I can’t recall when I first noticed that Steve Prefontaine and Cobain had a lot in common, but it was about two years ago that I started digging into their uncanny similarities, parallels, and overlaps. The more I learned, the more my mind was blown. Eventually, I decided to share my findings with the world in video form.

When I sat down with Flagstaff-based videographer Nick Geib to share my vision for this admittedly quirky little project, he got it instantly, and within seconds he was putting forth ideas to make it better. We had a blast filming and producing it together, and I think it shows.

Of the two actors in the video, the best by far is my friend and housemate Skylar Allen, a former Hollywood child actress. The black-and-white photographs of Steve Prefontaine were provided by another ringer, Jeff Johnson, who is best known to the running world as Nike’s first employee and the man who named the company. I’ve known Jeff, who was close to Pre in Nike’s early days since I was fourteen. He’s also the guy who took the photo of Pre that appears on the cover of How Bad Do You Want It? Now in his mid eighties and as sharp as ever, Jeff is a regular reader of Endurance Mastery and I feel blessed to have him in my corner.

If you enjoy the video, you can show your appreciation in two ways: 1) Share the video with your runner friends and 2) buy a copy of my new book, Dying to Run: An Athlete’s Quest for One More Finish.

Thank you!

At gathering time one day, I asked the Dream Runners a simple question: “What’s the worst pain you’ve ever felt?” They all gave different answers, of course, but none of them had any trouble pinpointing their most painful moment, which was what I expected. Pain leaves a mark.

What’s interesting to me is that our individual answers to the pain question change over time. If the worst pain you’ve ever felt doesn’t kill you, it will eventually be surpassed by an even greater pain, which in turn will be surpassed in due time.

The worst pain I experienced growing up was when I blew out my knee on a soccer field at fourteen—not the injury itself but the physical therapy that came after surgery. Once a week for eight weeks, a ham-fisted PT lay me face down on a padded table, gripped my left ankle in two hands, and pressed my heel toward my butt, groaning like a weight lifter as gruesome popping sounds issued from the knee, all in the name of restoring range of motion. My scrawny muscles contracted with full force in some primal effort to create a sensory distraction, my teeth practically soldering themselves together as my fingernails cut semipermanent indentations in the table’s vinyl cover and my brow contracted with such force that my eyeballs were sore the next day. It took 34 years, a pandemic, and a coughing injury to surpass the torture I endured on that padded table.

I’ve always been a cougher. When we were kids, my brother Sean— who had the bedroom across from mine and was kept awake on many a winter’s night by my incessant woofing—accused me of exaggerating the symptom for attention’s sake, but if so, I never outgrew my fakery, and when I caught COVID-19 the woof came back with a vengeance.

Each day began and ended with a half-hour fit of expiratory violence that struck the moment I lifted my head off the pillow in the morning and again the moment I lay down at night. My entire body seized with each hammering convulsion, blowing out a concussive roar so ghastly that Nataki fled the room, unable to bear the sound of me, much less the sight. If you’ve ever encountered a demon-possessed middle-aged man wearing cotton pajamas in the throes of an ill-fated exorcism, you have some idea how I looked and sounded. I coughed up mucus, bile, blood, and—on two occasions—my dinner.

One night I coughed so hard I broke a rib. My brother Josh, who’s a nurse practitioner, says it’s more likely I tore cartilage. Maybe so, but I’m confident an actual broken rib wouldn’t have hurt any more than whatever it was I’d done to myself.

“Imagine being stabbed in the lung with a letter opener,” I told Nataki in an effort to explain why my coughing now conjured images of a gorilla undergoing live castration, each thrust of the letter opener producing a satanic blend of plosive bark and shrill involuntary scream. “Now imagine being stabbed with a letter opener twenty times per minute for thirty minutes.”

The dread itself was dreadful. I braced myself mentally for each new round of torture, knowing exactly what was coming. But there came a night when, braced once more for the letter opener, I coughed with a mite less violence than I had in the morning, and for not as long. Realizing I’d been spared the expected exorcism, I felt a pinch of disappointment followed by a smack of disbelief.

Disappointment! Why? My best guess was that on some level I regarded my coughing fits as tests. COVID-19 wanted to break my spirit, and I wanted to prove it couldn’t. The decades I’d spent cultivating an ability to dominate athletic suffering had bent my mind in such a way that I welcomed my painful coughing fits as opportunities to prove myself. Which is pretty fucked up. But is it any more fucked up than, say, a junkie dying of withdrawal from the very drug that’s killing them? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 53 years, it’s that our bodies and minds can become dependent on just about anything, pain included.

Mind you, I was very glad when my coughing fits petered out. But in the meantime, I accepted them as a personal challenge, and it’s the same now with long COVID. I sometimes imagine I’m in a competition with 99 other long-haulers, and whoever copes most effectively with their suffering wins a prize. Don’t ask me how one measures coping, or what the prize ought to be. It just helps me to think this way.

At dinner last night, Diane asked me what my goal was for today, and I gave a slightly different but no less truthful answer than I’d given Dhani in the van: “I want this race to be the most painful thing I’ve ever done.” Which sounds masochistic, but it’s not. Pain is life’s greatest inevitability. You have to be good at pain to get by in life. That’s why long-distance running is so popular—it strengthens not only the heart and lungs but also the spirit, and a strong spirit is pain’s worst enemy.

No sane person seeks pain as an end in itself, nor do I, but for me there is no greater pleasure than conquering pain, and no greater happiness than knowing my strength. I want this race to prove that I am stronger for what I’ve endured. It’s not the easiest way to score a serotonin hit, but it’s my way.

Extreme pain is often described as “blinding,” and I get it now. A flying saucer could land in front of me and I wouldn’t see it. The universe has shrunk to the exact proportions of my body. Nothing exists outside my skin, while inside a final showdown is happening between two elemental forces: pain and will, the first telling me to quit and the other urging me to keep going. I keep going, but the real action is in my head, where I continue to stare into my suffering like a monk meditating on his breath, and as I do, its many dimensions—battered legs, pleading lungs, broiled innards—fuse together, becoming a single composite excruciation that perfectly replicates the Worst Day of My Life, with a little extra thrown in. The pain wants me to look away, but I refuse. What began as an ultramarathon has become a game of chicken. Pain versus will. Will versus pain. Who blinks?

Enjoyed this excerpt? Keep reading! Order your copy of Dying to Run: An Athlete’s Quest for One More Finish today.

I started writing seriously in 1980, when I was eight years old. Personal computers weren’t really a thing back then (although my father, who worked in tech, had an early model), so I wrote everything longhand, from third-grade book reports to the many poems I scribbled outside the classroom. It wasn’t until I went off to college that I finally switched from a typewriter to a word processor for schoolwork (though I stuck to pad and pen for poetry). The advantages of going digital were obvious and irresistible and habit forming, beginning with the power to revise on the fly. If I had to go back to using a mechanical typewriter today, my office would be filled with crumpled sheets of paper, each inscribed with one failed sentence. Hell, the paragraph you’re reading was revised three times before I moved on to the next one!

By the time artificial intelligence came along, I’d been writing for more than four decades. AI makes writing easier in a whole new way, essentially writing for you to whatever degree you choose. Want a lighter touch? Have your agent of choice edit your sentences as you write. Want those blank pages to magically fill up with words while you play Call of Duty in your pajamas? Just enter a semiliterate prompt (“pleez rite a 1200 word esay on chaucers canterberry tails so I dont have to”) and voila, your “work” is done.

As blissfully dependent as I am on Microsoft Word, I have no wish to accept AI’s more active assistance of the writing process, and I never will. Not for moral reasons, mind you. Some writers feel that using AI is cheating, but to me it’s no worse than working with a human collaborator, which is something principled writers have done since the beginning of time. A young Harper Lee leaned heavily on her veteran editor at J. B. Lippincott when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, yet no one has ever suggested that Tay Hohoff’s name ought to appear next to Lee’s on the cover of the book. As long as writers disclose their AI use and do their share of the work, I’m cool with it.

Nor do I keep AI at arm’s length in my creative process for aesthetic reasons. I see lots of scared artists comforting themselves with the belief that AI is fundamentally incapable of generating original beauty the way humans can, but while this might be true today, it won’t be true for long. If pure human creativity is to survive, it must do so for reasons other than objective superiority.

Which brings me to the real reasons I’ve banned AI from my writing desk, of which there are three:

Reason #1 – I don’t want AI to write for me for the same reason I don’t want AI to have sex for me.

For most people, writing is a purely instrumental chore. The average citizen takes little pleasure in typing up a resume cover letter or a dating app profile or anything else. All they care about is the end result. Like an answered prayer, AI allows these logophobes to skip the hair-pulling tedium of writing and go straight to the final product, and from their perspective, anyone who chooses not to take this shortcut has their head up their ass.

But there are those of us who truly love to write, and although we, too, take satisfaction in completing an essay or a novel or whatever, we take far greater satisfaction in the work itself. As Virginia Woolf phrased it in her diaries, “The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.” Even if AI can help us write better, or at least faster, we’d rather endure the hair pulling than sacrifice the pleasure of turning empty pages into meaning. From our perspective, creating a written text without actually writing is about as appealing as making a baby without having sex.

Reason #2 – I don’t want AI to help me write for the same reason I don’t want AI to exercise on my behalf.

If you’re like me and you truly love to write, you want to be good at it, and the only way to be good at writing is to write, the more the better. When you spend ten minutes slaving over a single sentence, straining to get it right, your writer’s mind grows stronger. And when AI writes a sentence for you, your literary faculties weaken. Psychologists call this cognitive offloading, and it literally shrinks the brain, the same way physical offloading (e.g., driving instead of walking) shrinks the muscles. Using AI to turbo charge your writing is like training for the Tour de France on an electric bicycle. When race day comes, you’ll find out the hard way that you’re not very fit.

Reason #3 – I don’t want AI to help me write for the same reason I read James Joyce and not James Patterson.

Even the best human writers are incapable of writing well on the first try. Show me your favorite book and I’ll show you the thirty-fifth revision of a terrible first draft. Leo Tolstoy once told a friend, “I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.”

Writing is mostly rewriting, if you’re doing it right, and rewriting is mostly reading what you’ve written with a ruthless critical eye. George Saunders pictures this critical eye as a meter he wears on his forehead, the needle tipping leftward toward “negative” and rightward toward “positive” as he scans the latest draft of whatever he’s working on. Every writer should read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders’s folksy treatise on close reading and the craft of storytelling, where he explains how the forehead meter works:

I try to read what I’ve written the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? If it drops into the N zone, admit it. And then, instantaneously, a fix might present itself—a cut, a rearrangement, an addition. . . I go through the draft like that, marking it up, then go back and enter that round of changes, print it out, read it again, for as long as I still feel sharp—usually three or four times in a writing day. So: a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat) through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts, over months or even years.

To be a good writer, it is not enough to have a way with words. You must also be an astute critic, able to sniff out even the subtlest flaws in a piece of writing so that each draft is better than the preceding. Your forehead meter must be well calibrated, so to speak, and the best way to calibrate a forehead meter is to engage in that very “repetitive, obsessive, iterative” process advocated by Tolstoy and Saunders—hour upon hour of eagle-eyed scrutiny and line-by-line fixing.

Writers who rely too much on AI don’t just suck at writing. They also suck at reading, which is worse. Having failed to do the work required to develop good taste in writing, they look at what AI spits out and think it’s James Joyce when in fact it’s James Patterson. If the point of using AI is to fool the world into believing you’re a better James, good luck fooling those of us who commit to “hundreds of drafts” and can see the flaws you’ve missed in the slop you put forward as yours.

A Pleasant Fortnight

It took me two weeks and eighteen total hours to complete this essay. AI could have whipped up something that made the same points in twenty seconds, which would have freed me up to do stuff I don’t enjoy as much, saddled with the knowledge that my brain was shrinking, my way with words fading, and my critical eye losing sharpness. No, thanks.

If you liked this essay, you you might also like my new book, Dying to Run: An Athlete’s Quest for One More Finish.

Garcia is currently accepting remote coaching clients of all ages, and there’s a good chance you’ll want to hire her after listening to this interview, which took place shortly after she visited Dream Run Camp in Flagstaff. If so, reach out to her via Instagram or email me at matt@dreamrun.com. For more pearls of wisdom from the mind of Coach Garcia, check out the personal essay she wrote recently for the 80/20 Endurance blog.

An example is Eliud Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic marathon champion from Kenya. At the Berlin Marathon in 2015, Kipchoge’s shoes started to come apart after less than six miles, causing painful blisters on both feet and a bloody gash on the left big toe. A lot of runners would have called it quits, but Kipchoge not only finished the race, he won it, offering no complaints at a post-race press conference.

“It is a good shoe, and I have tested that same shoe in training,” he said in reference to his spontaneously disintegrating Nikes. “But that is sport. I have to accept it. I had pain in my foot, but what could I do? I had to finish the race.”

Self-control, radical acceptance, and personal character. Check, check, and check.

I strove to practice these same principles in my own running, and I preached them in books like How Bad Do You Want It? and The Comeback Quotient. Yet it wasn’t until I got sick with long Covid and lost the ability to run that Stoicism became more than just a helpful tool for me but a lifeline, pulling me back from the brink of despair and toward a recovery worthy of its own book.

Here’s a quick timeline:

February 29, 2020 – Caught Covid-19 while running the Atlanta Marathon

At 48, I was as fit as I’d ever been, finishing the race in 14^th place out of 2,152 participants.

March 16, 2020 – Broke a rib coughing

I’d never been so sick, but after a month in bed I recovered fully—or so I thought.

October 6, 2020 – Developed long Covid

After six months of apparent good health and productive running, I was hit with a whole new wave of symptoms, including dysautonomia, muscle weakness, shortness of breath, brain fog, and neuropathy. Unlike my prior cough, however, these symptoms did not go away.

January 19, 2021 – Pulled the plug on running

Long Covid has more than 200 documented symptoms, but the most common complaints are chronic fatigue, which makes you not feel like running; exercise intolerance, which makes you feel awful when you do run; and post-exertional malaise, an all-over icky feeling that makes you wish you hadn’t run. I kept running as long as I could, but in the end I just couldn’t.

May 24, 2021 – The worst day of my life

Against my better judgment, I attempted a cautious one-mile test run after fifteen weeks of rest. The result was a terrifying episode of autonomic hyperactivity, a potentially lethal shock state marked by hyperventilation, tachycardia, and hyperthermia. I spent that whole day curled up in bed amid a tangle of sweaty sheets, twitching and wheezing like fresh roadkill. When my wife came to check on me, I told her I wanted to die. It was that bad.

January 1, 2024 – Signed up for an ultramarathon

It made no sense. I hadn’t run in almost three years, and I’d gained almost 40 pounds. Still dealing with daily symptoms, I’d resigned myself to being sick for the rest of my life. But the Stoic in me knew I had to cross one more finish line—and not just any finish line.

Before I got sick, I dropped out of a 100K race just past the halfway point. For closure’s sake, I needed to finish what I’d failed to finish when I was younger, healthier, and fitter, running 100 kilometers and not a centimeter less. I would have preferred to do it without long Covid, but I was prepared to get it done with the disease.

October 25, 2024 – Ran 100 kilometers

I had ten months to get ready for the Javelina Jundred, and I needed all ten of them. My “training” (mostly walking) went better than expected initially, but a major flareup forced me to stop exercising for seven weeks at the height of summer, when I should have been hitting my peak. Adding insult to injury, an autumn heatwave struck the Sonoran Desert on race day, resulting in a new record high temperature of 99°F. We all suffered out there in the blazing Arizona sun, but no one more than me, the guy with dysautonomia, which impairs the body’s ability to thermoregulate. Not once but twice my nervous system went hyperactive on the race course, the second episode so severe that my pacer considered calling for help on the satcom device he’d brought along just in case. Nevertheless, I finished.

A younger me might have won the race, but he could not have done what I did that day with the challenges I faced. What I’d lost in physical strength I’d gained back twofold in mental strength, a trauma-driven midlife personal growth spurt that allowed me to enjoy my proudest moment as a runner long after I’d passed my physical prime. And I had Stoicism to thank for it.

Stoic Running in 3 Steps

I believe that Stoic principles can help any runner get more out of themselves. It isn’t easy, though. Stoicism challenges its adherents to take full responsibility for their thoughts and actions. But if you’re willing to commit to a set of three Stoic “rules” that I imposed on myself while pursuing my race for closure, you will be rewarded. Not only will you perform better, but you’ll also care less about conventional measures of success and find more satisfaction in showing up as the best version of yourself when it counts.

Rule #1 - Don’t waste energy hoping things will go your way.

The key to happiness, according to the Stoics, is breaking free of emotional dependence on outside circumstances, so you’re happy rain or shine. “Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would,” wrote the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “but rather wish that everything happens as it does happen—then your life will flow well.”

I’m sure lots of runners participating in the Javelina Jundred hoped it wouldn’t be 99 degrees on race day, and what did it get them? A lot of worry beforehand and 99 degrees regardless. Instead I chose to accept the forecast and prepare, spending hours inside a barrel sauna chanting to myself, “Heat gives me strength.”

Runners who waste energy hoping for favorable weather and other blessings that are outside their control have a hard time coping when, inevitably, the weather doesn’t cooperate, or their feet blister, or whatever. Stoics seek their advantage not in better luck but in being better at dealing with bad luck, which is inescapable.

Rule #2 - Focus on controlling the things you can control.

The other side of not worrying about things you can’t control is making the most of what you can, and though we can’t control the weather, the Stoics teach, we can control something far greater, which is what goes on inside our heads. “You have power over your mind—not outside events,” wrote the last great Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, who held a day job as Emperor of Rome between 161 and 180 A.D. “Realize this, and you will find strength.”

With long Covid, the thing you can’t control is your own body. I knew my body would betray me in my race for closure, but I believed I could overcome this difficulty by showing up as as the brave and joyful man that I am in my finest moments, and that I had to be to complete those 100 kilometers.

Over the years I’ve collected a trove of personal mantras to help me through the crisis moments in races. “This is where you want to be.” “It’s never all bad.” “Be here now doing this.” “It’s only pain.” These and other self-reminders of who I wanted to be when things went from bad to worse out there in baking dunes kept me going despite the physical implosion I was experiencing.

Rule #3 - Treat adversity as growth opportunity.

When things go our way, we tend to perform well, which is nice. When they don’t go our way, we grow stronger in the process of battling our misfortune, which for Stoics is even nicer. As Seneca the Younger put it, “Misfortune is virtue’s opportunity.”

No sane person wishes adversity upon themselves, and Stoics don’t either. But they also don’t mind adversity, because they’d rather be strong than lucky. If Eliud Kipchoge seemed indifferent to the comically bad luck that befell him in the 2015 Berlin Marathon, it’s because he was. “I believe in a philosophy that says to win is actually not important,” he told one journalist. “To be successful is not even important.”

When you run stoically, what’s important is not the time on the clock when you finish or how many runners you beat but who you show up as in the race. “You don’t have what it takes,” reads a poster in my office that I made myself. “You find what it takes.” When you finish stronger than you started, you’ve run stoically, and win or lose, there’s no better feeling.

My Challenge to You

I ran my race for closure for myself, but not only. I also ran it to show what’s possible for mortals like us when we emulate the likes of Eliud Kipchoge and Marcus Aurelius. I wanted to prove that even when absolutely nothing goes your way—not even your health—you can run your proudest, most unforgettable race if your best and strongest self shows up. To quote myself again: “Sometimes the worse it is, the better it is.”

Stoic running isn’t for everyone. But then, neither is running.

For the whole story of my experience with Stoic running, check out my new book, Dying to Run: An Athlete’s Quest for One More Finish.

The first indication that something was amiss with my ticker came from heart rate data collected during my runs. One day I’d pin the needle at 180 beats per minute while jogging along at my forever pace. The next day I couldn’t get my heart rate above 110 at any speed. Perplexed, I began to monitor my heart around the clock, detecting further anomalies. The simple act of standing up would make my pulse jump 30 beats, and when I paused a morning walk with Nataki to admire a neighbor’s garden, my heart rate spiked instead of settling as it normally did. I know now that these were symptoms of post-viral dysautonomia and had nothing to do with my later-diagnosed heart disease. It’s not uncommon for symptoms of one disease to lead to the discovery of a second one—comorbidities, in doctor-speak—and that’s what happened to me.

It took a while, however, like a badly played game of twenty questions. I went in for bloodwork, which came back normal. I then took a lung test, which also came back normal. Chest X-ray, echo­cardiogram, EKG: normal, normal, normal.

Next up was a cardiac stress test, where the patient walks or runs on a canted treadmill wearing electrodes. I’d been sick for three months at that point, but I hadn’t yet pulled the plug on running, and I approached the test like any other race even though it very much wasn’t. A normal heart patient would have worried about what the test might find, but all I cared about was posting a good score.

I arrived at the hospital clad in color-coordinated Hoka apparel, buzzing on caffeine and carbs. Final instructions were given by a masked technician who might as well have been a megaphone-holding race organizer. Most of what she said went in one ear and out the other, but I caught the part about “continuing to failure.” When the starting pistol cracked (there was no starting pistol), I leapt up onto the treadmill with an eagerness that, judging by the technician’s body language, lacked appropriate solemnity. It was all I could do to suppress the impulse to ask her for the number to beat.

Had it been given, that number would have been neither a time nor a speed nor a distance nor anything else I was used to measuring performance by but a metabolic equivalent, or MET, which is how performance is measured in cardiac stress tests. One MET equals your rate of calorie burning at rest. A slow walk is 2.0 METs, or double your resting energy expenditure, and so on. The average heart patient taps out at 6.0 METs. I was still going strong at 17.2 METs when the machine stopped and I was ordered to step off.

“You said I could go to failure!” I protested.

The technician ignored my outburst and asked if I’d been experiencing chest pains. The answer was yes, but that was beside the point.

“I wasn’t even tired!” I half-shouted. “You didn’t let me finish!”

A flash of pity passed over the technician’s eyes.

“Mr. Fitzgerald,” she said with forced patience, “your test results are . . . abnormal. You need to stop exercising. Immediately. That means no more running. I don’t want you even mowing the lawn.”

“But—”

“You will start taking children’s aspirin. One a day. We’ll schedule you for a cardiac angiograph as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you experience any chest pains, call 911 right away.”

One week later, I lay supine on a padded table with a catheter in my arm, staring up at a large cylindrical contraption called a fluoroscope. A special glow-in-the-dark dye suffused my bloodstream, allowing the scope to capture X-ray images of my arteries. Every few minutes the cardiologist’s piped-in voice commanded me to hold my breath for the next shutter click. Between clicks I practiced my corpse pose, wondering what the doctor was seeing, knowing already it wasn’t good.

Of the many emotions you don’t want to see on the face of your cardiologist after such a procedure, shock has to be number one. But shock is what I saw in the eyes of the masked face of Dr. Singh when he entered the consultation room where I’d been sitting for two days (not really, but it seemed like it), awaiting the specifics. On paper, I was among the healthiest specimens Dr. Singh had seen in nearly thirty years of practice. I had zero risk factors for heart disease, perfect blood lipids, and a stress test result that qualified me to be a fighter pilot. By all measures, I had no business being in his office. Yet my calcium score—which relates to plaque size in the coronary arteries—was 363, placing me at moderate to high risk of suffering a heart attack in the next ten years. Dr. Singh had never seen anything like it. I know this because those exact words—“I’ve never seen anything like it”—came out of his mouth. The poor man was so plainly shaken by my case that I had to suppress an urge to console him.

Like I said, I’ll never know how healthy my heart was or wasn’t before I got sick, but it certainly wasn’t helped by the virus, which is known to inflame the inner lining of the arteries, making them sticky and prone to entrap passing lipids and calcium molecules. The virus also thickens the blood by forming thousands of microclots. In the coronary arteries, these unfavorable changes combine to accelerate plaque growth, a process that could be further hastened by, say, doing large amounts of high-intensity exercise, as I did during the six months between my recovery from COVID-19 and the onset of my present malady.

None of this was documented in my medical records, however, and Dr. Singh found himself at a complete loss as to what to do with me. He couldn’t tell me to start exercising or clean up my diet because I’d exercised my entire life and authored several books on healthy eating. Nor did it make sense for him to prescribe a statin to lower my cholesterol, which was low already. Yet he prescribed one anyway, as the only alternative to doing nothing. I took one pill, maybe two, and tossed the bottle.

What I really needed, I decided, was a second opinion from a doctor who was also a runner, and I knew just the person: Amy Fiedler, a cardiac surgeon at UCSF who competed in triathlons and ultramarathons when she wasn’t stenting the arteries of sedentary sugar addicts. On the pretext of interviewing her for a magazine article about heart risks in endurance athletes, I got Dr. Fiedler on the phone and asked her how I might better assess my own risks in continuing to run. Dr. Google had advised me to request a coronary catheterization, a mildly invasive procedure that would determine the severity of any blockages I might have, and Dr. Fiedler seconded this recommendation.

“Depending on the outcome,” she said, “you’ll come away with either peace of mind or a basis for pursuing further treatments.”

“Let’s say there are no blockages,” I said. “If I’m understanding you, this means it’s safe for me to run now. But if running contributed to my plaques, won’t more running just keep making them worse until I do have a blockage?”

“That’s a good question,” Dr. Fiedler said, “and I don’t know the answer to it. I don’t think anyone does.”

By the time this call took place, I’d already stopped running for reasons that had nothing to do with fear of a heart attack. In the first five months of 2021, my malaise had worsened to the point where I could hardly walk, much less run. The heart stuff could wait. Yet even when I returned to running, I kept putting off the procedure, knowing the result might force me to stop. Just give me six months, I thought.

A lot of runners run for health-related reasons, but I never did. I ran because it made me feel alive, like in the last mile of the 2020 Atlanta Marathon, where I drove myself deep into the pain cave in an unsuccessful effort to chase down the leader of the forty-plus age division. Official race photos show my teeth bared like I’m being dunked in battery acid, but what they don’t show is that on the other side of that silent scream, I was experiencing a kind of euphoria— the sublime torment of being almost there but not quite.

Exercising to total exhaustion as I did in Atlanta is known to suppress the immune system temporarily, enabling opportunistic viruses to gain a foothold. I can’t prove it, but I like to think I got COVID-19—and later long COVID—because I ran that marathon. And if I had the chance, I’d do it again.

At a scientific conference some years ago, I debated the meaning of “health” with some hotshot endocrinologist. His definition was “resilience against threats.” What a sad little view of health! So passive. So timid. My definition of health is feeling alive, and you won’t feel very alive if your top priority is being resilient against threats. To feel what I felt in Atlanta, you must take risks and put yourself in danger. That’s my experience, anyway. The raw intensity of that last mile, where I stretched myself so far that I never recovered: That’s what I call health. And if it’s not health, I prefer it to health.

Republished with permission of 80/20 Publishing from Dying to Run: An Athlete’s Quest for One More Finish by Matt Fitzgerald. See more at 8020books.com.

I’d had my share of colds and flus, but this new bug was far worse. At one point during my monthlong confinement, I coughed so hard I broke a rib—or maybe just tore some cartilage between ribs, but in any case, it hurt like hell. I lost all of my hard-earned fitness in that terrible month, and when I started running again in April I was determined to earn it back. And I did, setting an unofficial personal best of 33:25 for 10 kilometers in a solo time trial on a wheel-measured route in August.

But by October I was sick again, overcome by a weird new mix of symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath, and erratic pulse. It took me a while, but eventually, I figured out that I’d developed long Covid, a post-viral chronic illness similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue (ME/CFS), with no known cure. Like a lot of long-haulers, I underwent all kinds of testing in medicine’s effort to identify the cause of my symptoms, which revealed that in addition to long Covid I had coronary artery disease, a comorbidity that probably predated my COVID-19 infection but was likely exacerbated by it. I stopped running in January 2021, not because of my wonky my ticker but because my most debilitating long Covid symptom, known as post-exertional malaise, had gotten so bad that I simply couldn’t run.

By New Year’s Eve 2023, I hadn’t run in three years, aside from a few failed attempts. That night I signed up for the Javelina Jundred, a 100-kilometer ultramarathon in Arizona’s Sonoran desert. I was thirty pounds overweight, completely deconditioned, and still dealing with persistent symptoms of fatigue, neuropathy, shortness of breath, brain fog, and exercise intolerance, and I had ten months to muster the fitness required to run 62 miles on hilly trails in extreme heat.

In a life filled with impulsive risks, this one was by far my biggest gamble. To the best of my knowledge, no person with unresolved long Covid had ever taken on such a severe test of endurance—so why did I? There’s no simple answer to this question, but the biggest factor was a need for closure. Shortly before I got sick, I dropped out of a different 100K race at 38 miles, having fallen twice and hurt my ankle, knee, and shoulder. At the time, I comforted myself with the knowledge that I would have other chances to finish the business I left unfinished that day, little knowing that a viral meteor was heading straight toward me. When the meteor struck, I couldn’t get over the fact that I hadn’t known my last race was my last race, and I needed one more finish line to say a proper goodbye to my runner self.

I’d be lying, however, if I told you I would have attempted my race for closure had I not been a writer as well as a runner. The opportunity to chronicle my quest for the entertainment of others was what justified the risk for me. Merely living the experience wasn’t worth dying for, but telling the story was. By turning my suffering into art, I would make it useful, and not just useful but necessary. A thing of beauty would now exist that wouldn’t have existed had I not suffered.

I’m happy to say that I did not die in the quest to cross that final finish line, and the resulting book, Dying to Run: An Athlete’s Quest for One More Finish, is now available for preorder. It’s about running, yes, but it’s also about life and death and everything in between. It will make you laugh and it will make you cry, sometimes within a single page, and it will leave you changed forever, I promise. I wrote it for you, so please accept my gift.

Preorder Links:

Barnes and Noble

Amazon

80/20 Publishing

Fast forward to 2023, when entrepreneur Greg Rublev, who had recently acquired MarathonGuide, reached out to me with an interest in partnering with 80/20 Endurance, a company I cofounded. That partnership never materialized, but when I learned that Greg offered executive coaching services on the side, I asked for his help in my capacity as the creator of Dream Run Camp. In the past two years I’ve learned an MBA’s worth about starting and running a business from Greg, with whom I’ve formed a strong relationship grounded in mutual respect.

Last month, Greg came back to me with a new proposal. Knowing I had big plans for Endurance Mastery, he suggested I team up with MarathonGuide, which would provide strategy, design, branding, editing, programming, digital marketing, and accounting support for Endurance Mastery, allowing me to focus on content creation. I accepted the offer without hesitation, and the partnership agreement was signed last week.

When I started Endurance Mastery in March, I had a master plan that included daily content in a variety of formats and other voices besides me own. Partnering with MarathonGuide allows me to put this plan into effect much sooner than I had anticipated. I’m thrilled to announce that the new Endurance Mastery by Marathon Guide will launch next Monday, November 3. Here’s what you can expect from us going forward:

Monday

Monday Musing (all subscribers)

If you like Endurance Mastery in its current instantiation, you’ll love our Monday Musing department, which is a continuation of the weekly blog I’ve been writing since the beginning. I’ll cover a wide range of topics—training, mindset, recovery, you-name-it—offering a perspective you won’t get from any other coach and always with the goal of providing actionable advice that you can put to use immediately in your quest to reach your full potential.

Tuesday

Tuesday Teaching (paid subscribers only)

Each Tuesday I will host a live, interactive coaching lesson. I’ll give a 30-minute video presentation on a topic such as marathon training or performance weight management and then take questions. A recording of the lesson will be made available the following Tuesday, and past lessons will be archive for easy access anytime.

Wednesday

Weekly Roundup (all subscribers)

If you’re currently a MarathonGuide subscriber, you’re accustomed to receiving a weekly newsletter that highlights recent and upcoming race events and offers timely news and tips. Going forward, Endurance Mastery subscribers will receive a rebranded version of this newsletter.

Thursday

Sports Science Update (paid subscribers only)

I love science, and I closely follow new research in the field of endurance sports science. On Thursdays I’ll briefly review a new study of particular interest and explain what it means for athletes like you using a unique hybrid format that combines text and video.

Friday

Friday Conversation (paid subscribers only)

Friday’s my day to have a one-on-one video conversation with a noteworthy figure in endurance sports. I’ve got three interviews in the can already that you can look forward to watching in the coming weeks: journalist Jared Beasley, author of The Endurance Artist (November 7); mental performance coach Jeff Troesch, author of One Day Better (November 14); and neuroscientist Scott Frey, who provides brain training services to endurance athletes (November 21).

Saturday

Credible Sources (paid subscribers only)

It’s important to me that Endurance Mastery provide a platform for other trustworthy experts not named Matt Fitzgerald. Credible Sources will make these thought leaders available to you through guest posts, callouts, and reviews. We’ll start on November 12 with an article titled “Five Reasons Why Runners Should Consider Competing in a Triathlon,” by Hillary Topper, author of the forthcoming book Unlocking the Triathlon.

Sunday

A Look Back and a Look Ahead (all subscribers)

We’ll wrap up the week by giving subscribers a consolidated review of our recent postings and a preview of the coming week’s content.

Subscribe Now and Save

All existing subscriptions to Endurance Mastery—both free and paid—will automatically roll over to the new Substack. Free subscribers will receive our Monday Musing, Weekly Roundup, and Look Back/Look Ahead postings, as well as our Tip of the Day, which will appear in your Notes feed. Paid subscribers will also receive our Tuesday Teaching, Sports Science Update, Friday Conversation, and Credible Sources content.

Our new paid subscription service will be priced at $9 per month or $99 per year, but we’re offering a 20 percent discount to those who purchase a paid subscription in the month of November. I might be biased, but I think this is a tremendous value—just pennies a day for 365 high-value original postings per year.

Your support is vital to the viability of this vision. Endurance Mastery will be my full-time job in the months, years, and decades ahead. But this will only happen if mastery-seeking athletes like you contribute to its continuation. On behalf of my new parters at MarathonGuide, I thank you for your past and future support of the only endurance sports media outlet focused exclusively on helping athletes reach their full potential!

CLICK HERE to take advantage of our limited-time 20 percent discount on paid subscriptions to the new Endurance Mastery by MarathonGuide.

There’s no registration required and the event is open to all Endurance Mastery subscribers and anyone else who’d like to join. I’ll explain the five eating habits shared by elite endurance athletes across cultures and sport disciplines and offer practical guidelines for emulating these habits. I’ll spend about 30 minutes on the presentation and leave 15 minutes for questions and answers. If you’re not able to tune in live, never fear—I’ll post the recording here afterward.

Beginning next month I’ll offer these webinars every week but only to paid subscribers. Here’s your chance to raise your nutrition game in anticipation of the 2026 season and get a sneak peak at coming attractions on Endurance Mastery. I hope to see you there!

What: “How to Eat Like an Elite” - Free Live Webinar

When: Wednesday, October 22 at 4:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-7)

Where: Use this link to access the webinar

Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? —Matthew 6:27

“Should I be worried?”

I hear these words every now and again from athletes I coach. Almost always the question comes up in the context of some problem that has occurred in the athlete’s training. It might be leg cramps that ruin a third straight long run, or an untimely recurrence of knee pain, or an unexpected plateau in fitness following a period of steady progress. Whatever the problem, I can feel the question coming during my weekly check-in with the athlete, and when it does come, my answer is always the same: “No, you should not be worried.”

That’s the short answer. The longer answer is that there is simply no such thing as a situation in which any athlete should be worried. There are certainly situations in which it is natural to feel worried, and there are some situations in which it’s damn hard not worry. But I would never recommend that an athlete worry because I happen to know that worry is completely counterproductive and in many cases poses a bigger threat to the athlete’s goals than whatever it is they’re worried about. Don’t believe me? Look at the research:

A 2013 study appearing in NeuroImmunoModulation measured psychological stress levels and immune function in a group of nineteen runners training for the fifty-six-mile Comrades Marathon. Based on their findings, the authors concluded that “recreational marathon runners with higher levels of psychological stress may be more at risk for the immune alterations that are common during periods of prolonged physical training,” placing them at higher risk of getting sick or injured or becoming overtrained.

A 2015 study by Chinese researchers found that runners with higher stress levels before a marathon ran slower times.

A 2021 study led by Charles Urwin of Deaken University in Australia found that anxiety levels before an ultramarathon strongly predicted gastrointestinal distress during the ultramarathon.

And in a 2022 study that looked at the relationship between anxiety and recovery in a group of forty-one injured runners, the authors concluded, “High anxiety may identify runners who will experience a longer recovery process, health-related functional disruptions, and less optimization of gait biomechanics during rehabilitation after a lower extremity injury.”

The Athlete Who Never Worries

In summary, worrying about a problem makes it worse for the athlete in every conceivable way. As normal as it may be to worry in certain types of situations, it is never helpful. Nor is it ever necessary to worry. All it takes is one athlete who doesn’t worry in a situation where everyone else does to prove that a problem can be recognized and addressed without interference from negative emotions—and we don’t have to look very far to find that one athlete.

As I write these words, I am eight days out from a 100-mile ultramarathon and I have a lower leg injury that has rendered me unable to run for the past twelve days. I’m chagrined that the injury occurred and angry with myself for mismanaging it initially, but I’m not worried about the next eight days. Instead of worrying, I’m acting, doing everything I can to recover and rehabilitate, from cross-training to following my PT’s corrective exercise protocol. Instead of allowing my circumstances to govern my emotions and hoping for a full recovery, I’m actively managing my emotions in a way that’s helpful to me by accepting that my leg will likely still hurt on race day and bracing for its potential impact on my performance.

Worry is nothing more than a weak attempt to control what cannot be controlled. You’ve planned a picnic for Saturday and the forecast calls for a fifty percent chance of rain, so you worry that it will rain and your picnic will be ruined. Irrational! It will either rain on Saturday or it won’t regardless of whether you worry. But this analogy only goes so far, because although worrying about rain does not increase the likelihood of rain, worrying about an injury or a race outcome will increase the likelihood of a longer recovery or a poor outcome.

Rejection Is Not Denial

Rejecting worry is not the same thing as denying the problem. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. The less energy athletes put into worrying about their problems, the more they put into solving them by focusing on relevant factors under their control. This was shown in a 2020 study by Sandra Llera of Towson University and Michelle Newman of Penn State, who reported that worry impaired the problem-solving process in a group of 185 psychology students.

Say what you want about me, but I always practice what I preach. I preach worry-free problem solving to my athletes and I practice worry-free problem-solving as an athlete myself. Yesterday a Dream Runner who’s been here several weeks and saw me crushing epic runs before my injury and now sees me walking with a pronounced limp told me, “You sure seem to be taking this well. I’d be freaking out.” I told her she should work on that.

Should this problem have my attention?

Yes.

Should I take active measures to fix the problem?

Yes.

Should I focus on what I can control and let go of what I can’t?

Yes.

Should I be worried?

Never.

If Troesch were attention seeking, he would have long ago written a book that shared his unique expertise with the athletic masses. Instead he waited until he’d accumulated thirty-five years of experience to summarize his wisdom in the newly released One Day Better: Mental Performance Concepts to Transform Your Game & Life, a collection of 150 short, practical lessons that athletes can apply immediately to move one step closer to mastery. Collectively, these lessons lead athletes along a mastery-oriented growth process that Troesch developed after becoming disillusioned with cookie-cutter tools like S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting that he learned in graduate school.

“I noticed that many of the individuals I was working with were constantly anxious about the gap between where they were today and where they thought they needed to be in relation to their goal,” he explains in the introduction to One Day Better. “A lot of my clients seemed relieved with the challenge to bring a little more each day, adding a little more wisdom or experience to their bank account. Thus, I started speaking to the notion of getting a little better each day, with clear intention of the daily gains and an acknowledgment of the gains at the end of the day. This idea seemed to keep my athletes appreciating their small daily ‘wins’, and kept them on track towards what they were attempting to master.”

If you have a short attention span, you’ll appreciate the economy of words that characterizes One Day Better. Few of its 150 chapters runs longer than two pages, and the average length is a page and a half. But there’s a lot of great teaching packed in each lesson, and you could easily spend a whole week meditating on and beginning to implement any single one of them.

Troesch has forgotten more than I’ll ever know about mental performance, but I’ve been around long enough to have some ideas of my own, and I found myself nodding along throughout my reading of One Day Better. Troesch’s pragmatic, holistic, mastery-focused approach to mental performance exactly matches my approach to coaching.

An example from early in the book is “Effective Vs. Right,” a 469-word chapter in which Troesch argues, “There is no [single] right way to exercise or get fit. No right or proper way to train technically, mechanically, or tactically. There is no right technique or right way to eat properly or recover optimally.” As evidence, he points to the myriad different golf swings, pitching styles, and shooting techniques that have landed individual golfers, baseball players, and basketball players in the hall of fame over the decades. Most athletes aren’t clear on the distinction between right and effective and are biased toward rightness because it simplified the process of chasing mastery to a straightforward matter of money see, monkey do. But Troesch isn’t having it.

“I want athletes and coaches to be open-minded to the idea that it’s their job is to figure out what’s most effective for them,” he writes. “This is only discovered through trial and error, through failing and learning, through successes an accurate understanding of how they were achieved. Only then can you intentionally attempt to replicate those successes. Through this process, the athlete homes in on an awareness of what works best for them.”

As a coach, I’m thrilled that One Day Better now exists. I’m going to encourage all of my athletes to get a copy, and when they encounter challenges and opportunities that are addressed in the book, I will point them to the relevant chapter, ask them to read I and take notes, then talk to them about how to implement the concepts it introduces. When they get stuck in “have-to” thinking, I’ll point them to Chapter 5 (“Response Ability”), where Troesch reminds us that “we have the ability to respond in any manner we choose to any circumstance we find ourselves in.” When they fall into the trap of fixating on what just happened instead of letting it go and focusing on the present, I will point them to Chapter 26 (“Current Events, Not History”), where Troesch urges athletes to “focus on the windshield, not the rearview mirror.” And when they express an excessive fear of failure or an exaggerated emotional response to failing, I will point them to Chapter 49, whose title almost says it all: “The Only Failure Is a Failure to Learn.”

As if you needed one more reason to pick up your own copy of One Day Better, know that the book is being published by 80/20 Publishing, which I cofounded. We are the only publisher specializing in books for endurance athletes, and by purchasing our products you not only support your own pursuit of mastery but also help us keep doing what we do. So, thank you!

Take track, for example. The World Association of Masters Athletes, which is the official governing body for older track and field athletes, ratifies world records for five-year age categories beginning at thirty-five to thirty-nine and going all the way up to 100-plus. Nearly half of the records for events longer than 800 meters and for ages fifty and up have been set since 2020.

Younger athletes are getting faster too, but older athletes are getting faster more quickly. We see this when we look at historical data across age divisions at events like the World Triathlon Age-Group Championships. In 2014, for example, the winner of the women’s 60-64 division finished 22:18 behind the winner of the 30-34 division. Ten years later, the gap was down to 17:14. Meanwhile, on the men’s side, the gap shrank from 18:24 to 13:23.

At the Vanguard

At the vanguard of this revolution are barrier-breaking older athletes like Tommy Hughes, an Irish runner who at fifty-nine completed the Frankfurt Marathon in 2:27:52, lowering the single-age world record by six minutes, and American swimmer Ellen Reynolds, who last year set twenty-six world records in the women’s 60-64 age category, including a mindboggling mark of 19:10.59 in the long-course 1500-meter freestyle event.

I can’t compare myself to these champions, but I’m trying to do my part to close the gap between younger and older endurance athletes. Just yesterday, in fat, I finished third overall at the Flagstaff Marathon, an absolutely brutal 26.2-miler that starts at 8,000 feet of elevation, gains 2,400 feet from there, and takes place entirely on ankle-twisting, pinecone-strewn snowshoe trails. The winner was thirty-four years younger than me and the runner-up (whom I was reeling in until a race volunteer sent me in the wrong direction with seven miles to go, resulting in an extra 500 meters of running) fifteen years younger. Even with the extra distance, my time was the fastest ever run by someone over fifty in the twenty-year history of the event and would have been good enough to win it on many past occasions. I was, in fact, the oldest runner in the entire field today, and I beat all but two finishers.

As an endurance athlete yourself, and one who, like every other athlete, is getting older every day, you probably want to know what athletes like Tommy Hughes and Ellen Reynolds are doing differently that is allowing them to redefine what’s possible after turning fifty. You’ll have to wait until the 2027 publication of my book for older endurance athletes, Faster Masters, to learn Tommy’s and Ellen’s secrets, but I’ll tell you mine now.

What’s My Secret?

It’s threefold, actually. First, I don’t use age as an excuse to lower my expectations. As I make my way through my fifties, I don’t expect to get slower, recover slower, lose my tolerance for hard training, or lose to athletes young enough to be my children. Reality gets the final say, of course. My body is changing, but so far my decline from my performance peak has been far shallower than it is for most athletes, and my “no excuses” mindset has a lot to do with that.

Second, I exploit the many advantages of getting older. Most athletes harp on the obvious disadvantages of aging, but the advantages are real. If I may say so, I executed a beautiful race today, negative-splitting a course that nobody negative splits and finishing with nothing left in the tank. Except for trusting my gut instead of the volunteer who pointed me the wrong way, there’s nothing I could have done differently from the start of lap one to the end of lap two that would have gotten me to the finish line any quicker. I sometimes executed perfect races when I was young, but they happen much more predictably now that I’m wiser and more mature.

The third ingredient of my recipe for aging well as an endurance athlete is that, for the most part, I’ve taken very good care of my body over the decades. Aside from the three-plus years I lost to long COVID, I’ve maintained a consistently high level of fitness, eaten well, slept plenty, and kept young psychologically by centering my life on my great passions of writing and running. Health is the foundation of fitness, and for aging athletes who are all about fitness, the benefits of prioritizing health in its many dimensions compound as the years go by.

Talent, Schmalent

It goes without saying that natural talent plays a role in the record-breaking performances of athletes like Tommy Hughes and Ellen Reynolds. But you don’t need talent to age well as an endurance athlete relative to your own ability. That comes from what you do with what you’ve been given. Athletes at the vanguard of the masters revolution not only inspire us by redefining what’s possible for competitors over fifty but also provide a blueprint for successful aging in endurance sports. By using this blueprint as a model for your journey, you can surprise yourself in the same way Hughes, Reynolds, and others are surprising the world.

As is so often the case, the terrible run in question was designated as an “easy” run—a low-intensity eight-miler intended to gently pad my weekly training volume and set me up for a strong set of mile repeats the following day. From the very first stride I felt like a man who weighed thirty pounds more than I did the day before and hadn’t run in a month. My first mile was completed in 9:14, and I slowed down from there. For context, I’d completed a thirty-one mile run ten days earlier at an average pace of 8:09 per mile. Like I said, terrible.

All runners—and I mean all runners, including national champions and record-breakers— experience runs like this one. The important question, therefore, is not how to avoid them but what to do when they happen. Here’s what I did, and what I recommend you do:

1. Make a decision.

When a run starts off terribly, it raises the possibility that continuing to execute the plan will do more harm than good. Runners who stubbornly persist in these situations despite clear indications that they shouldn’t often end up digging themselves into a hole of fatigue, pain, or sickness that takes them a week or more to climb out of, all for the sake of putting a check mark next to today’s training agenda. To avoid such consequences, runners need to think rationally and act decisively, determining whether it’s best to execute the run as planned, modify it, or abandon it altogether.

Yesterday I decided to continue running but at a slower-than-normal pace and shift from a distance-based training prescription (eight miles) to a time-based session (sixty-five minutes, which would result in less distance covered). I also modified my route to ensure I was never more than a mile from my vehicle, allowing me to change my mind and quit at any time without major inconvenience.

2. Contextualize.

This is where nine out of ten runners fail miserably in nine out of ten terrible-run situations. Instead of putting their performance in context, considering why they feel awful, they react in knee-jerk fashion, allowing in defeat and questioning everything—their fitness, their training plan, their coach, their goals, and even their running ability.

It’s far more rational and a lot more fair to yourself to put your terrible run in its proper context. In the case of my terrible run yesterday, contextualizing the fiasco explained everything. Three days earlier, I ran thirty-five miles on challenging terrain, followed by twelve miles the following day. And although I did rest the day before yesterday’s disastrous easy run, I spent four hours driving immediately prior to the run, which is the rough equivalent of being dragged behind a horse for ninety minutes. All things considered, my feeling awful at Buffalo Park yesterday was entirely predictable.

3. Troubleshoot.

I’m only human, and I did feel some concern out there yesterday. In particular, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I had entered a state of overreaching in my training or that my chronic illness (the core symptoms of which—chronic fatigue, exercise intolerance, and post-exertional malaise—are almost indistinguishable from the hallmark signs of overreaching) was making a comeback. Worry gets you nowhere, however, so I resolved to make no assumptions and gather more evidence before deciding whether there was a problem I needed to address.

My planned run for the following day—today—was a set of mile repeats at critical velocity, a challenging workout that would tell me a lot one way or another. I told myself that if I felt terrible again and performed poorly, I would have enough information to make the decision to take it easy for a few days, and if I ran well I’d know that my terrible easy run was a one-off.

4. Think helpful thoughts.

What you think about while you’re having a terrible run matters. Every runner has the same initial thought when they realize they’re in for an hour of suck: Oh, shit. It’s what happens next that distinguishes the endurance masters from everyone else. Endurance masters make a conscious effort to displace unhelpful negative thoughts with helpful positive ones. In doing so, they reduce their anxiety level and put themselves in a better position to make good decisions. The rest, meanwhile, remain stuck in oh, shit mode and don’t rebound emotionally until their next good run.

When I realized yesterday that I was in for an hour of suck, I reminded myself that I’m training for a 100-miler, and 100-milers are all about running while feeling terrible, so I might as well take advantage of the opportunity to practice. To this end, I pretended I was at mile ninety of the Javelina Jundred, and if I could just tolerate the suck for a couple more hours I would be a proud finisher.

So much of how we feel while running is determined by our expectations. If we expect to feel good and we feel bad, we feel terrible, and if we expect to feel terrible and we feel bad, we feel kind of good. I expect to feel terrible at mile 90 of my 100-miler, and what I realized yesterday while pretending to be there was that if I feel only that bad in the race itself I will be very happy, a helpful thought that enabled me to complete the balance of my terrible easy run in a positive mind state.

Happily Ever After

I knew while warming up this morning that my terrible easy run was just a one-day blip and I was going to have a good workout, and I did. Bad days are inevitable in training, but if you do what endurance masters do in these situations—make a decision, contextualize, troubleshoot, and think helpful thoughts—they’re never that bad, and the next day’s almost always better.

A few years ago, America’s second-largest pharmacy chain launched an advertising campaign with the tagline, “Walgreens is all about making life easier.” If the words sound familiar, it’s because versions of the same catchphrase have been used by dozens of other brands over the years, which tells me that the average consumer finds the prospect of an easier life appealing. Modern commercial advertising is a precise science, and major corporations don’t reuse old messaging without proof of its effectiveness.

I suppose any rational consumer wants the process of getting their prescriptions filled to be as easy as possible. But assuming Walgreens delivers on this promise, are they actually making our lives easier? And to the extent that our lives have been made easier by products and services that address our daily hassles, are we happier than we were when life was harder?

Science says otherwise. Studies of historical trends in psychological well-being suggest that the average person has become neither more nor less satisfied with life over the generations. Your great-grandparents missed out on drone grocery delivery, but odds are you’re no happier than they were. And if you’re not, then Walgreens is lying to us. Products and services don’t make our lives easier in any meaningful way, nor does easy living make us happier.

Sigmund Freud knew this a century ago. In his 1929 book Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that the recalcitrant nature of human happiness makes it impossible for us to technologize our way out of our natural state of existential angst. “If there had been no railway to conquer distances,” he writes in a famous passage, “my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice.” In short, every solution creates a new problem, leaving us right where we started happiness-wise.

The Buddha knew the same thing in the 2nd century B.C.E. According to legend, Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha) was raised by wealthy and overprotective parents who tried to make their son’s life as easy as possible. But an easy life did not bring lasting happiness to the young prince, and when confronted with the inescapable realities of sickness, aging, and death, he renounced the easy life and went searching for happiness, a journey of purposeful self-challenge that became the very source of his happiness.

People want life to be easy. That’s why advertisers promise to make our lives easier, and why the Buddha’s parents raised him inside a protective bubble. But people also want to be happy, and it turns out that easy living doesn’t yield happiness, whereas purposeful self-challenges does. Psychologists call this the effort paradox. In a 2018 paper on the subject, Michael Inzlicht of the University of Colorado observed that, although humans have a well-documented tendency to minimize effort in a variety of situations, “Effort can [also] be experienced as valuable or rewarding in its own right. While humans and other animals readily apply more effort for better outcomes, they sometimes view the same outcomes as more rewarding if more (not less) effort was used to attain them.” As an example, Inzlicht notes that “mountaineers value mountain climbing precisely because it is so arduous and effortful.”

It’s no accident that the most effortful sports of all—endurance sports—went mainstream in the 1970s, the decade of microwave meals and waterbeds. According to sociologist Michael Atkinson, life became too damn easy for many people around this time, and they went berserk. Suffocating beneath the coddling softness of an American dream turned nightmare, vast numbers of modern-day Buddhas extricated themselves from their La-Z-Boys and came together in so-called pain communities, chasing a feeling Atkinson termed “exciting significance.”

“People are really tired of living a sort of dull, boring, and sedentary lifestyle,” he told me in a 2010 interview. “Most triathletes have white-collar desk jobs. They don’t use their bodies. They use their minds or their voices all day, and they really like the physical aspect of doing something grueling like triathlon.” A triathlete himself, Atkinson interviewed members of his own pain community—a local triathlon club—for a paper titled, “Triathlon, Suffering, and Exciting Significance.” Among them was Oliver, a middle manager and family

man who did nothing more strenuous in his daily life than operate a television remote control until he took up triathlon, which cured him of a soul-sapping ennui. “I had money,” he explained to Atkinson. “I had stability; but I had nothing to make me feel alive, to make my body and mind work in different ways. I think that’s the essence of being human, to feel alive, to move beyond the comforts of familiarity. It’s about saying to yourself that you don’t want to feel dead on earth.”

Degrees of Challenge

Oliver’s right, of course. As humans we possess an innate drive to challenge ourselves. That’s why so many of us choose to become endurance athletes. But even the endorphin junkies among us also tend to avoid discomfort and minimize unnecessary effort, which is why we invent and use things like La-Z-Boys and remote controls. And when they are combined in an athlete, these opposing instincts—challenge-seeking and laziness—yield individuals who really want to test themselves . . . but only to a point.

I took a poll on social media, asking my fellow athletes how often they finish a race feeling they gave everything they had and could not have gone any faster by digging any deeper. Only 7.7 percent of respondents answered “always,” while another 70 percent admitted they seldom or never go all out in races. “I probably have the capacity to push more,” commented one athlete, “and no reason not to, and yet I just don’t, or I seem to forget.”

Another example of this lukewarm embrace of challenge is the rising appeal of “easy” marathons like the downhill REVEL Race Series. There’s nothing wrong with seeking beginner-friendly courses where fast times are guaranteed, but it’s worth questioning yourself if the reason you got into endurance sports was that you craved a challenge, and now here you are trying to minimize the challenge for the sake of putting up numbers that enhance your status.

And it’s not just amateurs who bring this lukewarm attitude to their respective pain communities. When USA Track & Field announced a noon start time for the 2024 Olympic Trials Marathon in Orlando, Florida, a vocal faction of qualifiers protested, arguing that the expected afternoon high temperature of 73°F (cooler than almost any of the marathons that Ironman triathletes endure on summer afternoons after having already swum 2.4 miles and cycled 112 miles) was too warm. These elite athletes were okay with the challenge of running 26.2 miles, but any challenge beyond that was totally unacceptable.

Chosen and Unchosen Challenges

Let’s be clear: Some challenges are chosen, others unchosen. Becoming an endurance athlete is a choice, but many of the challenges athletes face in pursuit of improvement are unchosen. In my experience, most endurance athletes have little tolerance for unchosen challenges. When they get injured or go through a rough patch in training or struggle with their nutrition, they react like entitled consumers storming back to Walmart with their defective robot vacuums, demanding refunds. They love the challenge of chasing improvement as endurance athletes . . . as long as everything goes their way.

I said most athletes, mind you, not all. When Courtney Dauwalter lost her vision in the middle of the 2017 Run Rabbit Run 100-mile trail race, she kept running—and won. At no point did she even consider stopping, instead treating her sudden (and thankfully temporary) blindness as just another part of the overall challenge of running 100 miles. Eliud Kipchoge had a similar reaction when his left shoe spontaneously fell apart during the 2015 Berlin Marathon, shrugging off the mishap after winning the race despite a bloodied foot. “That is sport,” he told reporters. “I had pain in my foot, but what could I do? I had to finish the race.” And when social media exploded with grumbling about the Olympic Trials Marathon noon start time, two-time Olympian Des Linden openly mocked the grumblers, which she rightly characterized as a freely bestowed competitive advantage to tougher competitors like herself. It’s probably no coincidence that Linden won the 2018 Boston Marathon in famously hellacious weather conditions that caused quite a bit of whining from others in the race.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with choosing a flat course and hoping the weather cooperates when you’re going after a personal-best race time. Nor is there anything wrong with racing for finisher’s medals rather than for personal bests, doing just enough to break free from La-Z-Boy inertia and experience exciting significance. The problem comes when athletes who claim to want to reach their full potential set a limit on their challenge-seeking, as only those who consistently challenge themselves to the absolute maximum have any hope of achieving mastery.

Challenges are to athletic development as soil, water, and sunlight are to plants. You grow as an athlete to the exact degree you challenge yourself, and fall short of your potential to the exact degree you avoid challenges. If you challenge yourself 90 percent as much as you could, you are fulfilling 90 percent of your potential. It’s as simple as that. The thing that trips up a lot of athletes is that challenges have a different relationship to performance than they have to mastery.

Challenges are the enemy of performance in the sense that, when the weather’s terrible, race times suffer. But they are the friend of mastery, because self-regulatory ability grows in direct response to embracing challenges. In chasing performance instead of mastery (for example, by running only marathons with net-downhill courses), athletes avoid challenges, thereby slowing their progress toward mastery and ultimately limiting their performance.

Such athletes would do well to study certain other sports, particularly bouldering, where the inseparability of challenge, performance, and mastery is impossible to overlook. Ask a boulderer how good they are and they will answer with a number on the V scale, which ranks individual climbs (or “problems” as they’re aptly known within the sport) by degree of difficulty. Improvement in bouldering entails moving up the V scale by continuously attacking problems one level above one’s current level. There is only one road to better performance, and that’s the road of bigger challenges. In endurance sports, however, athletes can pursue performance at the expense of growth by taking the easy way, but as in bouldering, only the hard way leads to true mastery.

I’m not saying you have to make things as hard as possible all the time. Training in combat boots is harder than training in running shoes, but it’s also dumb. Here’s the thing, though: To run the very best race you’re capable of, you have to make the race as hard as you can by trying as hard as you can. Even if you’ve chosen the fastest course available, the weather is perfect, you’re wearing carbon-plated super shoes, a hired pacer is pacing you, and you’re hopped up on performance-enhancing supplements, you cannot reach the finish line in the least time possible without challenging yourself to actually do this, and the few who do are the few who exhibit a challenge-seeking mindset not only on race day but every day.

I’ll leave you without one more example of such an athlete: Kara Goucher, another two-time Olympian, who throughout her career refused to stop and remove pebbles from her shoes during training runs. Even if she noticed a pebble or other debris when she put the shoe on, before she’d even started her run, she’d leave it be, regarding the small nuisance as good practice for races, where stopping for any reason could cost her victory.

The pebble is not the point. Goucher’s husband and fellow Olympian, Adam, thought she was crazy for leaving pebbles in her shoes,but he found other ways to challenge himself. What’s your pebble?

Excerpted from Chasing Mastery: 25 Lessons to Cultivate Your Full Potential in Endurance Sports.

To this end, I recommend taking inventory of our inputs periodically, looking at how you distribute your attention and assessing whether the things that are getting it actually deserve it, and whether anything that isn’t getting any attention from you should. I’ll go first:

My Inputs

The following list isn’t exhaustive, but it covers all of my major daily inputs.

Coaching

In terms of time demand, coaching gets most of my attention on any given day. I’ve always got athletes to take care of here at Dream Run Camp, and another twenty remote coaching clients get daily attention from me as well.

I consider my athlete interactions to be highly enriching because they’re difficult to execute perfectly but I always try my best, which means each interaction makes me a better coach. Just yesterday a Dream Runner who is struggling (more mentally than physically) with his adjustment to high altitude blew a tempo run for the second time in two weeks, and for the same reason. During the ride back to camp I tried to strike the right balance between showing compassion for his frustration and calling bullshit on his excuses, all with an aim toward ensuring he doesn’t repeat the same mistake and is better equipped in the future to self-manage challenges in training. In reviewing our conversation afterward I identified some things I did well and one or two I could have done better, which will benefit the next athlete I coach through a similar challenge.

Input grade: A+

Reading

I read about fifty books each year, and almost all of them are highbrow novels of the kind that are taught in college literature courses. For example, I’m currently a few chapters into Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a novel by the Polish Nobel prizewinner Olga Tokarczuk.

In the past I thought of my reading as pure entertainment, but some time ago I realized it’s also a highly enriching input to my own creativity. Virtually every book I read was written by a writer who’s better at the craft than I am. Through constant exposure to the very best writing, I become a better writer, not by consciously studying the techniques of the authors I choose but by allowing their artistry to seep into my subconscious mind, which is where ninety-five percent of the creative process takes place.

People are often surprised to learn how few running books I read. The reason, quite simply, is that very few running books meet my quality standards. (There are delightful exceptions, though, including Jared Beasley’s captivating new release, The Endurance Artist: Lazarus Lake, the Barkley & a Race with No End.) I refuse to lower my input standards; running writers need to raise theirs!

Input grade: A+

Music

I’ve been a fanatical music lover my entire life. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Without music life would be a mistake,” and I feel exactly the same way. My listening habits have evolved over the years, however. Through my twenties and into my thirties I took deep dives into favorite artists like Nina Simone and Bob Dylan. Then along came the streaming services and everything changed. When I subscribed first to iTunes, then Pandora, then Spotify, then Tidal (for better sound quality, which the average listener doesn’t notice but I certainly do), I stopped listening to music I was already familiar with and started listening almost exclusively to music I’d never heard before.

I love the sense of possibility I experience when I cue up Tidal’s Daily Discovery mix. But the real reason I’ve veered toward the unfamiliar in my musical inputs, I believe, is that my creative unconscious thrives on engaging with novelty. It’s like a workout for my Muse to be continuously challenged to assimilate and evaluate new sounds, which keeps my creative impulse in a state of constant ferment and stops me from getting stuck in my ways as a writer. To keep evolving as a creator of art I must keep evolving as a consumer of art.

Input grade: A+

Writing

I write twice a day most days. In the morning I work on a short-form piece (it’s 6:10 AM here in Flagstaff as I write these words), and in the afternoon and evening I work on whichever book project of mine is furthest along in its composition or editing.

I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t writing an output, not an input? The answer is yes and no. First drafts are outputs. The only input there is a blank page that I fill with clumsy, half-baked sentences. But most of writing is revision, and that process is more input than output. When the first draft is complete, I review the garbage I’ve written and try to make it better. Then I review the second draft, decide it’s still garbage, and work toward further improvement.

Every writer is a better critic. What I mean by this is that even if you’re not good enough at writing to write something that doesn’t suck, you at least know it sucks, and this knowledge affords you the opportunity to make it better through revision. “Genius is a choice,” Nietzsche wrote, and again he’s speaking my language. How do you write a work of genius? You don’t. You write something that sucks and then iterate over and over and over until it’s close to perfect.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve revised the 75,000-word manuscript of my long COVID memoir, but it’s more than twenty and possibly close to thirty. Each time I go back to it, I’m exposed to better writing with fewer flaws, and my skills are stretched a little further. It’s like a tournament where each victory results in your being matched up against a better opponent.

Input grade: A+

Running

Before I got sick with long COVID I often listened to music while I ran. Since returning to running last year I haven’t once listened to music while running. During the week I often run with my Dream Runners, which nicely combines my running and coaching inputs, but on the weekends I spend hours upon hours alone with my thoughts as I tramp through the wilderness.

They’re essentially moving meditations, these long runs, hikes, and run-hikes. I’m not a visually oriented person, so the scenery doesn’t count as much of an input on these excursions (though it is spectacular). The major inputs are all internal: the rhythm of my breathing, the piston-like contraction and relaxation of my muscles, my thirst, and my mental chatter.

In bygone times it was normal for people to spend hours on end alone with their thoughts, but now it’s rare, and our species has become weaker as a result. I am never bored during a half-day run in the forest because I’ve trained my mind to be self-sufficient. Who do you think is more likely to crack psychologically in a 100-mile ultramarathon: a runner who does get bored during long runs or one who doesn’t? Granted, no one cracks due to boredom specifically in an ultra, but if boredom is evidence of a weak mind . . .

Input grade: A+

Current Events

For the past three years I’ve had a rotating cast of strangers living in my home at all times—more than 200 in all. One thing this experience has taught me is that most athletes have a greater variety of inputs than I do. In particular, they consume quite a bit more sports-related content through social media, podcasts, websites, and streaming services. Increasingly, I find that the athletes around me are better informed about current happenings and personalities in the sport, which concerns me, because there’s a lot happening in the sport and there are many interesting personalities to follow.

When I was young I swore I would never become a curmudgeon—the kind of liver-spotted cliché who says today’s music is total crap, all of it, just like his father said about his generation’s music. And I haven’t. I truly believe there’s as much vibrancy in today’s generation than there was in mine. But as time goes by I pay less and less attention to current events, so I’m missing out on some inputs that would enrich me in ways that are complementary to my current inputs. I don’t want to become that Gen X writer who always draws examples from the 1990s, and I’m headed in that direction.

Input grade: C

I’m open to advice on ways to keep up on the best of what’s new in endurance sports without taking too much of my attention away from my existing inputs, which I quite like. And if I may offer you a bit of advice, it’s this: Do what I just did and audit your current inputs, rooting out those that don’t deserve your attention and identifying for what’s missing. You have as much control over your attention as you have over your money—spend it wisely!

You might expect that improvising like this would result in chaotic training with no direction. But there’s a difference between planning at the last minute and not planning at all. The short-term planning I do today encompasses all the same factors I considered previously in my long-term planning—what type of race I’m preparing for, how far away it is, my recent training and current fitness, and the principles of progression, specificity, and balance—such that, if you looked back at my training log after a big race, it sure would look as though I had planned the whole thing in advance and disruptions had been minimal. But that’s just it: Improvisational training is in fact more orderly than following a long-term plan because it allows small adjustments to be made along the way and avoids the big adjustments that are inevitably required when long-term planning meets reality.

The Experiential Factor

There was one additional planning factor that became front-of-mind when I stopped creating complete roadmaps, and it changed my whole relationship with training. You see, a workout is not just a physical stimulus; it’s also an experience that the athlete is wide awake for and affected by emotionally and cognitively. But how many athletes think of it this way? Freed from the strictures of long-term planning, I began to think of workouts as experiences first and physical stimuli second and designed workouts that differed from the usual thing in ways that appealed to me. For example, instead of a normal progression run I once ran ten miles easy to soften up my legs and then went straight into an all-out 5K time trial, looking to see how close I could get to my most recent 5K race time on tired legs. It was as hard as it sounds, but it was also fun and exciting.

In short, switching from long-term planning to improvisation turned my training into an adventure, whereas previously it had been a series of tasks. Back when I planned everything all at once, I tended to look past each individual workout, valuing it only as a steppingstone toward the end goal, but now that I plan each session individually, I seek to maximize its intrinsic value, which I do by incorporating elements of novelty and challenge.

My Latest Adventures

When you’re training for a 100-mile ultramarathon, as I’m doing now, it’s that much easier to practice an adventure-based approach. Lately I’ve been having a blast devising epic weekend wilderness experiences that deliver engaging tests for my mind even as they build endurance and durability in my body. Three weekends ago I completed a forty-mile structured run-walk on a primitive dirt road that dead ends at a stunning overlook with a view of Sedona’s red rock formations. Two weekends ago I did a fifty-kilometer road run. Last weekend I went out and back for four hours on a route with one giant climb, one huge descent, and nothing else, accumulating 3,000 feet of elevation gain in 25.5 miles. This weekend I’m heading down to McDowell Mountain Regional Park to run with my buddy Jarred on the Javelina Jundred race course in desert heat—twenty miles on Saturday and twenty again on Sunday.

Don’t get caught up in the specifics of these examples. It’s the underlying adventure mindset, which is continuous, that matters more than the individual adventures, which last a few hours each. According to somatic psychotherapist Sarah Tuckett, “Choosing an adventure mindset means seeking novelty and adopting an attitude of anticipation, curiosity, creativity and play. Whilst these new experiences may be challenging, striving will ultimately bring you a sense of pleasure and a hit of happiness in the form of dopamine.”

What I love most about winging it in training is the sense of freedom it gives me. I know the rules, but I’m no longer rulebound. Three weeks before my 100-miler I’m going to race the Flagstaff Marathon, which is hands-down the toughest marathon I’ve ever run. It’s a bit risky, but most adventures are, and I’m confident I’ll come away from this adventure unscathed and even more prepared for Javelina.

When training is an adventure, you don’t worry about it being less than perfect. The paint-by-numbers approach that aims for perfection isn’t perfect either, and it’s less enjoyable, and with ambitious athletes who like working hard, the best predictor of ultimate outcomes is how much fun they’re having along the way.

Are You Up for an Adventure?

Last week I asked my social media followers to rate the accuracy of the following statement as it relates to them: “I see my training as an adventure.” The top answer was “somewhat accurate,” with thirty-three percent of the vote. As a coach, I try to move these athletes up the adventure scale to “accurate,” and eventually, “very accurate.” No athlete should ever feel obligated to see their training as an adventure, but in my experience athletes never regret embracing this mindset.

If you’d like to shift toward an adventure mindset in your training, I suggest you do what I did and dispense with long-term planning. It’s okay to have a broad roadmap to your next big race, but the specifics of your key sessions should not be determined until a few days before each of them. When you do this, four things will happen:

1. The training process will become more exciting due to the uncertainty surrounding what happens next. This uncertainty is the essence of all adventures, and though uncertainty is scary to many athletes, champions embrace it and relish the excitement it engenders.

2. You’ll feel freer. Athletes are more motivated in training when they feel in control of the process, and when you switch from rigid planning to training adventurously, the plan is no longer telling you what to do. You get to decide what appeals to you now, and do it.

3. Your training will become more effective as you base your daily and weekly workout decisions on current information instead of planning many weeks ahead and having to make adjustments that are often a day late and a dollar short.

4. You will put more thought into crafting experiences when deciding what to do next in your training. There are lots of different workouts that would make sense for physiological reasons on any given day. Of these, which one would be most interesting or confidence-building or just plain fun?

When you treat training as an adventure, you are allowed to, encouraged to, and rewarded for having a good time while you’re getting fitter. I don’t know about you, but for me that’s hard to pass up!

“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value,” the professor counseled. “He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.”

Most quotes attributed to Albert Einstein are apocryphal. Not only did Einstein never say, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” but whoever did say it was a complete moron with no understanding of the difference between everyday human irrationality and actual insanity. But the quote that William Miller recorded during his visit with the most revolutionary figure in the history of science and included in an obituary appearing in the May 2, 1955 issue of LIFE is authentic, and it’s my all-time favorite Einstein quote.

A Confession

When I first came across Einstein’s value/success distinction in 2014, I realized that I had spent my entire adult life caught between wanting to be both a man of success and a man of value. In fairness, I’ve always put value first. Unlike, say, Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster who stole hundreds of millions of dollars invested in her worthless company, Theranos, I didn’t want to get rich at any cost. And unlike, say, Kim Kardashian, who is more than happy to be famous for being famous, I wanted to be famous for writing books that had a positive impact on people. But I did indeed want to be famous, and I wasn’t against getting rich. So I tried to have it both ways, putting my heart and soul into my writing and then working my ass off to sell and bring attention to what I’d written.

I share this confession by way of explaining why I admire purists like Gary Cantrell, aka Lazarus Lake, the enigmatic creator of the Barkley Marathons and the subject of Jared Beasley’s captivating new biography, The Endurance Artist: Lazarus Lake, the Barkley, & a Race with No End. Few individuals in the endurance space have achieved more success (a NETFLIX documentary, enshrinement in the Ultrarunning Hall of Fame, an original race event—Big’s Backyard Ultra—that has spread to sixty-one countries) without ever making any conscious effort to be successful, and in a world where almost everyone has their price, that’s worth celebrating.

The title of the new book couldn’t be more apposite. Although Wikipedia categorizes him as a “race designer and director,” Laz is really an artist who just happens to have a different medium than most. Outside Magazine saw this too, dubbing him “the Leonardo da Vinci of pain.” He’s a performance artist who creates running-themed experiences designed to push ordinary people to their absolute physical and mental limits in a style that is an extension of Laz’s own mischievous, sardonic, crusty, and uncompromising personality.

Born for This

When you learn the origin story of any great artist, you invariably discover that in one way or another they were born to do what they do. In Cantrell’s case, there just had to be some traumatic early-life encounter with pain that steered him toward becoming the Leonardo da Vinci not of kindness or anger or travel or birdwatching but of pain specifically, and The Endurance Artist reveals there was indeed such an encounter. At age twelve Cantrell was diagnosed with a massive benign facial tumor that had entirely replaced his right cheek and required multiple major surgeries over the span of six years to eradicate. The respect for pain and the coping skills he acquired in enduring this ordeal provided the palette for his later endurance creations. And an overlapping experience as a high school cross-country and track athlete supplied the canvas.

At the age of twenty-four, Cantrell organized his first race: an offroad marathon held on a virtually unnavigable course in the wilds of south-central Tennessee that turned out to be a mile longer than advertised. Sound familiar? When the few finishers (who’d paid twenty-five cents a head to enter the event) complained about it afterward, Cantrell shot back, “If you want to run for time, run on a track.” At a time when American distance running was rapidly becoming standardized and homogenized, this longhaired greenhorn with a lopsided face wanted to go in the other direction, imagining a scarier, funnier version of the sport.

A success-seeking event organizer would have surrendered to his customers’ negative feedback and pivoted toward making people-pleasing, cookie-cutter races (“flat and fast!”). But value-driven Gary Cantrell did the opposite, spinning out his vision in various ways until one of them took (the Strolling Jim 40), then another (the Barkley). When an artist is thoroughly uninterested in getting rich and famous, it often takes them a while to find their audience.

As a writer, I was struck in reading The Endurance Artist by how important language is to Laz’s creative expression. A voracious reader growing up, he first made a name for himself as a popular columnist for Ultrarunning magazine. Applicants vying for one of the forty coveted entry slots awarded annually to the Barkley Marathons must submit an original essay about why they should be chosen. Those selected receive a personal “condolence letter” from Laz, and when they’re out on the race course they must find books stashed at various points and tear a page out to prove they were there. The event is awash in darkly humorous names, like The Bad Thing (“a sheer wall of Tennessee jungle” that racers must either ascend or descend depending on which way they’re going) and Quitter’s Road (a jeep road that serves as a quick escape route for those who’ve decided they’ve had enough).

The Barkley is unquestionably weird, but it’s also self-consistent. With it, Lake has created a wacky world-within-a-world that has a life of its own and continuously evolves to become more of what it already is. In one of my favorite scenes in The Endurance Artist, a bumbling would-be Samaritan who wrongly thinks the race has ended brings one of the five books back to the start/finish area, rendering it unfindable by a racer still out on course who only needs to find that one book to become a rare successful finisher of the event. When a member of Laz’s inner circle offers to schlep the book back to its proper hiding spot, Laz stops him. “Shit happens,” he says. Any other race director would have regarded the bumbling Samaritan’s fuck-up as a perversion of the event, but Laz embraced it as an accidental and organic part of it—the vision calling its own shots.

True to the Vision

Staying true to the vision is what “men of value” do. While others chase success and take more than they give, or start off intending to stay true to their vision only to sell out at the first opportunity, Laz waited until 2007 to begin to allow media access to him and his events, and then only to save the Barkley Marathons from being shut down by the park authority in charge of the land on which is takes place. “Gary wasn’t interested in money,” said his ex-wife when Beasley interviewed her for the book. “He just didn’t have any ambition.”

Of course, Laz was ambitious, just not in a way people recognize in a society where artists are almost expected to calculate every move to maximize their fame and wealth (I see you, Taylor Swift!). It’s refreshing to see attention given to a high-integrity purist who could shill for major corporate sponsors à la Andrew Huberman but doesn’t or could turn himself into a cultish self-help Instagram guru like David Goggins but wouldn’t dream of it.

I’ll always crave approval, and I do appreciate the finer things, but ever since I came across that Einstein quote I’ve striven to put value ahead of success, and reading The Endurance Artist was the reminder I needed that when you keep doing the same thing over and over in pursuit of a pure vision, eventually you do get different results.

Full disclosure: I am not only an admirer of Jared Beasley’s The Endurance Artist, but I’m also a co-owner of the company that published it. Forgive me, therefore, for putting on my publisher’s hat and using this space to promote Jared’s upcoming book tour. There’s a lot of buzz about this book, so if you’re interested in attending one of the following events, act fast!

The Trail Running Film Festival, Nashville with Harvey Lewis and Jared Beasley presented by UltraSignup and HardWin Adventures

Saturday, September 6th at 4 pm CDT

Percy Warner Park

50 Vaughn Rd, Nashville, TN 37221

Tickets required from Ultrasignup. More info

Join author Jared Beasley and special guest Harvey Lewis for a conversation on The Endurance Artist. Enjoy a selection of trailrunning films as they tour the globe, while getting a sneak peak into the making of Beasley’s latest book, the grueling nature of Backyards, and Harvey Lewis’s personal journey. Tickets required.

The Endurance Artist with Lazarus Lake, Jared Beasley, and David Callahan presented by Hoka, Fleet Feet, Parnassus Books, and UltraSignup

Wednesday, September 10th at 6:00 p.m. CDT

Clementine Hall

4710 Charlotte Ave, Nashville, TN 37209

Tickets required from UltraSignup. More info

Join fellow runners and ultrarunners for an evening filled with incredible conversation between ultrarunning's iconic race director, Lazarus Lake and author and journalist Jared Beasley, moderated by UltraSignup’s David Callahan. This event launches The Endurance Artist book tour in an intimate, 300-seat venue for an unforgettable evening. Book signing and special giveaways. Tickets required.

Book Talk and Book Signing with Lazarus Lake, Jared Beasley, and Rob Apple presented by Ultrasignup and Fleet Feet

Friday, September 12th at 6:00 p.m. CDT

Barnes & Noble Booksellers

2615 Medical Center Pkwy, Murfreesboro, TN 37129

Tickets required from UltraSignup. More info

The second of two scheduled talks with Lazarus Lake, join author Jared Beasley with special guest Rob Apple, the most prolific ultrarunner in history with 725 ultras run.

Book signing and special giveaways. Tickets required.

Book Talk and Book Signing with Jared Beasley presented by Fleet Feet

Monday, September 15th at 6 pm CDT

2750 Carl T Jones Dr SE Ste 750, Huntsville, AL 35802

Come for a run with the author. Book signing and special giveaways. This event is free and open to the public with no registration required.

Book Talk and Book Signing with Jared Beasley presented by Wagner’s RunWalk

Tuesday, September 16th at 12:00 p.m. EDT

Wagner’s RunWalk

420 Queen City Avenue, Tuscaloosa, AL 35401

Celebrate the official publication release of The Endurance Artist with author Jared Beasley. Book signing and special giveaways. A trail run in the afternoon. This event is free and open to the public with no registration required.

“Five Years with Laz” Book Talk with Jared Beasley presented by Fleet Feet

Tuesday, September 16th at 6 p.m. CDT

Fleet Feet

3060 Healthy Way Ste 100, Birmingham, AL 35243

Stop in for the official launch night of The Endurance Artist with author Jared Beasley presented by Fleet Feet Birmingham. Come hear about getting to know the infamous ultrarunning race director Lazarus Lake at the Barkley Marathons, the Backyard Ultra World Championship, and as crew for his “Walk Across America.” Book signing and special giveaways. This event is free and open to the public.

Book Signing at the Barkley Fall Classic 50K Trail Ultramarathon presented by Union Avenue Books, Knoxville

Friday, September 19th, 12:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. and Saturday, September 20th, 5:00 a.m. - 8:20 p.m. EDT

Brushy Mountain State Prison

9182 TN-116, Petros, TN 37845

More info

Meet author Jared Beasley and Lazarus Lake during packet pickup for the Barkley Fall Classic at the iconic Brushy Mountain State Prison. Books available for signing and sale. Registration is not needed to spectate or attend. Advance registration required to participate in the race. A catered dinner will be served for entrants from 4 pm to 7 pm.

Book Talk and Book Signing with Jared Beasley

Saturday September 27th, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. EDT

Barnes & Noble Booksellers

1145 High Ridge Road, Stamford, CT 06905

Meet Jared Beasley, author of The Endurance Artist, and hear about ultrarunning, Lazarus Lake and his infamous Barkley Marathons and the Backyard Ultra movement. This event is free and open to the public.

Recorded Interview & Book Auction with Jared Beasley and Lazarus Lake

Saturday, October 18th

Big’s Backyard World Championship

Releases during live coverage of Big’s Backyard Ultra World Championship on the Backyard Ultra YouTube Channel.

Book Talk and Book Signing with Jared Beasley and “Gagz” Gagliardi

November 6th, 6:00 p.m. EST

Philadelphia Runner

1711 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19103

More info

Meet author Jared Beasley at Philadelphia’s well-known running store during this free, public event. Books available for signing and sale as well as special giveaways. With special guest and local running legend Michael “Gagz” Gagliardi. Run to follow. This event is free and open to the public with no registration required.

The Endurance Artist with Jared Beasley presented by Pace Yourself Run Co. and The Country Bookshop

November 21st, 6:00 p.m. EST

Pace Yourself Run Co.

205 NE Broad St, Southern Pines, NC 28387

More info

Meet author Jared Beasley for a slideshow and lively discussion about ultrarunning, Gary Cantrell, the Barkley Marathons, and Big’s Backyard Ultra. Books available for signing and sale. This event is free and open to the public with no registration required.

The Endurance Artist Book Talk and Book Signing with Jared Beasley

November 28th, 12:00 p.m. EST

Litchfield Bookstore

11421 Ocean Hwy Unit D, Pawleys Island, SC 29585

More info

Meet author Jared Beasley to learn about ultrarunning, the Barkley Marathons, the backyard ultrarunning movement during this free event, open to the public. Slideshow and special giveaways. Books available for signing and sale.

The Endurance Artist Book Talk and Book Signing presented by Howe2Run

December 3rd, 6:00 p.m. EST

11 Gateway Blvd S Ste 54, Savannah, GA 31419

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Meet author Jared Beasley to learn about ultrarunning, the Barkley Marathons, the backyard ultrarunning movement during this free event, open to the public. Slideshow and special giveaways. Books available for signing and sale.

The Endurance Artist Book Talk and Book Signing with Jared Beasley

December 8th, 6:00 p.m. EST

Tidal Creek Brewhouse

3421 Knoles Street (corner of Johnson), Myrtle Beach, SC 29577

Meet author Jared Beasley to learn about ultrarunning, the Barkley Marathons, the backyard ultrarunning movement during this free event, open to the public. Books available for signing and sale. Slideshow.

From Jud: Matt’s recent writing The Other Talent, on the inner life of athletes, resonates deeply with me. His reminder that you can be “a little unhinged and yet still pulled together” (my paraphrase—you’ll need to read his version) captures the truth so many of us live. Here we return to one of his “OG books,” 80/20 Running, and why I believe the 80/20 principle belongs not only in our training plans but also in how we care for our mental health. And then we’ll take it one step further: what if the concept of periodization—so central to endurance training—also belongs in our mental training?

Rediscovering 80/20 and the Art of Slowing Down

So many of us grow up with a coach—whether it’s a swim coach, a track coach, or a parent who doubles as a soccer coach. As athletes mature, the training gets more structured, more scientific. That was true for me in my 30s and 40s, when I began applying endurance principles more seriously to my trail running and mountain biking.

That’s when I finally picked up Matt Fitzgerald’s 80/20 Running. It wasn’t new. Most of my friends had already read it. But it was transformative for me.

In the book, Matt introduces what has become a staple of endurance training: 80% of your weekly training should be done at low intensity, the other 20% at high intensity. Put simply, lots of easy running (what he often just called “slow running”), and just enough fast running to build strength and speed. We call it by different names now, most notably “zone 2 training,” but the principle holds. The genius of the book wasn’t just the math. It was the intentionality. If you don’t plan for balance, the 20% takes over, and burnout follows.

That principle has shaped my athletic journey. But today, Matt and I want to suggest a twist: What if the 80/20 principle applies just as powerfully to mental health and resilience as it does to physical training?

80/20 for Mental Health

Think of your mental health not only in clinical terms like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, or PTSD. Think of it in the same way you think of your body: adaptable, trainable, and responsive to intentional stress.

Here’s the idea:

• 80% Calm Zone (Zone 2 for your mind): The bulk of your week should support mental recovery and base-building. This might include good sleep hygiene, mindfulness routines, journaling, unstructured play, or simply showing up to daily life without overloading your nervous system.

  

  

• 20% Stress Zone (the “intervals” or “HIIT” for your mind): The remaining slice should include deliberate “hard efforts” that challenge you emotionally or psychologically—difficult conversations, public speaking, diving into hard projects at work, tackling fears, or performing under pressure.

  

  

The hypothesis is straightforward: if you stack all your mental 20% on top of or in close succession to your physical 20%, you risk creating an unsustainable load.

When the 20% Collides

I learned this lesson the hard way.

Last spring, I was in the most intense training block of my life preparing for the Canyons 100K. I was stacking long mountain runs with hard climbing days, often back-to-back. At the same time, I decided to launch The Balanced Athlete with Dr. Jud on Substack.

I thought publishing alongside a peak race would be a meaningful milestone. What I didn’t anticipate was the emotional intensity of “going public.” Messages poured in. Most were encouraging. Some raised hard questions: Would this transparency hurt my career? Was I putting my family at risk by being so open about mental health?

The physical load of race prep plus the emotional load of public vulnerability hit at once. It felt like I’d stacked two 20% blocks on top of each other. Looking back, I wish I had waited until my training cycle eased to launch. My nervous system needed more time in the calm zone.

Before moving on, pause for a moment. Can you recall a time when you stacked your own “20 percents”—a big physical push and a major emotional stressor—too close together?

The Evidence for Mind-Body Load

This isn’t about avoiding challenges. It’s about sequencing them with intention. Just as you don’t hammer intervals every day, you don’t want to schedule your hardest conversations, biggest exams, or most vulnerable moments on top of peak training weeks.

Academic research supports this overlap. A 2020 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology examined 29 interventions and found that mental fatigue consistently reduced endurance performance—even when heart rate and lactate levels were unchanged. The culprit? Increased perception of effort. In other words, the mind and body share the same training currency. Push both too hard, and performance suffers.

From 80/20 to Mental Health Periodization

The 80/20 framework helps us manage weekly balance. But endurance athletes know that the bigger picture matters too. That’s where periodization comes in. We don’t just plan week to week—we structure entire seasons. Macrocycles (the year), mesocycles (blocks of several weeks), and microcycles (the week). Stress and rest aren’t random; they’re intentional.

What if we treated our mental health the same way?

• Mental Macrocycle (season or year): Big-picture mental goals. Building resilience, strengthening confidence, or improving balance between sport, work, and family.

• Mental Mesocycle (monthly blocks): Focused themes. One month emphasizing stress management, another focusing on reframing negative thoughts or cultivating gratitude.

• Mental Microcycle (weekly rhythm): Intentional spacing of “easy” and “hard” days. If a big exam, presentation, or performance looms, that’s a hard mental day so adjust training or social load around it.

Research backs this approach. Several authors note that psychological skills training is most effective when integrated systematically, not sporadically. Notably, Kellmann et al. (2018) highlight how inadequate recovery from psychological stress impairs performance just as much as inadequate physical recovery. The parallels are striking.

Athlete Examples

Elite athletes intuitively practice this. Simone Biles’s decision to step back during the Tokyo Olympics wasn’t weakness—it was mental health periodization. Recognizing she had reached a peak load, she chose recovery to prevent collapse. Eliud Kipchoge, a champion marathoner, often speaks about the rhythm of calm days, recovery, and intentional mental preparation being as important as his mileage.

These world class athletes remind us that thriving in sport isn’t about grinding endlessly. It’s about sequencing stress and recovery in both body and mind. We can apply that process in our own lives.

Parents: Mental Health Periodization Matters Even More for Kids

If there’s one place where mental periodization is urgently needed, it’s in the lives of young athletes. Too often, kids are pushed from one demand to the next—school, practice, homework, weekend tournaments, play dates, social commitments—without any intentional recovery.

As a pediatrician and a parent, I’ve seen it firsthand. Well-meaning parents may periodize their child’s physical training adding some gaps in between activities, but forget their mental load. A week of finals plus three practices plus a weekend tournament equals burnout, frustration, and sometimes injury. Kids flame out…and as parents we wonder why.

Imagine instead stepping back and looking at the whole month and saying: “This is a heavy academic block, so we’ll ease off competitive pressure.” Or after a tough race weekend: “This week needs to be lighter, with more downtime and unstructured play.” These choices aren’t soft—they’re smart. They help kids adapt, grow, and stay in sport longer. They allow kids to thrive in their sport and, more importantly, in their broader lives.

Intentionality Is the Key

The central lesson is intentionality. Physical training works because we plan stress and recovery with purpose. Mental resilience deserves the same care. By weaving the 80/20 principle into your week and periodization into your seasons, you can prevent overload and create capacity—not just for sport, but for career, parenting, relationships, and life.

In practice, that means asking:

• Where are the mental “intervals” in my week?

• Where are the mental “easy runs” and how can I build in more of these?

• Am I giving my mind time to adapt, or am I stacking too much at once?

Your body adapts best with balance. So does your mind.

So let’s be more intentional with these concepts.

Jud

I do something similar with my bathroom scale. At most times it sits in a corner unused. But when I know I’m getting leaner—which invariably happens when I’m training for a big race—I step on it daily for a small dose of extra confirmation that the process is working and I’m approaching peak form.

As I write these words, I’m nine weeks away from racing the Javelina Jundred, and I’m getting leaner. This morning I weighed in at 139.6 pounds, which is pretty light for an adult American male, whose average weight is 199.8 pounds. But it’s especially light for someone as tall as I am (six feet, one inch). The body mass index (BMI) is a clinical tool that uses the following formula to calculate a person’s weight-to-height ratio: kilograms ÷ meters². When I entered today’s numbers into an online BMI calculator, I got a result of 18.4, which puts me just below the line between “healthy” and “underweight”.

Among the many factors BMI doesn’t account for is a person’s natural bodyweight set point. I happen to be an extreme ectomorph with a very low setpoint, and although many people would not be healthy at a BMI below 18.5, I can assure you that I did not get there by starvation, and in fact I’m healthier than I’ve been in a very long time and I feel terrific.

But Skinny Shaming’s Okay?

When I was a junior in high school a final adolescent growth spurt brought me to my current height. At that time I weighed 138 lbs and my was BMI 18.2. Running had something to do with my exceptional lankiness back then, but just like today, genes had more to do with it. I bought my first wristwatch around the same time and I had to go with a ladies model because my boney wrists had room to swim inside anything made for my sex.

Unsurprisingly, I took a good amount of teasing growing up on account of my skeletal appearance. I remember finishing a cross-country practice at the front of the group with my teammates Mark and Mike and standing around talking with them afterward while we waited for the others to catch up. The two of them were standing side by side facing me and they started laughing for no apparent reason.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

“You’re so skinny!” Mark answered.

I was flabbergasted. Mike and Mark were the skinniest kids I knew, and evidently I was so much skinnier than they were that they found my body hilarious. You can imagine what effect this incident had on my vulnerable seventeen-year-old ego. Incidents like this one fed into my decision to quit running the following spring, after which I became a meathead and ballooned up to 206 pounds.

When I started running seriously again in my late twenties I lost weight quickly. I wasn’t trying to lose weight as an end in itself—to the contrary, still scarred by my youthful skinny shaming experience, I didn’t want to get any skinnier than necessary to maximize my fitness and performance, which was my try goal—but my genetic predisposition for skinniness hadn’t gone anywhere and the fat flew off my body as a collateral side effect of ramping up my running.

Through this process I discovered that I felt and performed best at 141 pounds—a scant 2 percent above my high school racing weight—further validating set-point theory. But even after this discovery, I never actively tried to return to this exact number (which for me coincided with periods of peak training and did not naturally sustain itself year-round), instead focusing on nourishing my body with lots of good food and training smart and letting the numbers take care of themselves.

And they always did. I completed my fastest marathon at age forty-six weighing 141 lbs and my fastest Ironman in 2019 at the same weight. Still, I must admit that I was a little surprised when my weight returned to the same number recently after more than three years without running, a disease-induced period of middle-age sedentariness that caused me to gain forty pounds of pure grade A All-American blubber. Score another one for set-point theory!

I wish every endurance athlete who is interested in performance weight management followed my form-follows-function approach. Folks get into trouble when they start chasing body weight and body composition targets as goals unto themselves, distinct from fitness and performance goals. Athletes who make this mistake invariably start to eat and train in ways that may have the effects they want to see in the short term but do so at the long-term cost of sabotaged fitness, performance, and health.

A race is not a physique contest. The way you look when you’ve attained peak fitness as the result of eating healthily and training smart is the way you’re supposed to look. And I include myself in this generalization, even though I still get skinny shamed forty years after it all started. Just yesterday—I kid you not—a guest here at Dream Run Camp spoke the following sentence to me: “Your dimensions are indicative of a potential for certain genetic conditions.”

My younger self would have been hurt by these words, perhaps adding biceps curls to my gym routine in a useless effort to make my body less susceptible to unflattering commentary. But at fifty-four I’m way past caring what other people or the BMI chart thinks, so instead I laughed an unforced laugh and inscribed the insult in the quote book we keep here so that future Dream Runners may also enjoy a good laugh at my expense.

A little over halfway through my journey toward the Chicago Marathon—where I was scheduled to compete in the men’s elite division thanks to some backroom maneuvering by sports agent Josh Cox—I suffered a second-degree tendon strain during an epic workout on Lake Mary Road. Forced to shut down my training (Coach Ben wouldn’t even let me ride the ElliptiGO for three days), I watched helplessly as my dream turned into a nightmare.

On the second of those three days of enforced sedentariness I received an email message from a self-described fan of my writing who wanted me to know that he and some of his training buddies had placed bets on how long I would survive with NAZ Elite before I got injured, and that he had won the wager, having chosen the exact date of my groin injury. His delight in my downfall was obvious, despite cursory efforts to sandwich his gloating between hollow expressions of sympathy.

You’re probably thinking, What an asshole, and I must admit I had the same thought initially. But I didn’t dwell on the insult because I knew I was putting myself at risk of becoming the object of meanspirited commentary when I made the decision to publicly share my fake pro runner experience in real time. In fact, that was the entire point of putting myself out there—not to fail and be trolled but to expose myself to the pressure of knowing I’d be trolled if I failed and to use that pressure to increase my chances of succeeding. In other words, I deliberately sought out the unnecessary risk of failing publicly as a way to enhance my performance.

I Learned from the Best

My all-time favorite athlete is Muhammad Ali, and it was from him that I learned this high-stakes gambit. Here’s a relevant passage from my scandalously underappreciated book The Other Talent:

Prizefighting is a high-pressure vocation. To lose a heavyweight title fight is to receive a very public ass whooping. Yet Muhammad Ali willingly quadrupled the pressure he was under by mouthing off and clowning around before his fights. It’s humiliating enough to be knocked flat before an audience of millions, far worse to meet this fate after having predicted—in rhyming couplets—the exact round in which you would knock your opponent flat. Gorgeous George was what is known in pro wrestling as a heel, generating interest in his matches by provoking fans and making them want to see him lose. Ali used the same playbook, pitting the entire boxing world against him ahead of his first title shot by predicting an eighth-round knockout of undefeated champion Sonny Liston. Such immense self-imposed pressure will either weigh an athlete down or lift them to otherwise unattainable heights. In Ali’s case, we know the result. Sonny Liston quit on his stool after six rounds.

It goes without saying that not every athlete is like Muhammad Ali. Many if not most athletes perform worse under pressure, not better. What distinguishes those who thrive when the pressure’s on from those who wilt? Let’s see what science has to say.

Chokers Versus Clutch Performers

Research by sport psychologists has shown that mental pressure is a universal feature of the athletic experience. Eminent social psychologist Roy Baumeister has defined this type of mental pressure as a “perception of increased incentives to perform well”. A pressure situation in sports is one where the stakes are seen to be higher than usual and performing well matters more. This is the case for all athletes. What differs is how individual athletes interpret and respond to pressure.

A 2024 meta-analysis conducted by Australian researchers and published in International Reviews of Sport and Exercise Psychology highlighted four things that clutch performers have and do that chokers lack and don’t do.

1. Focus and Prepare

The first thing clutch performers do when confronted with a high-pressure situation is rise to the occasion, acting out the expression, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” According to the authors of the meta-analysis, “Increased focus, task-oriented attention, effort, and thorough preparation all contributed to athlete performance under pressure” in the studies they looked at. Chokers, meanwhile, tend to fixate on the pressure itself and the anxiety it provokes, essentially freezing instead of getting going when the going gets tough.

2. Embrace the challenge

It's not that clutch performers don’t feel pressure; they just interpret it positively instead of negatively. “Appraising anxiety as facilitative, and appraising the situation as a challenge,” the aforementioned authors write, “was suggested to facilitate athlete performance under pressure.” On the other hand, they continue, “appraising anxiety as debilitative, and appraising the situational demands as outside the capabilities of the athlete, was noted to encourage choking.” Clutch performers want the ball with 3.3 seconds left in the game and their team down by one point, whereas chokers would rather stay on the bench.

3. Confidence and Control

As I often point out, sport mastery is all about control, so it’s not surprising that the meta-analysis also found differences in perceived control between clutch performers and chokers. “An athlete’s confidence in their ability to achieve their goal,” the authors report, “the expectations they hold, and the level of perceived control they have over their actions and emotions, were all reported to contribute to an athlete’s ability to perform under pressure.”

4. Mental Toughness

Equally unsurprising is the fact that clutch performers were found to possess greater mental toughness (which Google AI defines as “the ability to persevere and remain determined in the face of challenges and setbacks”) than chokers. “Five studies highlighted the significance of mental toughness in performing under pressure,” the authors note. “Low mental toughness was associated with instances of choking, whilst higher levels were linked to excelling under pressure.”

What About Fear?

What did surprise me in reading the 2024 meta-analysis was that fear of failure was not cited as a relevant factor, although individual studies published before and after the paper under discussion have done so. In my own experience as a coach, fear of failure stands out as the single biggest impediment to successful coping with pressure among athletes prone to choking. It frustrates the hell out of me, too, because it’s completely unnecessary. Unless you’re a professional athlete who loses money and opportunities when you fail, nothing bad happens when you fall short of a goal—nothing except emotional devastation, that is, if you’re afraid of failure.

What would you think if you saw an athlete cross a finish line short of their goal and then start punching themselves in the face as hard as they could? I’ll answer for you: You would think they were completely insane. Well, guess what: This is exactly what happens on a psychological level when athletes suffer emotional devastation after failing. No money is lost, no opportunities. Nothing explodes or breaks. And yet the athlete beats the shit out of themself, manufacturing a price for failure that would not have existed if they hadn’t brought it into existence. Why?

Bad parenting is the short answer. Too many parents punish their children emotionally with disapproval when they fail. This teaches them to fear failure, and from then on they no longer need their parents to inflict psychological punishment—they are more than capable of punishing themselves for each and every future failure.

Adult athletes who fear failure don’t actually fear failure itself, which again causes no material harm to those whose very livelihood doesn’t depend on competitive success. What they’re really scared of is the way they feel after failing, having internalized the parental disapproval they experienced in their vulnerable youth. These athletes assume they have no choice but to suffer emotional devastation when they fail, not understanding that the pain they feel isn’t something that happens to them—it’s something they do to themselves—and overlooking the fact that there exist athletes who shrug at their failures and quickly move on, unfazed. And I am one of them.

Bring on the Risks!

My friend Sarah Crouch, a now-retired professional runner, once said to me, “If you’re not failing to achieve your goals at least half the time, your goals are too soft.” That’s the attitude you have when you don’t fear failure. Freed to take more and bigger risks, you fail more often, but you’re successes are far greater than anything you could achieve by playing it safe. And even when you do fall short of a goal, you walk away having enriched yourself with a far more thrilling experience than you can ever get by minimizing risk. For the risk-taking athlete, failure is merely an ugly period at the end of a long and beautiful sentence.

To be clear, not fearing failure is different from not feeling pressure not to fail. When I write in this space that I want to not just complete my first 100-miler but complete it in less than twenty hours and win my age group, I feel the pressure of knowing I will fail publicly if I fall short of these goals. I think about you, my readers, when I’m out there training, and I’ll damn sure think about you during my race. But again, that’s the point. Like other athletes, I regard a public failure as bigger than a failure that nobody notices. Consciously not wanting to fail publicly lights a fire under me, and that fire brings out the best in me. For athletes like Muhammad Ali, Sarah Crouch, and myself, pressure is simply a tool we use to manipulate our own emotions in a way that helps us perform in the clutch. We feel something very strongly, but it’s not fear.

Remember That Troll?

I would be remiss to close this essay without mentioning that I made a miraculous recovery from the second-degree tendon strain I suffered at the height of my fake pro runner experience and at age forty-six completed the 2017 Chicago Marathon with a personal-best time of 2:39:30, finishing 146^th out of 44,508 participants. I never publicly named the troll who celebrated my injury, but I’m confident he’s aware of how things turned out for me and is now living with a lacquer of egg on his face that will never come off. So be careful how you use the comment space!