Your Ultrarunning Elevator Speech

An accomplished ultrarunner told me she recently realized she had a terrible "elevator pitch" when she talked about her ultra running.

“How do I embrace and communicate who I am without downplaying what I've done or accommodating others’ responses?”

I’ve been there.

People say all kinds of things about your running.

From the outright critical, “You’re ruining your health/knees.”

To the awkward, “I don’t run/can only run 3 miles/wouldn't drive that far/would only run if a bear was chasing me…”

To the amazed, “Wow, how do you do that? I have so many questions!”

I used to come away frustrated from many of these exchanges. I’d jump at the chance to talk about ultrarunning but end up feeling misunderstood for the same terrible elevator pitch reason.

If you want to do better at this, here’s the simple way I fixed it.

First, in one sentence, what do you want your story to be?

Not how you “truthfully” or “accurately” tell it now, being careful to downplay your accomplishments and talk about how slow you go...

How you want to tell the story of the same accomplishments.

Distill down ideas for the new story’s title.

For example, “I can do hard things.” “I’m proud of it.” “I’m constantly becoming a stronger runner and human.” “Everything is possible.”

Pull an elevator pitch sentence or two from your list.

Second, what’s the outcome I want from this conversation, and why?

I used to need to “make” the other person understand my ultrarunning, get them to approve it, or convince them it’s not something to make fun of.

Because it’s important to me so it should be important to them.

No wonder I got frustrated.

But once I focused on outcome, I got ok with letting people not get ultrarunning. Letting them not care. Letting them laugh at it.

It had nothing to do with me, how much I loved it and all the ways it made my life better. There are plenty of things others are passionate about that I don’t get. The people who truly need to understand ultrarunning will be the ones to ask for more. Those are the people that get my attention.

Pick and choose when you want someone to understand or agree with you.

When it’s ok if they don’t.

And when you’re willing to simply listen instead to why they can’t run/run ultras because they feel inadequate next to you and need to feel okayed.

Third, if they’re curious and want more - what’s the simplest, most helpful layer of detail to add?

They’re forming a mental picture of ultrarunning from what you’re telling them.

I used to get lost here, sharing random facts or overwhelming them in my enthusiasm.

Until I decided the next most important details to add to someone’s mental picture.

For example, I tell them a 100-mile race for me typically lasts 24-44 hours. It starts Saturday morning, keeps going all that night and finishes sometime Sunday.

That simple addition often generates more questions - “Do you sleep? Where do you go to the bathroom?” - that lead to an actual, fun conversation about ultrarunning.

How to deal with people in your life - what they do and say, and whether they support you - is one example of what we can coach on.

Running is about training, racing and believing you can do it, but the environment we do that in - the places and people around us - have a big impact.

If you want to get better at all of it, including responding to what other people say and do, the first step is to use this link to set up a consult call.

Better is one decision away.