three things that affect your results, mind, body, and race, into one, because that's what happens in the race. And the mind, of those three, the mind, is the part that almost always gets left to chance. Crazy because that's 80% of your race right there. Two, the second thing this plan does is it anticipates problems and fears ahead of time and plans for them.
And then three, it makes as many decisions as possible ahead of time so you're not making them in the middle of the night on a tired, discouraged, exhausted brain. And four, it maps out all of this so you can see how it all works together, and you can fix anywhere that it doesn't before the race. Let me give you a very tiny example of what I mean. Think about the moment in your race when you want to drop.
Now, decide under what specific circumstances that you'll allow yourself to drop. Not just injury, but maybe a 911 call or unable to walk on my own, even to the car to drop. Notice how that feels. It's clear. It's defined, and it's one small decision that you and your crew and pacer don't have to make it in the race when everybody's tired and under pressure and stressed. Race Crafting does that for your whole entire race.
Imagine feeling that clear about your whole race. You don't have to figure out how to get there on your own. I've got you. With this package, you get four one-hour sessions with me, three to build your plan, and one after the race to pull out all the learning possible from it, even the stuff that you miss and I see so that you know what to keep doing and what changes to make before your next race.
In those first three sessions, those planning sessions, we're going to build your whole race plan together, goal, pace, course, worst-case scenario, and how to think in the race into one practical plan that you feel confident about executing. I'll help you spot problems we need to anticipate and plan for, and we'll map out exactly how you'll plan any fears that are in your way. You get to relax. You don't have to know the planning process.
I've already defined that. I'll walk you through every step and help you make all the decisions along the way with all my expertise and everything I've learned from my own races and helping my clients plan. Going into the race, you'll have a plan that's custom to you and that race. You made every decision in that plan, so you know in the race how it works and why. That is something that no app or AI plan can give you.
The only thing you need to bring to our first session is the race you're planning for and whatever's worrying you about it. That's it. We'll build everything else together. Here's what that looks like for a recent client. She DNFed Superior 100, a very tough single-track 100-mile that meant a lot to her. She DNFed it three times. She signed up for a fourth shot at it and started working one-on-one with me.
She had Badger a few months before Superior 100, and we planned Badger using Race Crafting, the same process you're going to go through. And she finished it six hours faster than her time there the year before. So when it came time to plan Superior, she was all in. She was understandably fearful of DNFing again.
And like many runners, she doesn't like running at night, and she was worried she'd be slow and miss cutoff like so many runners. So we planned her race with the same process to account for all of it. Her goal, cutoff times, cutoff stress, the reasons that she DNFed in the past, night running, the course, what she needed to think to finish it this time. We planned all of it. And she finished it. When severe thunderstorms hit, she adapted her plan instead of panicking.
Even with the doubts and being closer to the final cutoff than she wanted to be, she crossed that finish line and got her well-deserved buckle. Here's what changes before, during, and after the race when you have a Race Crafting plan. Before the race, you get a full plan that's specific to you, that course, your fears, strengths, and weaknesses, and goals, even the weather. If somebody asked you how are you going to do this race, you could tell them exactly.
It's a story you can visualize. It's your complete answer to, can I, or how am I going to do this? You can use it with crew and pacers so that everybody on the team is on the same page and knows how to support you instead of making them responsible for reading your mind or just knowing somehow what to do. You can be excited about the race again because you've turned what felt impossible into a practical plan. It's proof that it's possible for you.
You have proof in your hand that it is possible. And every time your mind panics about a what if, you can relax because it's already been accounted for. You can actually race in the race instead of worry. And the thing all my clients tell me, you go into the race calm because you know what you're doing in the race.
Now, in the race, you have a plan to direct you, and when something changes, like those thunderstorms, you can adapt clearly. I mean, you know, there's always something, especially in a 100-miler because you're out there for so long, there's always something that's going to change. And you're going to know how to adapt clearly.
You know what needs to change and how it affects the rest of your race. So you're not making just these reactive, knee-jerk decisions. Cutoffs stop being a constant worry because you planned for them, and you're not trapped by a rigid spreadsheet. These are your numbers, and you decided on them. Now, after the race, you know exactly what worked and what didn't, either in the plan or how you executed it.
You know where you went off plan and why, and it might be a good reason. So you know what to change next time. It gives you a framework to improve from, and it helps you learn faster. There's no imposter syndrome. When you hit your goal, you know exactly how you did it, and you don't have to wonder if you could have done better. You know you gave it your best.
Having a Race Crafting plan is like walking into a test with the answer key. When we're done with the planning, you know exactly how you're going to hit your goal instead of just hoping you will. Kerry's strategy at Mountain Masochist was run as fast as I can and death march it to the finish. My strategy now is plan it. Decide ahead of time how I'm going to run it, mind, body, and race, and then go run my plan.
And yours can be too. You don't have to wing it. You can stand at that starting line calm, knowing exactly how you're going to do this. And this isn't theory. Race Crafting is a proven methodology, tested in my own races and refined with client after client, including runners who have been where you are now. So, if there's a race that matters to you for whatever reason and you want to go in with a plan instead of hope, this is for you.
If you've got a race coming up, don't wait on this. Clients have already signed up for their fall races, and because it's one-on-one time with me, I have a limited number of spots for this. They're getting the races planned and discovering how confident it makes them about even the most daunting races and how fun the planning actually is.
So, if you want to go in your race calm instead of anxious, knowing exactly how you are going to do this, sign up for Race Crafting at susanidonnelly.com/race-crafting. Two words, race-dash between them-crafting. The link's in the show notes too. You have put a lot into this race, and you want to do everything you can to make sure it pays off. So it deserves the best plan you can get. And that's what we build together.
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 79. All right, you all. I am fired up today. I have been waiting for this episode so long because today, I'm launching something new. And it's one of my favorite ways to help runners. It's called Race Crafting. If you're anxious about a big race, it's rarely because you're undertrained. You're anxious because you don't have a plan for how to run it.
Race Crafting is my signature, proven process for planning a race so that you go into it calm instead of anxious. You run the smartest race possible, and you finish more reliably. You won't find this anywhere else. I built it organically over time in my own races, reverse engineering finishes in over 150 100-milers and 100+ other ultras of every distance and format. And then I refined it with client after client, race after race, so that what you get today is the version that's been tested and improved again and again.
Until now, the only way to get it was through my one-on-one mental mastery coaching. That's where you become the mentally strongest runner you can be. It transforms who you are so you run every race to its full potential. It's six months of weekly coaching sessions, training, and support toward your goal, and my clients get Race Crafting for every race they run. But not everybody is ready for that.
Maybe you're ready for the first step. Maybe your race is coming up fast. Maybe you're just now realizing that trying to ignore the race anxiety that's becoming overwhelming isn't working for you. And you need help. And I want you to have this help too. So now, Race Crafting is available on its own. We plan and evaluate one specific race in four sessions, three to build your plan and one after the race to learn from it.
So, if your big race is coming up fast, even three weeks out, this is where you take control of having the race you want. You can get it on my website at susanidonnelly.com/race-crafting, two words with a dash in the middle. And the link is in the show notes. And in this episode, I'm walking you through why Race Crafting takes the anxiety away, what goes into a real race plan, and one thing you can do today to start planning your next race.
All right, here's the situation. Put yourself here. You're going into a big race, one that's really important to you. One where you doubt you can finish. It's a really big challenge. And maybe it's one that you want to hit a challenging goal, like maybe a sub-24 100 or something like that. Or you just want to run your absolute best in this race for whatever reason.
Let's say it's a 100. It's your first 100. It's a new distance. It's your first 50. It's a 100 after some DNFs at that distance, or maybe it's like I said, a sub-24 100. There's a lot on the line for you. You've put in months of training. You've got the entry fee, travel, time off work, and you've told everybody you're doing it. So, you want to make sure that you do everything possible to have the race you want. But the uncertainty of this thing is overwhelming.
I mean, you planned your training thoroughly, down to the mile. You thought about it every day. But the race? It's this big, vague unknown, like driving at night into a thick fog you can't see through. How are you going to do it? You don't even know where to begin answering that question. And every day, the race is getting closer and you're getting more anxious about it, to the point where you wish somebody would just step in and give you a clear path.
Somebody would guide you, tell you what to do, tell you how to plan, and walk you through every step of it. So, what you do in the absence of that person doing that is you look at cutoff times and what you need to do to finish the pace you need to run or to hit your goal. You calculate what that pace is and decide you can stay ahead of that. That's your plan. You try to imagine what the race is going to be like. You ask others for advice. You look for somebody who's done it before.
You look for videos online, maybe. You waffle around about the drop bags, what to put in them, which ones to have, and all of that. And in the end, you make a decision, but that takes up a lot of time. And since this is an important race, let's say maybe you get a crew and a pacer as insurance because they'll make sure you finish. And that's it. That's your planning, cutoff time, drop bags, crew, and pacer. That's your plan.
So, you show up to the starting line still with no idea how you're actually going to do this. No wonder your anxiety is so high. It feels like you're about to jump off a high cliff with no plan, no wings, no parachute, no trampoline below to catch you. By default, you're probably going to result to the strategy that my dear friend Kerry told me decades ago. We were starting Mountain Masochist 50 Miler in Virginia.
And the early morning, it was still dark, and the shotgun, very loud shotgun, signaling the start had just blasted. And Kerry and I were in the sea of runners crossing the bridge about to make a right turn to hit the first climb. I can picture it like it was yesterday. I'd run some ultras before this, but this was the first time that it occurred to me that I didn't know how to run this race. I had no idea what strategy to use other than run.
So, I asked my more experienced friend Kerry who was running alongside me, what's your strategy for this? And he laughed and said, "Run as fast as I can and death march it to the finish." Now, I had a ton of respect for Kerry. He's the person who finally got me into ultra running. But my thought on hearing this was, I can totally see that for you, but that doesn't work for me. And I know I can do better.
But wanting something better and knowing how to do it are two completely different things. So along the way, I had a couple of big, important races overseas, one where not planning almost cost you a finish and a second one where it did. And I'll just say this, frustrating when a big race you poured so much into falls apart at the beginning because you didn't plan how to stay on course on an unmarked course with few participants in another country at night.
Those races and others showed me that it was time to find a better way. Now, the problem I saw that morning running next to Kerry at Mountain Masochist is that I didn't know what I was doing in the race. The thing I most wanted to go right, I didn't know how to do it. How crazy is that? I mean, I'd trained. I was physically capable of 50 miles, but when I got to the starting line, I had no real idea what to do other than run the best I could.
But I didn't even know what that meant. I mean, run the best I could, what does that even look like? How do you actually do that? Like me back then, you might be winging it in races too. You've spent months training but haven't planned how to run this race. And that gap between planning and completing all your training in detail and then having no plan for how to run the race itself, the actual event you've been working toward all this time, that's where your anxiety comes from.
Because when you race without a plan, you have to rely on luck and hope and maybe depend on your crew and pacers if you have them to do and say the "perfect" thing at the "perfect" time. When all you know to do is hope you can survive this race, you're taking my friend Kerry's approach. And if you're lucky, there's a death march to the finish in your future.
There is a better approach, a real race plan, a plan that answers can I do it and how do I do it, not just how fast do I have to run. And when I say plan, I am not talking about an elaborate spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers that I'm going to hand you and expect you to meet. So if you don't love spreadsheets, this is definitely for you. It's a roadmap, a full roadmap of how.
When I ask runners whether they want a plan, a race plan, they typically say no, immediately, because they think a plan is a spreadsheet, and they'll feel worse if they don't meet the times in the plan on that spreadsheet. If they get in the race and they can't meet those times. So they think they don't want a plan because they might fail to meet it.
But a plan, the way I do it, is freedom. It gives you calm, confidence, and space for you to see what you're doing and to make smart decisions when you need to adapt because you know what it's going to affect if you change this or that in the race. My type of plan is a game-changer.
Now, I didn't figure it out that day at Mountain Masochist. I mean, I was already in the race, but the idea that I could do better than that stuck with me. And over time, race after race of my own and client after client, it became the race planning methodology that I use with clients and in my own races today. That methodology is Race Crafting. My signature proven process for planning a race, and this race plan does four things.
One, it combines the three things that affect your results, mind, body, and race, into one, because that's what happens in the race. And the mind, of those three, the mind, is the part that almost always gets left to chance. Crazy because that's 80% of your race right there. Two, the second thing this plan does is it anticipates problems and fears ahead of time and plans for them.
And then three, it makes as many decisions as possible ahead of time so you're not making them in the middle of the night on a tired, discouraged, exhausted brain. And four, it maps out all of this so you can see how it all works together, and you can fix anywhere that it doesn't before the race. Let me give you a very tiny example of what I mean. Think about the moment in your race when you want to drop.
Now, decide under what specific circumstances that you'll allow yourself to drop. Not just injury, but maybe a 911 call or unable to walk on my own, even to the car to drop. Notice how that feels. It's clear. It's defined, and it's one small decision that you and your crew and pacer don't have to make it in the race when everybody's tired and under pressure and stressed. Race Crafting does that for your whole entire race.
Imagine feeling that clear about your whole race. You don't have to figure out how to get there on your own. I've got you. With this package, you get four one-hour sessions with me, three to build your plan, and one after the race to pull out all the learning possible from it, even the stuff that you miss and I see so that you know what to keep doing and what changes to make before your next race.
In those first three sessions, those planning sessions, we're going to build your whole race plan together, goal, pace, course, worst-case scenario, and how to think in the race into one practical plan that you feel confident about executing. I'll help you spot problems we need to anticipate and plan for, and we'll map out exactly how you'll plan any fears that are in your way. You get to relax. You don't have to know the planning process.
I've already defined that. I'll walk you through every step and help you make all the decisions along the way with all my expertise and everything I've learned from my own races and helping my clients plan. Going into the race, you'll have a plan that's custom to you and that race. You made every decision in that plan, so you know in the race how it works and why. That is something that no app or AI plan can give you.
The only thing you need to bring to our first session is the race you're planning for and whatever's worrying you about it. That's it. We'll build everything else together. Here's what that looks like for a recent client. She DNFed Superior 100, a very tough single-track 100-mile that meant a lot to her. She DNFed it three times. She signed up for a fourth shot at it and started working one-on-one with me.
She had Badger a few months before Superior 100, and we planned Badger using Race Crafting, the same process you're going to go through. And she finished it six hours faster than her time there the year before. So when it came time to plan Superior, she was all in. She was understandably fearful of DNFing again.
And like many runners, she doesn't like running at night, and she was worried she'd be slow and miss cutoff like so many runners. So we planned her race with the same process to account for all of it. Her goal, cutoff times, cutoff stress, the reasons that she DNFed in the past, night running, the course, what she needed to think to finish it this time. We planned all of it. And she finished it. When severe thunderstorms hit, she adapted her plan instead of panicking.
Even with the doubts and being closer to the final cutoff than she wanted to be, she crossed that finish line and got her well-deserved buckle. Here's what changes before, during, and after the race when you have a Race Crafting plan. Before the race, you get a full plan that's specific to you, that course, your fears, strengths, and weaknesses, and goals, even the weather. If somebody asked you how are you going to do this race, you could tell them exactly.
It's a story you can visualize. It's your complete answer to, can I, or how am I going to do this? You can use it with crew and pacers so that everybody on the team is on the same page and knows how to support you instead of making them responsible for reading your mind or just knowing somehow what to do. You can be excited about the race again because you've turned what felt impossible into a practical plan. It's proof that it's possible for you.
You have proof in your hand that it is possible. And every time your mind panics about a what if, you can relax because it's already been accounted for. You can actually race in the race instead of worry. And the thing all my clients tell me, you go into the race calm because you know what you're doing in the race.
Now, in the race, you have a plan to direct you, and when something changes, like those thunderstorms, you can adapt clearly. I mean, you know, there's always something, especially in a 100-miler because you're out there for so long, there's always something that's going to change. And you're going to know how to adapt clearly.
You know what needs to change and how it affects the rest of your race. So you're not making just these reactive, knee-jerk decisions. Cutoffs stop being a constant worry because you planned for them, and you're not trapped by a rigid spreadsheet. These are your numbers, and you decided on them. Now, after the race, you know exactly what worked and what didn't, either in the plan or how you executed it.
You know where you went off plan and why, and it might be a good reason. So you know what to change next time. It gives you a framework to improve from, and it helps you learn faster. There's no imposter syndrome. When you hit your goal, you know exactly how you did it, and you don't have to wonder if you could have done better. You know you gave it your best.
Having a Race Crafting plan is like walking into a test with the answer key. When we're done with the planning, you know exactly how you're going to hit your goal instead of just hoping you will. Kerry's strategy at Mountain Masochist was run as fast as I can and death march it to the finish. My strategy now is plan it. Decide ahead of time how I'm going to run it, mind, body, and race, and then go run my plan.
And yours can be too. You don't have to wing it. You can stand at that starting line calm, knowing exactly how you're going to do this. And this isn't theory. Race Crafting is a proven methodology, tested in my own races and refined with client after client, including runners who have been where you are now. So, if there's a race that matters to you for whatever reason and you want to go in with a plan instead of hope, this is for you.
If you've got a race coming up, don't wait on this. Clients have already signed up for their fall races, and because it's one-on-one time with me, I have a limited number of spots for this. They're getting the races planned and discovering how confident it makes them about even the most daunting races and how fun the planning actually is.
So, if you want to go in your race calm instead of anxious, knowing exactly how you are going to do this, sign up for Race Crafting at susanidonnelly.com/race-crafting. Two words, race-dash between them-crafting. The link's in the show notes too. You have put a lot into this race, and you want to do everything you can to make sure it pays off. So it deserves the best plan you can get. And that's what we build together.
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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