At my last haircut, a young apprentice I’d never met shampooed my hair. As you do in such moments, we chatted about the weather—specifically, the unusually early snowfall that morning.

She told me she had looked out the window at the snowflakes falling and said to her boyfriend, who was lounging on the couch, “It’s snowing.”

Without bothering to get up and check, he replied, “No, it’s not.”

Ultrarunning Can Look However You Want It to Look

It caught me off guard.

The scent.

I’d run this trail plenty over the years, but never encountered such an exquisite fragrance.

It was probably my imagination or a sense mixup, the way coffee sometimes smells like other things.

Ultrarunning Can Look However You Want It to Look

There’s no “right” way to do ultrarunning. You don’t have to run certain distances, race every month, or maintain a packed calendar of big events. You don’t need to stay in perpetual training mode or chase the races everyone else dreams of.

That’s important to understand, especially when you lose your energy and enthusiasm for ultras. Everyone else is buzzing about lotteries and race schedules, but thinking ahead sparks nothing for you. You’re not up for the intense demands of training—and it worries you.

Running consistently is a good thing, right? 

It helps you prepare for a race and gives you the deep satisfaction of knowing you’re someone who honors their commitments.

Yet many runners struggle with it. They feel they aren’t consistent enough, and no matter how hard they try, they just can’t seem to fix it.

With a new race year approaching and lotteries in progress, your race calendar might be open. You want to sign up for a race, but which one? There are so many options.

The last thing you want is to invest time and training in the wrong race.

When faced with this big decision, runners often delegate it to others - crowdsource ideas online, pick the race everyone says they should do, or choose one that’s supposedly “easy.”

The problem? Making your decisions this way often lacks the strong, personal reason to run—a compelling “why” - you need to have a great race.

You sign up for a race you’re excited about, eager to run well and have a great experience.

One of the first things you do is check the cutoff time. You think, “I just need to stay ahead of this.”

But from there, your mind goes in one of two directions.

A client of mine preparing for a major race just a month away, found herself reaching for perfection.

Perfect training. Perfect mindset. Perfect execution. Up to this point in her ultrarunning, she’d assumed the best way of achieving her goal depended on a flawless race but now, the mere thought of starting that cycle all over again felt like burnout waiting to happen.

In our coaching sessions, we discovered that her need for perfection wasn’t a conscious strategy. Deep down, she felt she needed to insulate herself from the physical pain, fear, and disappointment she anticipated in the race. If everything went perfectly, she reasoned, she could avoid experiencing any of that discomfort.

The Oasis Effect.

It’s the main reason you’re spending more time than you want in aid stations and something I help clients plan for ahead of a race so they can perform their best.

Once you know it, you can manage it.

This weekend volunteering at No Business 100, I watched the difference between runners that dropped when things got tough and runners that went on.

Given the choice, we’d all prefer to have plenty of time on cutoff and never have to give it a thought.

But sometimes, no matter how hard you work, you find yourself losing cushion instead of gaining it. Whether it's heat, a long stop, or relentless climbs, your progress slows. Suddenly, the comfortable buffer you’d counted on disappears, and you’re running close to cutoff - one of the toughest mental battles in ultrarunning.

One of the hardest parts of chasing ultra dreams is staying committed when it feels like your chances are slipping away—especially when you’re not running the way you used to.

Maybe you’ve had a few tough setbacks. You’ve had some unexpected DNFs and dropped out of races you fully expected to finish. Despite your hard training, you keep falling short of your goals. Every time you set a slightly ambitious goal, you miss it.

So, you double down—more miles, more speed work, more hills, more cross-training. But nothing shifts.

When I asked my client how her race went, she replied dejectedly, "I just didn’t do it."

It was her first Backyard Ultra, otherwise known as a Last Runner Standing race. It’s a relatively new ultramarathon format where you have to run a 4.167-mile lap in less than an hour (a 24 hour 100-mile pace) - every hour. 

The race ends when one runner remains and finishes a lap. This last finisher is the winner and only finisher. Second place is labeled the “Assist,” but all other runners get a DNF. No second place – only one winner.

My client entered with the bold goal to win. 

You feel defeated. A section or two ago, you were on top of the world—gliding along the trail, dancing over the rocks, running strong and fast. It was going to be your day, a peak race. You could feel it.

But now, you regret it —you’re in a deep low without the energy to pull yourself out.

Why did you believe the miles could all go that smoothly? Why did you think would could run the whole thing like that? Why did you delude yourself into thinking you deserved that kind of race?

Thinking, “I don’t want to be out here all day,” can come up in training but also in races, especially the longer distances.

This stems from impatience—a desire to rush through the experience to the finish, or to something more exciting. 

But when it becomes your primary focus, it can rob you of the very finish you’re impatient to reach.

A DNF can be painful.

You invested time, trained hard, and ran your best, but it wasn’t enough for a finish.

Our first reaction is to move on quickly and forget about it. You might feel the urge to take a break from running, shift your attention to the next race, or sign up for a ‘redemption race’ to prove the DNF was a fluke and restore your confidence. 

These seem like the best ways to bounce back, right?

But here’s the catch: when you rush to move past the DNF, it can linger in your mind, growing into something bigger than it really is.

Is your reaction to negative thinking, “I shouldn’t think this?”

You might believe that good ultrarunners don’t deal with negative thoughts. After all, negative thinking can make any race miserable, and if left unchecked, can spiral out of control and ruin it.

Since you know what you should be thinking—positive thoughts—the solution seems obvious: replace the negative thoughts with positive ones. Simple, right?

But when that doesn’t work and negative thoughts keep creeping back in, it’s frustrating.

You can be unstoppable - starting today.

It doesn’t matter if you’re slow, back of the pack, or have DNF’d a bunch of races.

The only thing in your way is a simple thought error that’s easy to fix - thinking ‘unstoppable’ means you don’t DNF.