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.

When you sign up for an ultramarathon, you’re excited.

You imagine running it bold, strong, and powerful.

But as the race approaches, the excitement is replaced by anxiety.

One weekend in July, three clients faced three of the toughest mountain 100-mile races in the sport.

None of them finished but all of them accomplished more than that and walked away with the massive jump in confidence you’d think comes only from finishing.

Here’s the five things they did to make that happen.

Ultra logic can be as faulty as ultra math.

(And we know what bad ultra math can do.)

Take these five logic examples from my weekly coaching sessions with clients:

“Everyone is running fast, so I need to.”

You need three things to be ready for a 100-mile race.

And they aren’t what you think.

It isn’t experience. You can have years’ worth of ultramarathon experience and not be ready.

A client was talking about her fall races with another runner, when the runner commented that Western States was really hard and the runners in it highly accomplished.

My client got angry in the moment but blew it off. Later, though, she questioned her own 100s and how they stack up to that type of big name event - Western States, Hardrock, UTMB and The Barkley

Of course negative stuff surfaced, so she asked me why a small statement creates so much negativity.

The antidote to fear is curiosity.

When I signed up for my first 100 mile race, Superior 100, I could have faced fear.

The longest I’d run was 50 miles. I knew people ran 100-mile races but the distance was too immense to hold in my brain at one time, which was worrying. I had no idea what running 100 miles would be like or what could go wrong.

When it comes to setting a race goal, it’s easy to choose one that’s “realistic.”

We believe being realistic is the best way to ensure we’ll finish. Realistic = finishing.

The opposite of realistic is aiming high. It will lead to a DNF, disappointing yourself and others, and looking foolish. Aiming high = aiming too high = irresponsible.

“Wow. I run there.”

Every time I drive to Knoxville I crest one particular hill where Knoxville sprawls ahead but beyond it stands the long, imposing blue ridge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Here I am in the car on the way to shop for groceries or get my hair cut. Everyday, ordinary life stuff.

And there lie the mountains, impossibly high, remote and commanding.

“I run there.”

Your race is a big deal and you want to make it the best it can be.

You work hard to make sure everything goes as planned - pace, nutrition, hydration, pacer, crew, drop bags, aid station stops…

So it’s frustrating when things outside your control sabotage that.

That’s where I was two weeks ago in Ring the Springs 100.

Over the years, I’ve watched clients take breaks from running. One thing I notice is how hard it is to take an actual break until it becomes a crisis, when they’re forced to take a break.

Why do we have to be forced to take a break instead of taking one when we need to?

One of the main reasons for runners is the fear of having to start all over from zero.