67. There Is No Right Way to Do Ultrarunning

What if the biggest thing holding you back in ultrarunning isn't your fitness, your training, or your mindset, but a set of rules you never consciously agreed to? Many of us unknowingly carry beliefs about what an ultrarunner is supposed to do, what races we're supposed to run, how much we're supposed to suffer, or what success is supposed to look like. Over time, those expectations can quietly turn a sport we love into something that feels heavy.

In this episode, I challenge some of the most common assumptions in ultrarunning and explain why they aren't facts at all, contrary to what we may believe. Through stories from my own running journey as well as clients I've coached, I show what becomes possible when you stop chasing someone else's version of ultrarunning and start defining your own.

If you've ever felt like ultrarunning has become more pressure than play, this episode will help you find your way back to the reason you started running in the first place. Discover how to identify the hidden rules that may be stealing your enjoyment of the sport, why there is no single "right" way to be an ultrarunner, and how creating your own definition of success can lead to greater confidence, self-trust, and longevity in the sport.

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 many of the "rules" of ultrarunning aren't rules at all.

  • How unexamined beliefs can quietly drain the joy from the sport.

  • Where these hidden rules come from, and how they shape our decisions.

  • Why there is no single right way to approach ultrarunning.

  • Why questioning old beliefs around ultrarunning can completely change your relationship with the sport.

  • How to create an ultrarunning experience that fits your life and your goals.

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 nothing you have to do in this sport is actually true? Listen on. This episode might change how you see ultrarunning for the better.

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 67. I have been looking forward a long time to talking about this philosophy. It's how I've approached ultrarunning differently than most people since day one for me in the sport. And it's the main reason I've loved doing this sport for 30 years and something that regularly helps clients find the joy and love of the sport that they thought they'd lost. So I'm really excited to share this.

Let's start here. See how many of these statements I'm about to read off to you seem like facts, obvious facts.

Number one, you have to always be pushing. You aren't supposed to take downtime unless you can absolutely help it.

Number two, you have to always be going for longer and bigger races. A 100-miler is more legitimate than a 50K; a 200 is more legitimate than a 100.

Number three, you have to intentionally subject yourself to suffering to be doing it right. The more it hurts, the more legit you are.

Number four, you have to finish everything to be good. But if you never DNF, you're not trying hard enough either. And if you do DNF, you have to redeem it.

Number five, you have to be crushing things. It's you against something else: the trail, your competition, the distance, the miles, the hours, the mountains, yourself, your demons, something.

Number six, you have to run the big famous races: Western States, UTMB, Moab 240, Hardrock. A local 50-miler with 40 finishers doesn't count.

Number seven, if you're not a pro making a living at it, you have to call this a hobby. Otherwise, it's embarrassing. I mean, who do you think you are? And it's irresponsible to spend too much on this without something to show for it.

Do any of those sound familiar? Maybe you nodded at one, maybe you nodded at all of those. Here's the thing though, these aren't true. These aren't facts. There's no rulebook for how to be an ultrarunner. There's no ultra police lurking out there to judge your 50K performance or whether you're suffering enough. Somewhere along the way, you picked these rules up anyway. And once you internalize a rule, even one you never agreed to, you start following it and measuring yourself against it.

And here's what that costs you. You spend years trying your hardest to do all of these right, only to feel ultrarunning growing heavier. And when you try to put that heaviness into words, you say, "It's just not fun anymore." And if you try to ignore that feeling, it eventually becomes, "I just don't want to do this anymore." And many runners don't. I don't want that for you. I want you to run and love ultras as long as you want to.

So before we dive into the content of this episode, I want to focus for a moment on what to get out of this episode. You may listen to this and think it doesn't apply to you because you don't believe anything in that list I just read off. And that's great if that's true. But what I really want you to do with this episode is ask yourself what rules you're still following that maybe I didn't name.

Because I didn't list every myth about how we might think that we're supposed to do ultrarunning right because otherwise, we'd be here all day. That list of seven I gave you was just a sample. So look for the examples I give here in this episode in your own beliefs and any rules like them that you've never questioned, especially beliefs about how it's supposed to be or how it's supposed to be done that are holding you back and destroying the joy of ultrarunning. Let's get rid of all that.

All right. What causes that heaviness? What's draining the joy out of ultrarunning are those unexamined rules about how you're supposed to do it. The real problem isn't the rules, though; it's that you haven't questioned them. You didn't sit down one day and decide to believe all these things. Nobody does. You pick them up organically from conversations with other runners and comparison to other runners, social media, race highlight videos, race marketing, some other runner's choices, and advice.

I mean, Runner's World just the other day called Western States the Super Bowl of ultrarunning, so that seems like what it is. And these rules probably made a certain amount of sense at the time, or they appealed to your aspirations, or you just didn't have enough experience in the sport yet to think anything different. So that's how rules like this get in, through the side door.

Usually, because they sound reasonable coming from somebody that you respect or admire, or if enough people repeat it, it seems like a fact. But you also probably never stopped to ask, or at least you might not have in a long time, whether they were ever true or whether they even fit the life and the ultrarunning that you have now. So it seems obvious that there's a way ultrarunning is just, quote, "supposed to be." But there isn't.

And here is what I really want you to hear in this episode: there is no right way to do ultrarunning. There's no way it has to look. It can look fast, or it can look slow, all 50Ks or all hundreds. And there's no way it has to feel. It can feel fierce or playful or peaceful or all-in, whatever is true for you today. There's nothing you have to do or achieve. You can finish races or not, and anything in between is right, too.

The sport is your playground. It's not a script or a procedure that you have to follow. It's not a club that you have to apply for and maintain membership in. It is big enough to hold the person who only ever does one 50K a year and loves it, the person chasing UTMB, the person who trains alone and never lines up at the start of a race, the person who's taking a year off from racing and just running trails for the joy of it.

All of them are doing it right because there is no right. There's only whether it's how you want to do ultrarunning right now. Look, ultrarunning is one of the few things in this life that's this big and life-changing that we get to do our own individual way, completely on our own terms. So don't surrender that freedom to a bunch of rules that you don't want and never agreed to. I've helped clients break free of these seemingly all-powerful rules and redefine success for themselves, and I've done it myself. So here are three stories: two client stories and one of mine.

First of all, take one of my clients. She came to me wanting to love ultrarunning again. She used to race, and for various reasons, she burned out on the pressure and expectations of others. Her life priorities, in the meantime, had also changed, but she still craved solo runs on trails. She still loved running trail, and she had access to great trails. She wanted to run like long or short, whatever she could fit in.

But she felt like she was in this really odd place, wanting to do the daily running that she did when she was training for races and do her own ultra distance but not actually race. So the question that nagged at her was, "Am I still an ultrarunner?" I worked with her to let go of those rules and give herself permission to do ultrarunning however she wanted and what fit her life. To do what she wanted, not what she thought she should or what other people expected of her or what she thought she had to, to be an ultrarunner. And she found her joy again.

Another client was running big races but wasn't having fun at it anymore. She's a super capable runner. She's run hundreds, a 200, Cocodona 250, all races that she wanted to do and is proud of doing, rightfully so. But there's been this growing heaviness of it not being fun anymore that actually literally stopped her in her last hundred. She just decided to stop. She was perfectly able to finish and just decided to stop. So, of course, we looked at why.

And we found that one of these common, unexamined rules was creating the problem: that you always have to be pushing for longer, harder, faster things. She was doing it. She was proud of doing it, and she was glad she was doing the races, but that unrelenting pressure to keep upping the bar was unforgiving. And there was no end in sight. There was no letting up, no permission to just kind of coast and enjoy it in any form, to even enjoy the feeling of pushing hard because you're not supposed to enjoy that.

But now that we've uncovered the problem, she's slowly letting go of that belief and learning to give herself that permission to run what she wants, however she wants, and enjoy it. And that still might be big things, but this time around, doing it for the love of it, not because she has to.

All right, then there's my story about rules. I did not set out to run 100 hundred-mile races. When I ran my first hundred, I fell in absolute love with the whole experience: the distance, the adventure of the unknown, the way it shows you that you have so much more in you than you think, that you can do something that seems impossible, even now seems impossible. And in that first hundred, I met a wonderful, experienced hundred-mile runner and asked him as we were running along together about his goals.

And he said he wanted to run all 33 hundred-mile races that existed at the time. Can you believe that there ever was such a time? Yep, I thought that sounded like a fun goal, like all 33 hundreds because I was really enjoying this hundred I was in. Until I got home and I looked at what that actually meant, what that list of 33 hundreds actually looked like. It looked like running a lot of races that didn't appeal to me just to be able to say that I'd done all 33.

And that is the moment I decided I need to make my own decisions about how I want to do ultrarunning. I have enough rules in the rest of my life, work and everything else. This, ultrarunning, is my playground, and I'm going to keep it that way. So I decided that when I had a weekend to race, I'd go for a hundred, and one that interested me instead of the distances and the races that rule said I was supposed to do and supposed to want to do.

Because I loved hundreds. That's it. That's the whole reason. And I wanted to do them forever. That's why I eventually hit 100 of them. And that's also when the point got buried. Because runners saw this number that I and a few others had reached and turned it into a stat to rack up. The same thing that almost pulled me in years earlier with that runner and his 33 races. I watched my fun turn into a new rule.

And the new rule was this: achieve this feat, hit this number, and you'll be a respected ultrarunner. You'll have made it. I want to be clear about what that number actually was for me. 100 hundreds wasn't a goal. It was the byproduct of loving something for three decades. Like, how lucky is that? I wasn't chasing the number; I was chasing the feeling that I got every time I lined up for a hundred and did it, a feeling I still get today. So that number is just a number.

It isn't the love and the life that went into creating the number. But to other people looking from the outside, it can look like a membership or proof. So runners chased it like that and hit it, and then nothing happened because there's no club, there's no secret handshake, no morning where you wake up magically different because a number changed. If you weren't the person you wanted to be at 99 finishes, you weren't going to be that person at 100 either. The number can't do the work.

It's just a number, and that dismays me, watching people chase that number just for the number and then reach it and find nothing magical waiting for them. Because again, for me, it's never been about the number. It's been about giving myself permission to indulge in something amazing that I love doing that gives me the adventure that I always wanted in life, that makes me feel alive. That just so happened to get me there to that number.

So that stuck feeling, that heaviness that ultrarunning might have right now, training or racing starting to feel like a chore instead of something you love? If any of that's familiar, it can be coming from rules that you don't even realize you're following, exactly the kind of thing I help my clients work through one-on-one. And it starts with unearthing the rules that you've been following without questioning.

So here's what I want you to walk away from this episode with: there is no right way to do ultrarunning. You don't have to be always pushing. Breaks aren't earned. You can take as much break as you want whenever you want for whatever reason you want. You don't have to race at a certain frequency or at all. You don't always have to be going for longer or bigger or faster races. You don't have to seek out suffering to be legit or a beast or impressive. Suffering and pain isn't the point. What you can do is.

You don't have to finish everything to be a great ultrarunner, and you don't have to DNF just to prove that you're trying hard things. How crazy is all of that? You don't have to redeem yourself or compensate for a DNF. You can simply walk away from it. You don't have to fight against things. You can work with the trail, your competition, the distance, the miles, the hours, the mountains, yourself, and yes, your demons. You don't have to run the big races ever. And you don't have to be a pro or a brand ambassador or have something to show for it to take your ultrarunning seriously.

The only rule? Decide what, when, where, and why you do it for your own reasons. That's it. Now, maybe there are a few rules in the list I read out at the top of the episode that you want to keep for now. And that's fine. This isn't about tearing everything down overnight. But here's what I've seen. When my clients shed these rules, they level up in confidence, in self-trust, and in their willingness to take bold risks.

Best of all, the joy comes back bigger than before. And when you enjoy something more, you want to keep doing it. It stops being a chore. It stops being something you dread. It becomes something that gives back to you, something you value and want to prioritize. That then creates longevity. That's how you get to do this for years, decades like me, if you want. That's how I have.

One of the reasons I've been running ultras for 30 years, one of the reasons I'm doing this episode today, is because I decided early on that I was going to do it my way. I wanted to explore the sport and my own capability and limits. I wanted to use it to see beautiful places and have adventures, not get good at following a bunch of rules that somebody else made up about how I should do it.

Ultrarunning is my playground. I'm not here to impress anybody. I'm here to have fun, to see what I'm capable of, and to live life to the fullest instead of watching it go by. And you can do that too. Because there's no right way to do ultrarunning. There's only your way.

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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Susan Donnelly

Susan is a life coach for ultrarunners. She helps ultrarunners build the mental and emotional management skills so they can see what they’re capable of.

http://www.susanidonnelly.com
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66. Making Big Race Decisions When There Is No Right Answer