57. Running an Ultra When the Odds Are Against You
What do you do when the odds say you probably won’t succeed? In this episode, I’m breaking down what ultra runners can learn from one of the biggest long shot victories in sports and how to keep believing in yourself when the outcome feels uncertain.
When you’re facing a race that feels intimidating, whether it’s a new distance, a comeback after a DNF, or a goal that feels bigger than anything you’ve done before, waiting for proof that you can succeed will keep you stuck. The real shift happens when you stop letting the odds dictate your decisions and start choosing to believe that success is possible, even before you know exactly how it will happen.
In this episode, you’ll discover how to build belief when the odds are against you, how to gather evidence that supports possibility, and how to keep acting on that belief all the way to your own breakthrough moment. I’ll show you how long shots win big races and how you can apply that same mindset to your own ultra running goals.
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.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why waiting for proof keeps runners from pursuing big goals.
The first mental shift required when the odds feel stacked against you.
What it means to be “thick-minded” about possibility.
How to build belief without needing certainty.
Why evidence matters more than doubt.
How race plans help you stay committed when pressure rises.
What it takes to create your own breakthrough race moment.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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!
VIDEO CLIP: Golden Tempo Wins Kentucky Derby 2026 at 23-1 | Cherie DeVaux Makes History
VIDEO CLIP: Overhead view of Golden Tempo's massive Kentucky Derby 2026 comeback finish | NBC Sports
Episodes Related to Running an Ultra When the Odds Are Against You:
Ep #40. Belonging in Ultra Running: Run Like You Deserve to Be There
Ep #45. Self Validation: The Skill That Makes You Unstoppable
Ep #48. What Ultra Runners Can Learn from Olympic Champion Eileen Gu
Full Episode Transcript:
A 23-1 long shot came from last place in the final stretch to win one of the most prestigious, most watched horse races in the world, the Kentucky Derby. The trainer, the jockey, and the horse had one thing in common. It was the biggest race of their lives, and none of them had ever done it before. Sound familiar?
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 57. This episode will air a week or two after the race, but as I'm recording this, a 23-1 long shot horse just won the Kentucky Derby. It's the horse with the longest odds to win in decades, and it wasn't just a win. If you watch the race, you saw it. The horse, Golden Tempo, came from beyond last place, several lengths behind the next to last of the 17 horses out there. In the absolute final stretch and edged out everyone else in the race, including the favorites, at the wire. Went from DFL to first. It was a spectacular, inspiring race. I must have watched the videos 50 times, and I'll include links to a few of the clips in the show notes for this episode.
But as if that wasn't enough, it's also a huge accomplishment because the trainer, Cherie DeVaux, became the first solo woman trainer to win the Kentucky Derby in its 152-year history, the first one. And when somebody asked her afterwards how she felt going into the race, she didn't say that she hoped they had a shot. She said that she believed they were going to win. Today's episode is about what it takes to believe something big when the odds are against you, and you don't know how it's going to turn out.
And first, to set this up, to give you the context, I need to talk about the odds, those 23-1 odds, and how delusional it could have seemed to believe the Golden Tempo could win. Golden Tempo's 23-1 odds means the people who study this stuff for a living looked at the field of horses and said, this particular horse has about a four percent chance of winning. Four percent. I had to look that math up, by the way, to put it in percentages I could relate to. I didn't do that calculation, but four percent. That's not zero, but it is darn close. And that's not some arbitrary number that somebody just reached for or thought would sound good. This number comes from handicappers, people who bet on horses, analysts, a lot of people who watch horses run for a living. All of them collectively saying, "Hmm, probably not this horse."
So, when you're standing in the paddock at Churchill Downs, which is where the Kentucky Derby is run, surrounded by 17 other horses at that elite level and the noise of 150,000 people watching you from the stands, that number, 23-1, seems like a fact. It probably even seems optimistic. The best you could hope for is just to be in the race, just to get in the race, and that should be enough for you.
So, the horse, Golden Tempo, the trainer, Cherie DeVaux, the jockey, Jose Ortiz, none of them raced that way. They all raced to win. They didn't race like, "Oh, just being here is good enough." They raced to win. And you can probably imagine what being a long shot to finish feels like in ultra running. It's that voice that shows up when you're registering for the race or registering for a distance that you've never finished. The odds in your head comes from what other people say, other people's doubts, and your own history of races, and sometimes just the math of how hard this race is. And you know what feeling like that much of a long shot feels like, too. If you weren't just two to one odds, but you were 23-1 odds and you're standing at the starting line of a race you've dreamed of for years or towing the line after a DNF, when everyone around you and all the evidence says you can't, you can imagine how hard that would be to believe.
The question isn't whether those odds are real. The question is whether you let them decide how you race. DeVaux, Cherie DeVaux didn't ignore the odds. She knew the odds, and she knew exactly where her horse sat in the field compared to the other ones. She just made a different decision about what to do with that information instead of letting it freak her out. And that's what this episode is about, how you decide you can win when everything says you can't.
So, let's start here at this point. None of the three, the trainer, the jockey, or the horse, had done this before. In 152 years of Kentucky Derby history, no woman had ever won it as a solo trainer, not once. So, Cherie DeVaux, the trainer, couldn't follow the example somebody else had made or the footsteps. She didn't have anybody to model after. She would have to blaze this trail on her own. And Jose Ortiz had tried the race. He had ridden that race 10 times and not been on a winner. 10 Derby starts without being on the winner.
Put yourself in his shoes. Imagine 10 tries at finishing one of the hugest races in your career with all DNFs. That's a lot of chances. That's 10 long years. That's not just 10 tries at this race, that's 10 years of having it emphasized that you're not going to be on the winner, 10 years to decide it's probably not going to happen. But that's 10 times that he went ahead and loaded into that starting gate anyway.
And the horse, Golden Tempo? The horse had five career starts, five races before the Derby, okay? Five. Three of those were wins, none of those were seconds, and two of those were thirds. So, a very mixed record. But good enough for Cherie to decide that he belonged at that race with those other horses at that level. The point here is that none of them had proof. They all had to start with a decision that it was possible. And that's exactly where you are with an intimidating race that you've never run or a distance that you've never attempted or a race that you've tried but never finished.
You don't get proof in advance. Nobody does. DeVaux didn't get proof from the past 152 years, for sure. Ortiz didn't get proof after his 10 tries. Golden Tempo didn't have solid proof in his five races. You're not going to get proof that you will do it before the race. And waiting to race until you do have the proof and you do know that you will finish, that means you're never going to race, and you're never going to discover what's actually impossible. If you keep waiting on the proof that's not there, you're going to be waiting forever.
So, the first move here isn't even believing that you will win or you will finish, it's just deciding that you could. Just that you could. That's the first step you have to take, and you can take that right now.
The next step is what DeVaux did once she decided that it was possible, once she made that decision that it was possible that they could finish, they could win. She described herself as, and I'm quoting her here, "one of those thick-minded people that thinks it's always going to work out." Thick-minded. This is a slightly odd term, so when I heard that quote, it really caught my attention, and I didn't want to just assume that she meant stubborn, just, "I'm a stubborn person." So, I did a little bit of research to find out what she means by thick-minded, and I learned that it's more than that. To her, thick-minded means someone who believes that things will work out even when she doesn't know how. So, when she says thick-minded, she doesn't just mean stubborn. She means stubborn about the possibility. That is a huge distinction.
I want to take a moment with that phrase, "thick-minded," because it's easy to hear that as a personality type, just she's just wired that way. She came out of the womb that way, and some of us just are, and some of us just aren't. But that's not what she's saying here. She's saying that being thick-minded is deciding where to put your attention when the outcome isn't certain and stubbornly sticking with it.
And I can 100% vouch for this. Believing things will work out even when you don't know how is something I've literally done my entire ultra career. Races with even slim odds are going to work out for me somehow and also be more fun. It's going to be more fun to find out how they work out. But it's why I'm able to find so much value even in the rare DNF. I believe that race, that DNF also worked out for me. In fact, it's all working out for me. It's just on me to figure out how it's working out. And I believe in that so much that I actually wear that on a bracelet.
So, that is not optimism. Being stubborn about the possibility is not optimism, it's a choice about how you see your ultra running. Because halfway through your race, that voice is going to tell you all the reasons that you can't make it, and it's going to be very convincing about why this isn't your day. Thick-mindedness isn't pretending that voice isn't there, it's hearing that voice and deciding that it doesn't get a vote in your race. It just doesn't get a vote today.
That's exactly what I teach clients, how to notice the thought, not argue with it being there, but to decide what they want to think instead. But it starts with you understanding that what you think is not just something that happens to you. It's not just something that is passive, it's something that you actually do. You get to decide what you want to think in training, and you do it with your training plan. You build your training plan around what you know.
Like your body, what it's capable of, what the race demands, your strengths, what training fits into your life, and then you stick with that plan even when everyone else around you is doing something different and that voice says that maybe their plan is right. And you also get to do this on race day. You run the plan that you made before the race when you were thinking strategically and clearly, not in the middle of the race when your mind can be a little bit here and there. You don't run the plan that fear or comparison wants to command you to use halfway through the race.
DeVaux and Ortiz built their race plan together. She brought what she knew about the horse and what she had seen it be capable of. He brought what he knew about riding that horse's in his other races. He had been the jockey for that horse in its other races. And he also brought his Derby experience because he had those 10 tries and they both knew that the horse was a closer, was good at sprinting to the finish. Really, its strengths were in the last bit. And they each had to trust what the other one knew and trust that the plan that they built between them, the race plan that they built between them, was worth sticking to in the race that was this important, life-changing for them. So they had to trust that the plan was going to work in this big race.
That's what DeVaux did. She bet on her training, on training the horse, her knowledge, her process, and every day without a guarantee. You're doing the same thing. Think about it this way. Your doubt doesn't get to predict your future. You always get to be stubborn about your possibility, okay?
Next, here's what Cherie DeVaux didn't do to build her belief in that possibility. She didn't look at the field of other 17 other horses and decide that Golden Tempo was the best horse in the race and he was going to win. She didn't go full on unicorns and daisies here. She didn't ignore the odds, and she didn't try to pretend that she was confident and manufacture some fake feeling of certainty that she didn't have.
What she did do, though, was look at what she knew about her horse. Golden Tempo's career before the Derby, I said, had only five starts. Three were wins, there were zero seconds, and two-thirds. And the most recent results were the third-place finishes. So, not exactly what you want. You'd rather them be the wins, but okay. And she knew what she'd seen in the very last race before the Derby, which was the Louisiana Derby.
Results-wise, in that race, Golden Tempo was a close third place, but she saw how he raced. And she saw that he was getting there in the final stretch. She saw the progress he made in the final stretch, specifically from the eighth pole to the wire. And the way he closed in the shorter Louisiana Derby convinced her that given the slightly longer course in the Kentucky Derby, that would give him enough time to actually do the work he didn't have a chance to in the Louisiana Derby and close first at the wire. He would have enough distance to do that.
She didn't dwell on the fact that he finished third in the Louisiana Derby. It just wasn't important. Instead, she looked at what he could do and where he was the strongest and how they could make the most of that in the Kentucky Derby. His ability to handle distance, close enormous gaps at the end, and keep improving. And in that final stretch, when other horses were fading, she saw that her horse was coming on strong. She had proof of that strength. She'd seen it, she had the evidence. So, that helped her have more faith that they could work that to their advantage here.
What she's doing here that I want you to take for your ultra running is the opposite of dwelling on doubt and failures. She was looking for evidence and she found it, and you have evidence too. Think about the races you finished that you weren't sure you would. And all the miles that you logged in long runs, all the miles you logged in training. The strengths that you know. Maybe you're not super fast, but you're incredibly, solidly consistent for hours on pace. Then think about all the improvements you've made to solve things like your feet's tendency to blister. All the improvements you've made since your last race. That is all evidence. That's your evidence. That all counts.
So, the question isn't whether you have enough proof to be certain, 100% certain that you can hit your goal. I said, you're just not going to have that. But you don't need to have that because the question is whether you're willing to find the proof that it's possible. We're talking possibility here, not certainty. So, the question is, what evidence do you have right now? What's your Louisiana Derby? Because there is something there. You have strengths, you have assets, you have evidence. There is always evidence.
And DeVaux's next move after deciding that it was possible was to find the evidence that she had enough to go on, that they had a chance to win. So, do what she did. Start a list. Make your evidence bank. Write down everything you can find and keep adding to that as you're going through training. It's one of the first things I do with clients. But belief starts here. It starts not with certainty, somehow magically appearing out of thin air one day. It starts with your decision to use what you already know and what you already have about what you can do and what your strengths are and all of that.
And next thing is, you act on all that. You act on possibility, and you act knowing you have this evidence, which is exactly what Ortiz did in the race with Golden Tempo.
So, first, I have to tell you a little bit about horse tracks. In horse racing, the finish line is called home. And those poles, if you ever watch this, if you watch the clips, you'll see white and colored poles along the track on the inside of the track. Those mark the distance from home. So, if you watch the video of the Derby that we'll put in the show notes, you'll see black and white striped poles marking the 16ths of the course. The 3/16ths pole, there's one close to the end. We count down. The 3/16ths pole is almost all of the 16ths around the track. There's only 3/16ths left. That means it's 3/16ths of a mile from home, about 330 meters out. That's 1.87/10ths of a mile. Think about that. That's less than two-tenths of a mile going at the speed of a horse. So that's roughly two city blocks from the end of a mile-and-a-quarter race, which means all of that means very late, not just late, but very late to come from behind.
And that's when Cherie DeVaux, watching the race, said she knew. She didn't know at the start. She watched them start. And not when they loaded in the starting gate, she didn't know it then. She didn't even know it at the halfway point. She knew it was happening when the race was almost over. When Golden Tempo and Jose Ortiz reached the 3/16ths pole, what she saw was something shift, and she felt it. She felt, "We're going to win this."
And if you watch the race, you understand why. Ortiz had held Golden Tempo back deliberately and patiently. That is so, so hard. But he did that exactly as planned. Last place, lagging last place through most of the race, several lengths behind the next to last horse while 17 other horses surged and jostled for position. He waited in the back, trusting the plan, which again is so hard to do, trusting the plan, trusting the horse, as the stakes kept getting higher and the pressure kept getting higher. And then on the last turn, he had Golden Tempo run to his strengths as a closer from absolute dead last to the win in the final stretch in the final straightaway. They've come around the last turn. That is not luck. That is belief in action.
And there's a split screen video, I'm going to see if I can find it and attach it in the show notes, of DeVaux, and the horses on the track and you can see she's in the top and their horse races in the bottom, and you can see that at the 3/16ths moment, you can see that moment on her face. And what strikes me about that, watching that, that's so much like ultra running. She didn't need to know at the start of the race that it would work, that this plan of theirs would work, that all the training that they had done would work. Ortiz and Golden Tempo just needed to run the race plan until that moment arrived.
And this is part of what's hardest to talk to ultra runners about because believing you can do something before you know how it turns out, I know, feels delusional, especially if it's this big. And when it feels delusional, acting on it anyway feels a little crazy. You're setting yourself up for a big fall. It's hard to do that. If you let yourself believe and then that doesn't happen, the disappointment is going to be unimaginable, you think. So instead, you hedge and you say, "I'm going to try and do it. I hope I can do it. If everything goes right, I'm going to do it," because that feels safer.
But what hedging actually costs you every decision you make in training and the race flows from what you believe is possible about the outcome. That means every decision, every mile, everything you do, how you pace, how you fuel, how you talk to yourself halfway through the race, how hard you fight for your goal near the end, it all comes from what you think is possible. And if you go in the race half-decided that it isn't going to work until you're proven otherwise, until you have some nice tidy proof, your decisions are going to reflect that quietly, consistently, every step of the way. You can't find your own 3/16ths pole moment if you never fully check into the race.
Believing you can finish that it is possible and really deciding it, committing to it, not just hoping it isn't a guarantee. Belief is not a guarantee. It's not magical thinking that somehow once you say you believe or you believe enough that it's magically going to happen. DeVaux could have believed with everything she had, and Golden Tempo could have still faded in that final stretch. So know this. Belief doesn't control the outcome, but what it does control is how you run when you believe that the outcome is still possible.
And again, what does that look like? It looks like making every decision as if you are finishing, you are hitting your goal. Fueling with care as if your body is going to need what you put in at mile 60 to still be running at mile 99.9, pacing as if you have the full distance to run, not wondering to yourself in your head how you're going to do it, answering how in your head instead. You don't have to feel it yet. You just have to decide that it's possible and act on that decision until you do feel it.
And stay open to the possibility the entire way because somewhere on that course there is the moment that Cherie DeVaux saw in her race. There is that moment waiting for you. It could be mile 60 out of 100, it could be mile 85 out of 100. It could be when you hear the finish line and you know you're within hearing distance. You'll feel something shift and you'll know it's your 3/16ths moment.
But you can only get to that moment if you decide to believe all the way there. Can't believe halfway, you can't believe only part of the way, you got to believe it's possible all the way there. That's what I want you to take from this race. DeVaux and Ortiz didn't know at the starting gate. They decided to believe long before the starting gate, believe in the possibility that it was possible. And at the 3/16ths pole, at the very end, reality caught up to what they'd already chosen to believe. Reality caught up to them and their belief. Your race works exactly the same way.
From the outside, this race looks like a miracle or a fluke. It is so fun to watch on video. A 23-1 long shot comes from last place to win at the very end. A first time Derby-winning trainer, a jockey earning his first Derby win in 10 years of trying. And none of that happened by chance. Big things like that happened when you decide to believe before you have proof. And then act on that decision that it is possible all the way to the finish line. Cherie DeVaux, Jose Ortiz, and Golden Tempo didn't just walk into Churchill Downs knowing that they were going to win, they believed it was possible.
And they decided that things were going to work out. And they gathered the evidence to prove that it could work out, and then they took action like it would work out, all the way through the finish line. They walked in having decided to race like they could do it. And that's how Cherie DeVaux became the first woman trainer to train a Derby winner. And how Jose Ortiz broke his 10-year streak to win his first Kentucky Derby. And how Golden Tempo did what the odds setters didn't expect and came from dead last in the final stretch to win and made history doing it.
They didn't have the odds in their favor. They didn't have proof that they would do it. They didn't know exactly how it would happen. But they had a decision and the guts to act on it. You don't have to ignore your odds. You just have to make your own decision about what to do with that information. Decide it's possible, act on that decision, and go create your own 3/16ths moment.
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 57. This episode will air a week or two after the race, but as I'm recording this, a 23-1 long shot horse just won the Kentucky Derby. It's the horse with the longest odds to win in decades, and it wasn't just a win. If you watch the race, you saw it. The horse, Golden Tempo, came from beyond last place, several lengths behind the next to last of the 17 horses out there. In the absolute final stretch and edged out everyone else in the race, including the favorites, at the wire. Went from DFL to first. It was a spectacular, inspiring race. I must have watched the videos 50 times, and I'll include links to a few of the clips in the show notes for this episode.
But as if that wasn't enough, it's also a huge accomplishment because the trainer, Cherie DeVaux, became the first solo woman trainer to win the Kentucky Derby in its 152-year history, the first one. And when somebody asked her afterwards how she felt going into the race, she didn't say that she hoped they had a shot. She said that she believed they were going to win. Today's episode is about what it takes to believe something big when the odds are against you, and you don't know how it's going to turn out.
And first, to set this up, to give you the context, I need to talk about the odds, those 23-1 odds, and how delusional it could have seemed to believe the Golden Tempo could win. Golden Tempo's 23-1 odds means the people who study this stuff for a living looked at the field of horses and said, this particular horse has about a four percent chance of winning. Four percent. I had to look that math up, by the way, to put it in percentages I could relate to. I didn't do that calculation, but four percent. That's not zero, but it is darn close. And that's not some arbitrary number that somebody just reached for or thought would sound good. This number comes from handicappers, people who bet on horses, analysts, a lot of people who watch horses run for a living. All of them collectively saying, "Hmm, probably not this horse."
So, when you're standing in the paddock at Churchill Downs, which is where the Kentucky Derby is run, surrounded by 17 other horses at that elite level and the noise of 150,000 people watching you from the stands, that number, 23-1, seems like a fact. It probably even seems optimistic. The best you could hope for is just to be in the race, just to get in the race, and that should be enough for you.
So, the horse, Golden Tempo, the trainer, Cherie DeVaux, the jockey, Jose Ortiz, none of them raced that way. They all raced to win. They didn't race like, "Oh, just being here is good enough." They raced to win. And you can probably imagine what being a long shot to finish feels like in ultra running. It's that voice that shows up when you're registering for the race or registering for a distance that you've never finished. The odds in your head comes from what other people say, other people's doubts, and your own history of races, and sometimes just the math of how hard this race is. And you know what feeling like that much of a long shot feels like, too. If you weren't just two to one odds, but you were 23-1 odds and you're standing at the starting line of a race you've dreamed of for years or towing the line after a DNF, when everyone around you and all the evidence says you can't, you can imagine how hard that would be to believe.
The question isn't whether those odds are real. The question is whether you let them decide how you race. DeVaux, Cherie DeVaux didn't ignore the odds. She knew the odds, and she knew exactly where her horse sat in the field compared to the other ones. She just made a different decision about what to do with that information instead of letting it freak her out. And that's what this episode is about, how you decide you can win when everything says you can't.
So, let's start here at this point. None of the three, the trainer, the jockey, or the horse, had done this before. In 152 years of Kentucky Derby history, no woman had ever won it as a solo trainer, not once. So, Cherie DeVaux, the trainer, couldn't follow the example somebody else had made or the footsteps. She didn't have anybody to model after. She would have to blaze this trail on her own. And Jose Ortiz had tried the race. He had ridden that race 10 times and not been on a winner. 10 Derby starts without being on the winner.
Put yourself in his shoes. Imagine 10 tries at finishing one of the hugest races in your career with all DNFs. That's a lot of chances. That's 10 long years. That's not just 10 tries at this race, that's 10 years of having it emphasized that you're not going to be on the winner, 10 years to decide it's probably not going to happen. But that's 10 times that he went ahead and loaded into that starting gate anyway.
And the horse, Golden Tempo? The horse had five career starts, five races before the Derby, okay? Five. Three of those were wins, none of those were seconds, and two of those were thirds. So, a very mixed record. But good enough for Cherie to decide that he belonged at that race with those other horses at that level. The point here is that none of them had proof. They all had to start with a decision that it was possible. And that's exactly where you are with an intimidating race that you've never run or a distance that you've never attempted or a race that you've tried but never finished.
You don't get proof in advance. Nobody does. DeVaux didn't get proof from the past 152 years, for sure. Ortiz didn't get proof after his 10 tries. Golden Tempo didn't have solid proof in his five races. You're not going to get proof that you will do it before the race. And waiting to race until you do have the proof and you do know that you will finish, that means you're never going to race, and you're never going to discover what's actually impossible. If you keep waiting on the proof that's not there, you're going to be waiting forever.
So, the first move here isn't even believing that you will win or you will finish, it's just deciding that you could. Just that you could. That's the first step you have to take, and you can take that right now.
The next step is what DeVaux did once she decided that it was possible, once she made that decision that it was possible that they could finish, they could win. She described herself as, and I'm quoting her here, "one of those thick-minded people that thinks it's always going to work out." Thick-minded. This is a slightly odd term, so when I heard that quote, it really caught my attention, and I didn't want to just assume that she meant stubborn, just, "I'm a stubborn person." So, I did a little bit of research to find out what she means by thick-minded, and I learned that it's more than that. To her, thick-minded means someone who believes that things will work out even when she doesn't know how. So, when she says thick-minded, she doesn't just mean stubborn. She means stubborn about the possibility. That is a huge distinction.
I want to take a moment with that phrase, "thick-minded," because it's easy to hear that as a personality type, just she's just wired that way. She came out of the womb that way, and some of us just are, and some of us just aren't. But that's not what she's saying here. She's saying that being thick-minded is deciding where to put your attention when the outcome isn't certain and stubbornly sticking with it.
And I can 100% vouch for this. Believing things will work out even when you don't know how is something I've literally done my entire ultra career. Races with even slim odds are going to work out for me somehow and also be more fun. It's going to be more fun to find out how they work out. But it's why I'm able to find so much value even in the rare DNF. I believe that race, that DNF also worked out for me. In fact, it's all working out for me. It's just on me to figure out how it's working out. And I believe in that so much that I actually wear that on a bracelet.
So, that is not optimism. Being stubborn about the possibility is not optimism, it's a choice about how you see your ultra running. Because halfway through your race, that voice is going to tell you all the reasons that you can't make it, and it's going to be very convincing about why this isn't your day. Thick-mindedness isn't pretending that voice isn't there, it's hearing that voice and deciding that it doesn't get a vote in your race. It just doesn't get a vote today.
That's exactly what I teach clients, how to notice the thought, not argue with it being there, but to decide what they want to think instead. But it starts with you understanding that what you think is not just something that happens to you. It's not just something that is passive, it's something that you actually do. You get to decide what you want to think in training, and you do it with your training plan. You build your training plan around what you know.
Like your body, what it's capable of, what the race demands, your strengths, what training fits into your life, and then you stick with that plan even when everyone else around you is doing something different and that voice says that maybe their plan is right. And you also get to do this on race day. You run the plan that you made before the race when you were thinking strategically and clearly, not in the middle of the race when your mind can be a little bit here and there. You don't run the plan that fear or comparison wants to command you to use halfway through the race.
DeVaux and Ortiz built their race plan together. She brought what she knew about the horse and what she had seen it be capable of. He brought what he knew about riding that horse's in his other races. He had been the jockey for that horse in its other races. And he also brought his Derby experience because he had those 10 tries and they both knew that the horse was a closer, was good at sprinting to the finish. Really, its strengths were in the last bit. And they each had to trust what the other one knew and trust that the plan that they built between them, the race plan that they built between them, was worth sticking to in the race that was this important, life-changing for them. So they had to trust that the plan was going to work in this big race.
That's what DeVaux did. She bet on her training, on training the horse, her knowledge, her process, and every day without a guarantee. You're doing the same thing. Think about it this way. Your doubt doesn't get to predict your future. You always get to be stubborn about your possibility, okay?
Next, here's what Cherie DeVaux didn't do to build her belief in that possibility. She didn't look at the field of other 17 other horses and decide that Golden Tempo was the best horse in the race and he was going to win. She didn't go full on unicorns and daisies here. She didn't ignore the odds, and she didn't try to pretend that she was confident and manufacture some fake feeling of certainty that she didn't have.
What she did do, though, was look at what she knew about her horse. Golden Tempo's career before the Derby, I said, had only five starts. Three were wins, there were zero seconds, and two-thirds. And the most recent results were the third-place finishes. So, not exactly what you want. You'd rather them be the wins, but okay. And she knew what she'd seen in the very last race before the Derby, which was the Louisiana Derby.
Results-wise, in that race, Golden Tempo was a close third place, but she saw how he raced. And she saw that he was getting there in the final stretch. She saw the progress he made in the final stretch, specifically from the eighth pole to the wire. And the way he closed in the shorter Louisiana Derby convinced her that given the slightly longer course in the Kentucky Derby, that would give him enough time to actually do the work he didn't have a chance to in the Louisiana Derby and close first at the wire. He would have enough distance to do that.
She didn't dwell on the fact that he finished third in the Louisiana Derby. It just wasn't important. Instead, she looked at what he could do and where he was the strongest and how they could make the most of that in the Kentucky Derby. His ability to handle distance, close enormous gaps at the end, and keep improving. And in that final stretch, when other horses were fading, she saw that her horse was coming on strong. She had proof of that strength. She'd seen it, she had the evidence. So, that helped her have more faith that they could work that to their advantage here.
What she's doing here that I want you to take for your ultra running is the opposite of dwelling on doubt and failures. She was looking for evidence and she found it, and you have evidence too. Think about the races you finished that you weren't sure you would. And all the miles that you logged in long runs, all the miles you logged in training. The strengths that you know. Maybe you're not super fast, but you're incredibly, solidly consistent for hours on pace. Then think about all the improvements you've made to solve things like your feet's tendency to blister. All the improvements you've made since your last race. That is all evidence. That's your evidence. That all counts.
So, the question isn't whether you have enough proof to be certain, 100% certain that you can hit your goal. I said, you're just not going to have that. But you don't need to have that because the question is whether you're willing to find the proof that it's possible. We're talking possibility here, not certainty. So, the question is, what evidence do you have right now? What's your Louisiana Derby? Because there is something there. You have strengths, you have assets, you have evidence. There is always evidence.
And DeVaux's next move after deciding that it was possible was to find the evidence that she had enough to go on, that they had a chance to win. So, do what she did. Start a list. Make your evidence bank. Write down everything you can find and keep adding to that as you're going through training. It's one of the first things I do with clients. But belief starts here. It starts not with certainty, somehow magically appearing out of thin air one day. It starts with your decision to use what you already know and what you already have about what you can do and what your strengths are and all of that.
And next thing is, you act on all that. You act on possibility, and you act knowing you have this evidence, which is exactly what Ortiz did in the race with Golden Tempo.
So, first, I have to tell you a little bit about horse tracks. In horse racing, the finish line is called home. And those poles, if you ever watch this, if you watch the clips, you'll see white and colored poles along the track on the inside of the track. Those mark the distance from home. So, if you watch the video of the Derby that we'll put in the show notes, you'll see black and white striped poles marking the 16ths of the course. The 3/16ths pole, there's one close to the end. We count down. The 3/16ths pole is almost all of the 16ths around the track. There's only 3/16ths left. That means it's 3/16ths of a mile from home, about 330 meters out. That's 1.87/10ths of a mile. Think about that. That's less than two-tenths of a mile going at the speed of a horse. So that's roughly two city blocks from the end of a mile-and-a-quarter race, which means all of that means very late, not just late, but very late to come from behind.
And that's when Cherie DeVaux, watching the race, said she knew. She didn't know at the start. She watched them start. And not when they loaded in the starting gate, she didn't know it then. She didn't even know it at the halfway point. She knew it was happening when the race was almost over. When Golden Tempo and Jose Ortiz reached the 3/16ths pole, what she saw was something shift, and she felt it. She felt, "We're going to win this."
And if you watch the race, you understand why. Ortiz had held Golden Tempo back deliberately and patiently. That is so, so hard. But he did that exactly as planned. Last place, lagging last place through most of the race, several lengths behind the next to last horse while 17 other horses surged and jostled for position. He waited in the back, trusting the plan, which again is so hard to do, trusting the plan, trusting the horse, as the stakes kept getting higher and the pressure kept getting higher. And then on the last turn, he had Golden Tempo run to his strengths as a closer from absolute dead last to the win in the final stretch in the final straightaway. They've come around the last turn. That is not luck. That is belief in action.
And there's a split screen video, I'm going to see if I can find it and attach it in the show notes, of DeVaux, and the horses on the track and you can see she's in the top and their horse races in the bottom, and you can see that at the 3/16ths moment, you can see that moment on her face. And what strikes me about that, watching that, that's so much like ultra running. She didn't need to know at the start of the race that it would work, that this plan of theirs would work, that all the training that they had done would work. Ortiz and Golden Tempo just needed to run the race plan until that moment arrived.
And this is part of what's hardest to talk to ultra runners about because believing you can do something before you know how it turns out, I know, feels delusional, especially if it's this big. And when it feels delusional, acting on it anyway feels a little crazy. You're setting yourself up for a big fall. It's hard to do that. If you let yourself believe and then that doesn't happen, the disappointment is going to be unimaginable, you think. So instead, you hedge and you say, "I'm going to try and do it. I hope I can do it. If everything goes right, I'm going to do it," because that feels safer.
But what hedging actually costs you every decision you make in training and the race flows from what you believe is possible about the outcome. That means every decision, every mile, everything you do, how you pace, how you fuel, how you talk to yourself halfway through the race, how hard you fight for your goal near the end, it all comes from what you think is possible. And if you go in the race half-decided that it isn't going to work until you're proven otherwise, until you have some nice tidy proof, your decisions are going to reflect that quietly, consistently, every step of the way. You can't find your own 3/16ths pole moment if you never fully check into the race.
Believing you can finish that it is possible and really deciding it, committing to it, not just hoping it isn't a guarantee. Belief is not a guarantee. It's not magical thinking that somehow once you say you believe or you believe enough that it's magically going to happen. DeVaux could have believed with everything she had, and Golden Tempo could have still faded in that final stretch. So know this. Belief doesn't control the outcome, but what it does control is how you run when you believe that the outcome is still possible.
And again, what does that look like? It looks like making every decision as if you are finishing, you are hitting your goal. Fueling with care as if your body is going to need what you put in at mile 60 to still be running at mile 99.9, pacing as if you have the full distance to run, not wondering to yourself in your head how you're going to do it, answering how in your head instead. You don't have to feel it yet. You just have to decide that it's possible and act on that decision until you do feel it.
And stay open to the possibility the entire way because somewhere on that course there is the moment that Cherie DeVaux saw in her race. There is that moment waiting for you. It could be mile 60 out of 100, it could be mile 85 out of 100. It could be when you hear the finish line and you know you're within hearing distance. You'll feel something shift and you'll know it's your 3/16ths moment.
But you can only get to that moment if you decide to believe all the way there. Can't believe halfway, you can't believe only part of the way, you got to believe it's possible all the way there. That's what I want you to take from this race. DeVaux and Ortiz didn't know at the starting gate. They decided to believe long before the starting gate, believe in the possibility that it was possible. And at the 3/16ths pole, at the very end, reality caught up to what they'd already chosen to believe. Reality caught up to them and their belief. Your race works exactly the same way.
From the outside, this race looks like a miracle or a fluke. It is so fun to watch on video. A 23-1 long shot comes from last place to win at the very end. A first time Derby-winning trainer, a jockey earning his first Derby win in 10 years of trying. And none of that happened by chance. Big things like that happened when you decide to believe before you have proof. And then act on that decision that it is possible all the way to the finish line. Cherie DeVaux, Jose Ortiz, and Golden Tempo didn't just walk into Churchill Downs knowing that they were going to win, they believed it was possible.
And they decided that things were going to work out. And they gathered the evidence to prove that it could work out, and then they took action like it would work out, all the way through the finish line. They walked in having decided to race like they could do it. And that's how Cherie DeVaux became the first woman trainer to train a Derby winner. And how Jose Ortiz broke his 10-year streak to win his first Kentucky Derby. And how Golden Tempo did what the odds setters didn't expect and came from dead last in the final stretch to win and made history doing it.
They didn't have the odds in their favor. They didn't have proof that they would do it. They didn't know exactly how it would happen. But they had a decision and the guts to act on it. You don't have to ignore your odds. You just have to make your own decision about what to do with that information. Decide it's possible, act on that decision, and go create your own 3/16ths moment.
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!