The second training plan

Every runner I work with has a training plan. Volume, long runs, intervals, strength work, hills, recovery, fuelling. People will spend an hour arguing about whether Zone 2 sits at 70% or 75% of max heart rate.

I love that stuff. It’s my job.

But after years of coaching, I’m convinced many runners are carrying a second plan that nobody mentions.

It isn’t in a spreadsheet. It isn’t on your watch. Nobody wrote it deliberately and nobody reviews it at the end of a week.

It’s the one running in your head.

And when the two plans disagree, I know which one usually wins.

How a story builds itself

The pattern I see over and over is almost boringly predictable once you know what you’re looking for.

Story leads to behaviour. Behaviour produces evidence. Evidence strengthens the story.

Then round it goes again.

Take my athlete and her hills. She believes she can’t climb, so she approaches every hill braced for it to go badly. She tightens up. She goes out too hard because she wants it over with, or too cautiously because she’s protecting herself. She arrives at the top in bits.

There’s the evidence. Right on cue.

“See. I told you I can’t run hills.”

Now she has a fresh receipt to file away, and next time the belief is a little heavier than it was before.

The injury one is even more brutal.

You decide you’re injury prone. So every ache gets your full attention. You start running scared. You cut sessions short, skip the ones that build resilience, avoid the surfaces you’ve decided are risky.

Six months later you’re weaker, less robust and less prepared than you were.

And then you get injured.

Sometimes the story doesn't just predict the injury. It quietly helps create the conditions for it.

The stories give us instructions. We just don’t notice ourselves following them.

The habit I nearly formed

I tell every athlete I coach the same thing when a race goes wrong and they don’t finish.

The next one gets finished. It doesn’t matter about the time. It doesn’t matter about the position. I don’t care if you walk the last three hours of it. We finish, because we need to start a new habit right now.

I’ve been on the wrong side of that habit.

There was a stretch in my own running where I didn’t finish three races in a row.

Each one had a reason. Genuine reasons, the kind you’d nod along with if I listed them here. Individually, every single one was defensible.

That’s exactly what makes it dangerous.

The first DNF hurts.

The second feels unlucky.

By the third, something else has happened, and it has nothing to do with your legs. You’re no longer a runner who didn’t finish three races. You’re becoming a runner who doesn’t finish. That’s a completely different problem, and no training block fixes it.

So before the next one, I made myself a deal. I decided in advance that the result was irrelevant. I told myself I’d crawl over the line if I had to. Nothing about that day was about performance. It was about interrupting a habit before it hardened into an identity.

That race happened to be the 24 hour where I qualified to represent Great Britain.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. I don’t believe I was in better shape that month. What changed was that I stopped negotiating with myself. The exit door was closed before the race started, so all the energy that previously went into deciding whether to continue went into moving forwards instead.

Belief usually arrives last

The self-improvement industry has this backwards. It sells you the idea that belief comes first, and once you believe hard enough the actions follow.

I’ve never seen it work that way.

Nobody wakes up feeling like an ultrarunner. You become one by doing the training an ultrarunner does, on the mornings you’d rather not, until the evidence stacks up high enough that calling yourself one no longer feels like a lie.

Confidence isn’t a mood. It’s accumulated evidence.

This is most of what coaching actually is. People assume my job is writing the sessions. The sessions are the easy part. The harder part is spotting the story an athlete has been living inside for fifteen years and then building a training block that quietly contradicts it.

If you tell me you’re not mentally tough, I’m not going to argue with you. Arguing changes nothing. I’ll just make sure that over the next twelve weeks you finish a series of sessions that a mentally weak person could not possibly have finished.

Then I’ll ask you what you make of that.

That’s the only debate I’ve ever seen anyone win against their own story. Not a better argument. Better evidence.

When the story is actually true

This is where a lot of the mindset industry loses me.

Not every limitation is imaginary.

I’m 43. No amount of belief, positivity or visualisation is going to make me 23 again. I can’t affirm my way back to the recovery I had fifteen years ago, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

“I’m getting older” isn’t a limiting belief. It’s a fact.

What actually matters is what you’ve decided that fact means.

I can’t change my age. I can absolutely change what I’ve decided my age means.

If getting older means my ceiling is lower, then every session becomes a small act of mourning and I’ll spend the rest of my running life comparing myself to a man who doesn’t exist anymore.

If getting older means my goals change shape, then I train differently. Recovery stops being the boring bit and becomes the point. Perhaps strength work goes up. Volume comes down a little. I pick events that reward patience and stubbornness rather than raw speed, which probably suits me better anyway.

Same fact. Two completely different next ten years.

It’s the same for a runner with a dodgy calf. There’s a world of difference between “my calf needs managing” and “I’m fragile.”

One of those sentences produces a plan.

The other produces a ceiling.

The one I’m still working on

I’ll give you a story of my own that I haven’t beaten yet.

For more than 25 years I’ve told myself I can’t settle in one place. I get bored quickly. I need to move. It’s just how I’m built.

And because I’ve said it for 25 years, I’ve made it true. I’ve arranged an entire life around it. We’ve raised our three children on the road, worldschooling them, basing ourselves in the Bulgarian mountains and spending winters in the Kenyan hills or on the jungle beaches of Goa.

Plenty of people have told us we’re mad. Family, friends, even strangers. The kids should be in traditional school. You need a base. It’ll catch up with you eventually.

So far, it hasn’t, our eldest is sixteen now.. It’s been the making of them, and I’d do it all again.

But... I’m no longer certain how much of that life came from genuine desire and how much came from a sentence I’ve repeated so often that it now behaves like a fact.

Because “I can’t settle in one place” is a story that arranges the evidence for you. Get slightly restless, and instead of sitting with it, you book the next flight. Restlessness gets solved before you ever find out whether it would have passed.

Lately I’ve been noticing I quite like being still.

Not forever, obviously. Let’s not get carried away.

But that’s a 25 year old story starting to loosen, and I only spotted it because I went looking.

The stories worth keeping

Now, having said all of that..

Not every story you tell yourself needs killing. Some of them are the reason you’re where you are.

Stories can hold us back. They can move us forward too.

Mine has always been simple. I see somebody do something extraordinary and my first thought is “if another human being can do that, why not me?”

Has that always been objectively true? Almost certainly not. There are people with gifts I’ll never have and races I’ll never win.

Has it been useful? Every single time.

It got me entering events I had no business entering. It got me onto a start line as an overweight dad who had no evidence whatsoever that any of it would work. It made me write a bestselling book. It made me represent my country at my sport. It made moving our family across the world feel like an adventure rather than a risk.

Stories don’t have to be perfectly accurate. They just have to move you forward.

Audit your stories

I’m not suggesting you invent a better story overnight. Stories don’t change because you declare them. They change because your actions slowly make the old one impossible to believe.

What I do think is worth doing, every now and then, is checking whether the stories you’re living by are still earning their place.

Ask yourself four questions.

Which of my stories are still serving me?

Which are just old explanations I’ve mistaken for facts?

Which one needs retiring?

And which new story do I want my actions to earn?

That last one is the whole game. You don’t get to declare the new story. You earn it, one kept promise at a time, until the evidence is so overwhelming that the old sentence no longer sounds true.

You don’t need to rewrite your whole identity. Just find one sentence that’s no longer helping you.

That athlete I mentioned at the start, the one who isn’t a hill runner. We’re eight weeks into a block with more climbing in it than she’s ever done. She hasn’t changed her mind about hills yet. She has, however, run every session.

That’ll do for now. The belief catches up later. It always does.

Because your legs don’t always stop first.

Sometimes your story does.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

In July 2019 I was lying on a bed in a roadside motel somewhere in Tennessee, directly under the air conditioning unit, trying to cool chafing so bad I could barely let the sheets touch me.

I was 90 miles into the Vol State 500km, a race that runs the length of Tennessee in the middle of summer. The heat and humidity had been grinding me down. I slept for a couple of hours, then dragged myself back out into the baking sun because that’s what you do. You keep going.

I managed another 15 miles. Most of it walking. Some of it puking.

Then Tori and the kids came past in the crew car for what must have been the tenth time that mile. I looked at them, and I got in.

Race over at 105 miles.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot since. Because a few years earlier, at the Spartathlon, I was arguably in worse shape. Mile 110, shin badly hurt, everything else trashed, running on fumes. And nothing on this earth was going to stop me reaching the statue of King Leonidas in Sparta. I got there.

Same runner. Both times in horrific pain. One race I quit, one race I finished.

So what was different? And more importantly for you: is your pain threshold fixed, or can you actually train it?

What the science says (briefly, I promise)

There’s a theory worth knowing about here, from Professor Tim Noakes, called the central governor.

Put simply, your brain acts like a protective regulator. Long before your body actually reaches its physical limit, your brain starts turning up the sensation of pain and fatigue to make you slow down or stop. It’s a safety mechanism, and a very good one. It’s kept our species alive for a long time.

If the brain is generating a large part of what we experience as suffering, then suffering isn’t purely a readout of physical damage. It’s an interpretation. A negotiation.

Which means the way we experience suffering isn’t fixed.

I’m not a scientist, and I’m wary of anyone who presents the central governor as settled fact rather than a useful model. But it matches what I’ve seen over and over again, in my own races and in the athletes I coach. The runners who fall apart are rarely the ones whose bodies fail first. They’re the ones whose interpretation of the pain collapses.

Which brings me back to Tennessee.

The real difference between my two races

At the Spartathlon, I expected to suffer. I’d built my whole race around it. When the pain arrived at mile 110, awful as it was, some part of me nodded and said, right, here it is. This is the bit I knew was coming.

At Vol State, the suffering ambushed me. I knew it would be hard, obviously. But the specific combination of heat, humidity and chafing that severe was outside anything I’d rehearsed in my head. When it hit, I had no frame for it. It didn’t feel like part of the race. It felt like something going wrong.

That distinction sounds subtle. It’s everything.

Pain you’ve expected is a companion. Pain you haven’t expected is an emergency.

We don’t panic because we’re in pain.

We panic because the pain wasn’t part of the story we expected.

In all honesty, I still don’t fully know whether stopping at Vol State was weakness or wisdom. The chafing was brutal, and there’s a version of that story where continuing does real damage. But I know the decision wasn’t made by my body. It was made by a mind that had run out of ways to interpret what was happening to it.

So can you train it?

Yes. Not by becoming harder, but by changing your relationship with pain before it arrives. This is a big part of the mental work I do with the athletes I coach, and there are three ideas at the heart of it.

Pain is temporary. The accomplishment isn’t. The pain of a race, however intense, ends. It fades within days. What you did stays with you forever. When it gets grim, I want my athletes consciously reminding themselves of that trade. You’re exchanging something temporary for something permanent. It’s the best deal you’ll ever be offered.

The more you fight it, the worse it gets. Your instinct when pain arrives is to tense up against it, to resist. That resistance creates tension, and tension amplifies pain. It’s a loop. The counterintuitive move is to relax into it. Breathe into the discomfort. Acknowledge it without handing it authority. I know how that sounds if you’ve never tried it. Try it on your next hard long run.

Not every painful thought deserves your attention. During a race your mind will throw everything at you. Some of it is useful information: a sharp, specific pain that’s telling you something real. Most of it is noise, or just the ordinary discomfort you signed up for. I teach my athletes to spot the thought, park it, and label it before reacting to it. You’d be amazed how much suffering is simply an unsorted pile of thoughts you’ve mistaken for facts.

None of this makes the pain go away. At the Spartathlon my shin still screamed at me for 40-odd miles. The frameworks don’t anaesthetise you. They change what the pain means, and meaning is what your brain uses to decide whether to let you continue.

It hurts for everyone. The people at the front of the race, the ones who look effortless in the photos, are suffering too. Sometimes more than you, because they’re pushing closer to their edge.

When you’re deep in a race and everything hurts, it’s very easy to believe you’re uniquely broken. That everyone else is coping and you’re the one falling apart. That the pain is a signal you don’t belong out there.

It isn’t. It’s just the entry fee, and everybody pays it.

I’ve watched too many well-trained runners drop from races not because their bodies gave out, but because they’d quietly assumed that if they’d trained properly, it wouldn’t hurt this much. So when it did, they concluded something must be wrong.

Nothing was wrong. It was just an ultra.

Every athlete I coach goes to the start line expecting the race to hurt. Expecting it to be grim, and at times to feel unbearable. Not hoping it won’t happen, but planning for when it does. Because pain that’s been expected and rehearsed is a completely different animal from pain that ambushes you in the Tennessee heat.

So yes, you can train your pain threshold. But not in the way most people think. You don’t train it by becoming numb.

You train it by changing what pain means before it arrives.

The race was never asking whether you could avoid suffering.

It was asking what suffering meant.

If pain means failure, you’ll stop.

If pain means progress, you’ll keep moving.

The pain isn’t the test.

The story you attach to it is.

And that’s the part you can train.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I actually think Zone 2 has done some good. It’s persuaded thousands of runners to slow down instead of racing every training run. That’s a huge positive.

My concern isn’t Zone 2 itself. It’s what we’ve turned it into.
I think we’ve overcomplicated something that used to be pretty simple.

Don’t get me wrong, none of this is new. The physiological principles behind it have been understood for decades. What’s new is the marketing of it. Like most things that get packaged up and sold to runners on social media, something useful has been stripped of its nuance, turned into a soundbite, and handed to people without the context they actually need.

Where Zone 2 Comes From

The science is there. Training at lower intensities develops mitochondrial density, improves fat oxidation, builds cardiac efficiency, and allows for higher overall training volume without the recovery cost that comes with harder efforts.

And to be fair, that’s all true.

The science isn’t really the issue. Applying it is.

The Problem Isn’t the Concept. It’s the Translation.

Elite athletes often run surprisingly quickly while still staying at an easy aerobic effort.
A world-class marathoner jogging at Zone 2 effort might be running sub-6 minute miles. Their aerobic system is so highly developed that genuinely easy running still produces real training stimulus.

For some recreational runners, Zone 2 might mean shuffling along at a pace that barely feels like running at all.

Somewhere along the way, this training philosophy has been presented as a universal solution, without enough discussion about context.

I’ve been around endurance running for a while now. I’ve raced internationally, coached complete beginners through to elite athletes, and been fortunate enough to spend time learning from some of the best endurance runners and coaches in the world.

I have never once trained by heart rate zones. Maybe I’d have been an even better runner if I had. I honestly don’t know. But it never stopped me developing a strong aerobic engine.

Not because I didn’t understand the science. But because I trusted something older and, for me, more reliable.

How I felt.

One of the things that reinforced that belief was spending time in Kenya with some of the fastest marathon runners in the world. I expected to find athletes obsessing over heart rate zones and watches. Instead, I found the opposite. Most of the runners I spent time with judged almost everything by feel. Easy runs were genuinely easy because they knew what easy felt like. Hard sessions were hard because they knew exactly where the limit was.

What struck me most wasn’t that they ignored technology. It was that they trusted their own bodies first. If the numbers backed that up, great. But they weren’t dependent on them.

That doesn’t mean heart rate data has no value. It does. But it reminded me that the most important tool any runner has isn’t the watch on their wrist. It’s the ability to judge effort honestly.

Running by Feel

Before heart rate monitors became affordable and before Strava turned every training run into a data set, runners trained by effort. They knew what easy felt like. They knew what hard felt like. They built that understanding through time on their feet and honest self-awareness.

That knowledge didn’t disappear when the technology arrived. But for a lot of runners, the technology quietly replaced it.

I’ve worked with athletes who couldn’t tell you whether they were working hard or easy without glancing at their watch. They’d lost the ability to read their own body because they’d outsourced that job to a device.

I remember one athlete messaging me after an easy run, frustrated because their watch kept beeping every time they hit a hill. They’d started walking the climbs just to keep the number on the screen where it was supposed to be.

We had a good chat about it afterwards. They weren’t actually running to feel anymore. They were running to satisfy the watch.

That’s when I realised how easy it is for a tool that’s meant to guide your training to quietly start dictating it.

Running by feel isn’t guesswork, it’s a skill. Like pacing, you get better at it the more you practise it. The best aerobic runners I’ve coached all had one thing in common. They understood effort. They were the ones who had learned to run consistently, honestly, and patiently, day after day, year after year.

What Zone 2 Gets Right, and Where It Goes Wrong

I’m not going to tell you Zone 2 training doesn’t work. It does.

Running a significant portion of your weekly mileage at genuinely easy effort is sound training practice. If the Zone 2 conversation is persuading runners who previously ran every session too hard to slow down and build properly, I think that’s a good thing.

But the issue is how it’s being communicated.

The first is the obsession with the number. Runners are now stopping mid-run to walk because their heart rate crept above 140. They’re avoiding hills entirely because the climb pushes them out of zone. They’re structuring their training around maintaining a metric rather than developing as athletes.

The second is that Zone 2 has become an identity. There’s a certain type of runner now who will tell you, with absolute conviction, that if you’re not in Zone 2 you’re wasting your time. Some of the nuance has disappeared.

The third, and perhaps most important, is that it lets runners avoid the real work. Easy running is comfortable. It’s pleasant. It doesn’t require much from you mentally or physically. I do wonder whether some runners have become so focused on staying easy that they’ve forgotten what hard training feels like.

Endurance running requires both. Easy days should genuinely be easy. But hard days need to be hard. The best endurance athletes in the world don’t just run around in Zone 2. They also do sessions that are brutally hard. That’s the balance.

If you’re running most of your miles at a conversational pace, feeling genuinely recovered between sessions, and gradually building volume over time, you’re doing the important thing. Whether that’s 138 bpm or 144 bpm probably matters a lot less than whether you’re actually running at the right effort.

Learn to run easy. Learn to run hard. Learn the difference between the two from the inside out, not just from a number on your wrist.

If you want a simple test for easy effort: you should be able to hold a conversation without gasping. You should finish the run feeling like you could have done more. You should not dread the session before you start.

The Bigger Picture

Zone 2 will eventually be replaced by the next big concept. Something else will come along, get picked up by influencers, and become the new non-negotiable pillar of endurance training.

The fundamentals will still be the same.

Run consistently. Run mostly easy, sometimes hard. Build volume patiently. Recover properly. Show up week after week.

Those principles were true before Zone 2 had a name, and they’ll be true long after the conversation has moved on.

If wearing a heart rate monitor helps you slow down, brilliant. Use it. But don’t forget that it’s a tool, not a coach.

The best runners I know don’t spend every run staring at their wrist. They learn what easy feels like, what hard feels like, and when each has its place.

Long before anyone called it Zone 2, people were building incredible endurance by doing exactly that.

So by all means wear the watch. Just make sure you could still train without it.

Leave a comment

Share Endurance Code | Nathan Flear

Subscribe now

Most runners would get faster by running more and lifting less.

The response was immediate.

Hundreds agreed.

Plenty told me I was wrong.

Some of the responses made me think, so I wanted to dig into some of the strongest ones. Not just from an opinion standpoint, but by looking at some of the physiology behind it. What actually limits most runners, what strength training does well, and where its benefits may be less significant than some people believe.

And to be fair to the critics, there are a few areas where I think they’re absolutely right.

First, what I actually said..

A few of you felt the headline betrayed the message.

That’s a fair point.

“Run more, lift less” is a sound bite. The fuller picture is more nuanced than four words can carry. So let me be precise about the claim.

I am not saying strength training is useless. I am not saying never set foot in a gym. I am saying that for most amateur runners, short on hours and carrying an underbuilt aerobic engine, the next hour is better spent running than lifting.

That’s the claim. Now let’s test it.

What actually limits most runners

When an amateur runner begins to struggle, it’s almost never because their legs can’t produce enough force.

It’s because their aerobic engine isn’t big enough yet.

Endurance running is, at its heart, a problem of oxygen. How much you can take in, deliver, and use. Three things drive that, and not one of them is built in the gym.

Mitochondria. These are the tiny power stations inside your muscle cells that turn oxygen and fuel into energy. The more you have, and the bigger they are, the longer you hold a pace before you fade. You build them by running. Easy miles, repeated, for months. Lifting does almost nothing for them.

Capillaries. These are the small blood vessels that feed oxygen to your working muscles and carry the waste away. Aerobic running grows a denser network of them. More capillaries means better delivery, better clearance, less fatigue. Again, built by running.

Fatigue resistance. The ability to still be running well in the final hour, not just the first. That’s durability, and durability is bought with time on your feet. There is no shortcut to it in the weights room.

This is the engine.

And for many amateurs, the aerobic engine probably has more room to grow than we realise. You’re leaving enormous gains on the table simply by not running enough, consistently enough, for long enough.

Strength work can help in lots of ways, but it won’t fully compensate for an aerobic engine that still has plenty of room to grow.

Where the critics are right..

Now the part where I hold my hands up.

Several of you made the point that strength work improves running economy. You’re right. This is the strongest argument against me, and it deserves respect.

Running economy is how much energy it costs you to run at a given pace. Two runners with the same engine, the same VO2 max, can perform very differently if one is more economical than the other. They get more speed for the same oxygen.

Heavy strength work and plyometrics improve economy. The evidence here is solid. But notice how they do it. Not by making your muscles bigger. By making them quicker and stiffer in the right way. Better signalling from brain to muscle. Stiffer tendons, the Achilles especially, that store and return more energy with every stride, like a better spring.

That’s a huge benefit and I won’t pretend otherwise.

But read it carefully.

Strength training polishes the engine. It does not build it. And you can only polish what’s already there. The runner with a small, underdeveloped engine doesn’t need polishing. They need an engine.

If you’re already running high mileage, consistently, for years, and you’ve wrung out most of what running alone can give you, then economy work becomes one of the few levers left to pull. At that point, strength matters. I’d coach it myself.

But I suspect many runners still have plenty of untapped gains available through consistent running alone.

Injury. The strongest practical point.

A few of you argued that strength training keeps runners healthy, and that most runners get injured because they simply aren’t strong enough.

There’s truth in this.

Stronger muscles and connective tissue tolerate load better. Tendons and bones adapt to stress, and tissue that’s been asked to handle force copes better when the miles pile up.

But to add some nuance.

In many cases, running injuries seem to be driven more by training load and progression than by strength alone. They’re caused by load. Too much, too soon, too often, without the patience to let the body catch up. Strength buys you a higher ceiling, yes. But the most common way runners break themselves is by ignoring the ceiling they already have.

A lot of the strength that actually protects a runner is built by running, when running is done well. Hills. Strides. Strong, controlled finishes on tired legs. That’s load tolerance earned in the exact pattern you’ll race in.

So I’m not against building robustness. I’m against assuming a barbell is the only place to find it.

Longevity. The point I concede most willingly.

This was the sharpest challenge, and the fairest.

One of you made the case that if you want to be an athlete for life, strength work is where you’ll find it. Bone density. Muscle mass. Connective tissue. The slow erosion that comes for all of us with age.

On this, I don’t half agree. I agree fully.

But I’d ask you to separate two goals that get tangled together.

Training to race faster is one thing. Training to still be strong, mobile and unbroken at seventy is another. They overlap, but they are not the same goal.

For racing faster, on limited hours, run more.

For ageing well, lift. Without question. The maths changes as we get older. Muscle and bone don’t look after themselves, and running alone won’t hold them.

A word on what “strength” even means

Part of this argument is just language.

When I said lift less, some of you heard “ignore your body.” That isn’t it.

There’s a difference between three things that get lumped together. Weight training in a gym. General strength work. And running-specific strength, the kind you build on hills, on strides, on tired legs late in a long run.

That last kind, I’m all for. In truth, much of the strength a runner actually needs is built by running, when running is done properly. Hills are strength training. Strides are strength training. They just don’t look like a barbell.

So when I say run more, I don’t mean junk miles on the flat forever. I mean run well. Varied. With hills, with pace, with purpose. That alone builds far more usable strength than most runners give it credit for.

So where do I land after all the debate?

Largely where I started.

I still think most amateur runners would benefit more from building their aerobic engine than adding another gym session. But some of the counterarguments raised important points, particularly around running economy, injury resilience and long-term health.

My comments were aimed at the typical runner juggling training time.

If you’re an amateur runner with limited training time, it might be worth asking whether your next breakthrough is more likely to come from another gym session or from a little more consistent running. For many runners, I’d argue it’s the latter.

If you’re a high-mileage runner chasing the last few percent, an older athlete protecting your body, or someone who simply wants to be strong for life, then strength work earns its place. Two sessions a week. No more needed.

Running builds the engine.

Strength polishes it, and keeps it on the road longer.

Get that order right, and the rest takes care of itself.

Strength training has become the sacred cow of the running world.

Open Instagram and you’ll see runners deadlifting, squatting, lunging, jumping onto boxes and wobbling around on balance boards. Browse the running magazines and every other article tells you that if you want to run faster, stay injury-free and reach your potential, you need to spend more time in the gym.

The message is clear.

Serious runners lift weights.

But what if we’re asking the wrong question entirely?

Over the years I’ve represented Great Britain in ultra-distance running, competed internationally, and coached thousands of runners, from complete beginners to Elite athletes, to athletes lining up at the worlds toughest ultra races.

I’ve seen runners become obsessed with strength training.

I’ve also seen runners achieve incredible performances while doing very little of it.

The Wrong Question

Most conversations about strength training start with the same question.

“Does strength training work?”

And the answer is yes. There’s no serious debate about that. Strength training can increase force production, improve power, enhance bone density, build muscle mass, and support general health.

But that’s not the right question for runners.

The question you should be asking is this.

“What am I giving up in order to do it?”

Time is finite.

Most runners aren’t professional athletes with unlimited training hours. They have jobs, families, commitments. Every hour spent in the gym is an hour that isn’t being spent running, recovering, sleeping, or with the people who matter to them.

If you have five hours a week to train, are you better off spending four running and one lifting? Or would you just be better off running for five hours?

Suddenly the answer isn’t so obvious.

One of the biggest mistakes recreational runners make is trying to train like elites without first building an elite foundation.

They follow professional athletes on social media. They see the strength sessions, the mobility routines, the gym workouts, and they copy them.

What they don’t see are the years of aerobic development that came first.

The reality is that most recreational runners are nowhere near their aerobic potential.

They’re running three or four times a week, covering 20 to 40 miles, while spending significant time and energy worrying about gym programmes, supplements, and recovery gadgets.

Meanwhile the biggest performance gains are sitting right in front of them.

Run more.

Not necessarily harder. Just more.

The uncomfortable truth is that for most runners, aerobic fitness remains the single biggest limiter of performance. The marathon is primarily aerobic. Ultra-running is overwhelmingly aerobic. Even shorter endurance events rely heavily on aerobic development.

If your aerobic engine isn’t fully built, strength training often just becomes a distraction from the work that matters most

When I look back at my own running career, the periods where I made the biggest breakthroughs weren’t the times I trained hardest in the gym.

They were the periods where I built volume consistently.

More miles.

More time on my feet.

More long runs.

More weeks strung together without interruption.

That’s not a glamorous answer. It’s not as exciting as a new strength programme promising to unlock hidden performance.

But endurance running has always rewarded consistency over complexity.

I’ve coached runners who desperately wanted a secret. A magic session. A special supplement. A revolutionary strength programme.

What they really needed was another six months of turning up.

The fundamentals are rarely exciting. But they work.

When Strength Training Actually Matters

Before anyone accuses me of saying strength training is useless, let me be clear.

I absolutely believe it has a place.

The question isn’t whether you should strength train. It’s when it becomes genuinely worthwhile.

There are four groups who benefit significantly.

Runners who are frequently injured. If your body keeps breaking down under load, targeted strength work may address the weaknesses behind that.

Older athletes. At 20 you can often get away with ignoring it. As we age, maintaining muscle mass, bone density and general strength becomes increasingly important for both performance and longevity.

Advanced runners already operating at high volume. Once you’ve built a substantial aerobic base, the gains from simply adding more mileage begin to diminish. That’s when strength training can add a meaningful stimulus.

Runners focused on long-term health rather than purely race performance. In that context, strength training becomes genuinely valuable.

The mistake is assuming every runner falls into one of those groups.

Most don’t.

Part of the issue is that gym culture leaks into running culture.

In the gym, more is better. More exercises. More sets. More intensity. More fatigue.

But endurance athletes need to think differently.

The goal isn’t to become a powerlifter. The goal isn’t to build the biggest squat.

The goal is to run better.

Those are not the same thing.

I’ve watched runners destroy themselves with leg sessions that leave them unable to train properly for days afterwards. They feel productive because they’re sore.

But soreness is not progress.

Exhaustion is not adaptation.

If your strength programme is compromising the quality and consistency of your running, you need to ask yourself honestly whether it’s helping or hurting.

What the Research Says

The latest research supports a sensible approach here.

Strength gains can be achieved without marathon gym sessions. Two short sessions a week are often enough. You don’t need endless exercises. You don’t need to train to failure. You don’t need to limp out of the gym.

Consistent, sensible strength work outperforms occasional heroic efforts.

In other words, the minimum effective dose is often surprisingly small.

If you’re going to strength train, you don’t need to live in the gym. You need just enough to support your running. No more, no less.

What I’d Recommend

If you’re averaging less than around 50 miles per week and you’re healthy, consistent and not injury-prone, focus almost entirely on building your aerobic engine.

Run more.

Gradually. Patiently. Consistently.

If you’re already running substantial mileage, strength work can become a useful addition. Build general strength through squats, deadlifts, lunges and step-ups. As race season approaches, move towards power, coordination and movement quality.

But even then, strength training is a supporting act.

Running is the main event.

Too many runners reverse those priorities.

The Bottom Line

The fitness industry loves complexity. Complexity sells. Simple truths rarely do.

The simple truth is that most runners are not limited by their squat strength.

They’re limited by their aerobic development.

Before you add another gym session, ask yourself honestly.

Have you already maximised your running? Have you built the aerobic base your potential deserves? Have you trained consistently, week after week, month after month, year after year?

If the answer is no, your next breakthrough isn’t waiting in the weight room.

It’s waiting on the road, the trail, the track or the hills.

Strength training is a tool. A useful one. But it’s not magic.

For most runners, the biggest gains still come from doing the thing they’re trying to get better at.

Running.

The race is over. Six days, nearly 270 miles, the length of Wales from north to south. Endless climbing and descending on roads that twisted through the Welsh mountains and countryside.

The overwhelming feeling now is relief that it’s done, sadness that it’s over, and a strange sense of connection to Wales that I hadn’t realised I was looking for.

I won every stage and the overall race.

But strangely, that doesn’t feel like the story.

I signed up for this because I wanted an adventure.

That was it.

No great masterplan. No deep need to prove anything to anyone. I’ve spent most of my adult life living abroad, but Wales is where I’m from. Wales reminds me of growing up, family, school friends, a happy childhood, simpler times.

I wanted to spend six days running through that.

I wanted the roads, the mountains, the views, the weather that can change three times in an hour.

Mostly, I wanted to feel that sense of adventure again.

A couple of months ago I ran a multi-day race in the Sahara and loved it. Not just the running, but the feeling of being in the middle of something uncertain and difficult and completely different from normal life.

This felt similar.

Why We All Need Adventure

Adventure is a strange thing.

People talk about wanting it, but most of us spend our lives trying to make things safer, easier, more predictable. We build routines that protect us from discomfort. We fill our calendars with things that are manageable. We plan holidays that come with guaranteed weather and five-star reviews.

And then we wonder why life starts to feel a bit flat.

I think adventure is one of those things we’ve quietly stopped prioritising. It sits somewhere near the bottom of the list, beneath work, family, admin, everything else. Something for “one day”. Something for when life calms down.

But life doesn’t calm down. Not really.

And the longer we leave it, the harder it becomes to remember what it even feels like to step into something you’re not sure you can do.

That’s what adventure really is.

Not a holiday. Not a trip. Not a bucket list tick.

Adventure is stepping into something without knowing exactly how it will unfold.

And there is something addictive about that.

Because the moment you do it, something wakes up in you. You feel more alive. More present. More yourself.

I think we all need a bit of that.

Not once in a lifetime. Regularly.

Then the Competitor Showed Up

By the end of day one, though, something else had appeared.

The competitor in me.

I’d won the first stage and, if I’m honest, after that I wanted to keep winning. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But it never became the most important thing.

The race itself, the experience of moving through Wales day after day, mattered more.

If I’d had to choose between winning and not seeing it through, I’d have chosen finishing every time.

Because this was never really about the result.

It was about the journey through it.

And it was hard.

Much harder than I expected.

The race was on roads, but they were Welsh roads through the mountains. There was very little flat. Just climb after climb, then long descents that hurt in a different way.

By the end, almost everything hurt.

My shin. My Achilles. My calf. My ankle. My quad.

And then all the other things that go wrong in a multi-day race. The general soreness. The fatigue. The chafing, which is probably best left out of this.

At times, my body worried me.

Not my mind. Never my mind.

The Mind Was Never the Problem

I never doubted mentally that I would finish.

That might sound a bit arrogant, but it isn’t meant to. I’ve just spent years working on that side of myself.

I know my mind well now. I know how quickly it can spiral if you let it, but I also know how to stop it.

I’ve built different systems and strategies over the years, not just for myself but for the athletes I coach too.

When things started to hurt, I didn’t let myself think about six days or 270 miles or what might happen tomorrow.

I just narrowed it down.

The next climb.

The next mile.

The next checkpoint.

At times, when I was alone on another long climb and everything hurt, the thoughts in my head became very simple.

Keep pushing.

Keep pushing.

Keep pushing.

You’re strong.

You know you’re strong.

It’s just a climb. You’ll be over it soon enough.

That’s all I needed.

I think one of the biggest mistakes people make, in running and in life, is believing they need to feel good in order to keep going.

You don’t.

You just need to stop making things bigger than they are.

Pain is real. But so much of suffering comes from the stories we tell ourselves about that pain.

Ten years ago, if my shin or Achilles had started hurting like they did this week, I’d have worried. I’d have imagined the worst. I’d have started thinking ahead, catastrophising, wondering if the race was slipping away.

Now I deal with it differently.

I acknowledge it.

Then I park it.

That’s one of the mindset systems I use. I call it thought parking.

You notice the thought. You accept it’s there. Then you deliberately put it to one side because it isn’t helping you right now.

“My Achilles hurts.”

Fine.

“But what if it gets worse tomorrow?”

That thought isn’t useful at mile 32 of today’s stage, so I park it.

All I need to do is get to the finish of this day.

Tomorrow can take care of itself.

And almost every morning, I woke up amazed at how much the body had repaired itself overnight.

That was one of the biggest lessons of the week.

The body is far more resilient than we think.

Most people stop too soon. Not because their body is done, but because their mind convinces them that it is.

I’ve always believed that the mind is the most important part of endurance, and this race only strengthened that belief.

That’s not to say it was all pain and suffering.

Far from it.

There were so many moments where I stopped and looked around and thought: this is exactly why I came.

The views were unbelievable. The roads winding through the countryside. The mountains. The silence.

There is something about running through a place like Wales that makes you feel connected to it in a way you never can from a car.

You notice everything.

The shape of the hills. The smell of the air. The tiny villages. The way the weather changes as you climb.

After living abroad for so long, I think part of me wanted to reconnect with where I’m from.

And I did.

More than I expected.

Wales is beautiful.

I knew that already, but six days of running through it gave me a different appreciation for it.

The other thing that made the week special was the people.

The event had a real family feel to it. It was brilliantly organised, but more than that, everyone was supportive of each other. Everyone was dealing with their own struggles, their own pain, their own doubts, but there was a real sense that we were all in it together.

That really mattered.

Because as much as I love the solitude of running, there is also something powerful about sharing an experience like this with other people.

Especially when they understand.

Now that it’s over, the thing I’m looking forward to most is getting home to Tori and the kids.

I’ve missed them massively.

More than anything else, that’s been the difficult part of the week. I love these adventures. If it was just me, I’d probably do them all the time.

But it isn’t just me.

And after a few days away, I miss them too much.

Maybe that’s part of why these adventures matter.

They make me feel alive, but they also remind me what matters most.

I think that’s the bit people miss when they talk about adventure. They think it’s about escape. Getting away from real life. Running from something.

For me it’s the opposite.

Adventure brings me back to real life. It strips everything else away and leaves you with what actually counts. The people. The place. The simple act of moving forward when it’s hard.

You come home different. Not dramatically. Just a little bit more yourself.

And honestly, I think most of us could do with more of that.

You don’t have to run 270 miles through Wales. That’s my version. Yours will look different.

It might be a solo trip somewhere you’ve never been. A long walk on your own. Signing up for something that scares you slightly. Saying yes to something you’d normally talk yourself out of.

It just has to be something that pulls you out of the routine and into the uncertain.

Because that’s where you find out who you are.

This race gave me a lot.

It gave me belief in my own mindset systems and strategies. My mental and physical strength.

It gave me confidence that there is still more to come later this year when I move towards the bigger goal of trying to qualify again for the GB 24-hour team.

But more than that, it gave me exactly what I was looking for.

Adventure.

That feeling of being completely immersed in something difficult, uncertain and real.

I think I’m always searching for that.

And for six days across Wales, I found it.

Share

Subscribe now

Every runner knows the feeling.

You start a new training block full of energy. New plan, new goal, maybe a race in the calendar. You’re motivated. You’re excited. Everything feels easy.

For a week or two, you don’t miss a session. You’re ticking boxes, feeling good about yourself, maybe even thinking, this time it’s going to be different.

Then life kicks in.

You’re tired. Work’s busy. The weather turns. You didn’t sleep well. The session looks hard. And suddenly, that motivation you were relying on has disappeared.

That’s where most runners come unstuck.

Not because they’re not capable. Not because they don’t want it enough. But because they’ve built everything around motivation, and motivation is unreliable.

Motivation Is a Feeling. Discipline Is a Choice.

Motivation is easy when everything’s going well. It’s there on the sunny days, when you’re fresh, rested, and feeling fit. It’s there when the session suits you.

But motivation doesn’t show up consistently. It disappears when you’re tired, when it’s cold and dark, when the session is uncomfortable. And if your training depends on motivation, your training will always be inconsistent. That’s just the reality.

Discipline is different.

Discipline is doing what you said you’d do, regardless of how you feel. Not perfectly. Not aggressively. Just consistently. It’s not about being extreme. It’s about being reliable.

The Lie Most Runners Believe

A lot of runners think successful athletes are more motivated. They’re not.

They don’t wake up every morning desperate to train. They don’t feel inspired before every session. They’re not immune to tiredness, stress, or doubt.

The difference is simple: they don’t rely on motivation. They’ve built discipline.

I’ve coached athletes at all levels, and the pattern is always the same. The ones who improve the most aren’t the most talented. They’re not the ones smashing every session or chasing perfection. They’re the ones who just keep showing up, even when it’s inconvenient, even when it’s boring, even when it’s the last thing they feel like doing.

The Reality Most People Avoid

There are going to be plenty of days where you don’t feel like running.

That doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost your edge or that you need a new plan or more motivation. It just means you’re human.

I’ve trained at a high level for years, I’m not motivated most days. That might sound strange, but it’s the truth.

Motivation isn’t the goal. If anything, chasing motivation is part of the problem. People are constantly looking for something to get them going, a video, a quote, a new plan. But motivation is just a feeling, and feelings change.

Discipline doesn’t.

A Simple Way to Think About It

Motivation is emotional. Discipline is behavioural.

You don’t fully control your emotions. You do control your actions. There’s a big difference between “I’ll run if I feel good” and “I run because that’s what I do.”

That shift is everything. It’s identity.

You’re not trying to get motivated to run. You’re someone who trains. And once that becomes your standard, everything gets simpler.

What Discipline Actually Looks Like

Discipline isn’t dramatic. It’s not about smashing yourself into the ground or proving something every day. It’s much quieter than that.

It looks like going out for your run when you’d rather stay in. Keeping the easy runs easy, even when your ego wants more. Completing the session as planned rather than as you feel. Turning up at 60% and doing what you can, instead of doing nothing at all.

That last one matters, because most runners treat it as all or nothing. If they don’t feel great, they skip the session. But progress doesn’t come from perfect days. It comes from consistent ones.

The Days That Actually Matter

The sessions you enjoy are easy. They’re not the ones that define you.

It’s the other days that count. The cold mornings. The tired legs. The busy days where you have to make time. The sessions you nearly skip. Those are the ones that build something, and not just fitness either, but resilience, trust, and standards.

Anyone can train when they feel good. The runners who improve are the ones who train when they don’t.

Where Most People Go Wrong

Most runners spend too much time chasing motivation. They think they need to feel ready, feel energised, have the perfect conditions. But that’s not how progress works.

If you only train when everything lines up, you’ll always fall short of your potential, because life doesn’t line up that often. The runners who get somewhere accept that. They don’t wait for the perfect moment. They work with what they’ve got.

A Better Standard to Aim For

Instead of asking “do I feel like running today?”, ask: “am I the type of person who does what they said they would do?”

That’s a different question entirely. It shifts the focus away from mood and onto standards. And once you build that standard, motivation becomes irrelevant. You don’t need to feel like it. You just do it.

Motivation will come and go. It always does.

But discipline builds something more valuable, and that’s consistency. And consistency is what leads to progress.

So the next time you don’t feel like running, don’t overthink it. That’s normal.

Just remember: the days you don’t want to run are the ones that matter most.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Whether it’s a distance pushed further than ever before or a time that redefines what we thought was possible, records represent the edge of human performance. They stand as markers of what can be achieved when everything comes together. From the outside, it’s easy to assume that record-breaking performances are the result of exceptional talent, extreme training, or something reserved for a select few.

But having been closely involved in the process, I’ve come to see it differently.

Records aren’t built on extraordinary moments. They’re built on ordinary days, repeated consistently, with intent. They’re the result of decisions made when no one is watching, sessions completed when motivation is low, and a level of discipline that most people never quite reach.

Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside athletes who have achieved performances at the highest level. A British 24-hour record. A 70+ world best over 50 kilometres. And just this past weekend a British V50 100-mile record. On paper, these performances look very different. Different distances, different ages, different types of athletes. But when you look beneath the surface, the process behind them is remarkably similar.

Take Matt Field as an example. When he first came to me, it didn’t take long to recognise what he was capable of. Not just in terms of physical ability, but in mindset. He had a clarity and a level of intent that set him apart early on. It wasn’t a case of needing to rebuild anything, but rather to guide, refine, and structure what was already there.

As we built towards his 24-hour race, everything came down to execution. There was no need for guesswork or unnecessary complexity. The focus was on pacing correctly, fuelling effectively, and maintaining discipline over the full duration of the race. The initial goal was to qualify for the national team, and then to push as far beyond that standard as possible.

What stood out with Matt was his attention to detail, particularly around fuelling. It’s rare to work with someone so meticulous in that area, and it removed a huge amount of uncertainty going into race day. We both knew that if he paced the race correctly and executed what had been practiced, he was capable of something significant. On the day, everything aligned. The performance didn’t just meet expectations, it exceeded them, resulting in a British record.

Fiona Davies presents a very different story, but one that is equally powerful. With decades of running experience behind her, she brings a level of self-awareness that can’t be coached. She understands her body, knows what she can and can’t tolerate, and has developed that through years of training and racing.

What stood out most with Fiona, however, was her willingness to continue learning. Despite her experience, she was open to change. Open to approaching training differently. Open to pushing herself beyond what she had previously done. In the build-up to her world best performance, she was completing long runs at paces she hadn’t previously touched, stepping into new territory despite having every reason to stay within what was familiar.

There’s a tendency to assume that age defines limits, and while it’s true that certain aspects of performance change over time, experience brings its own advantages. Fiona understands that she may not run shorter distances as she once did, but she also understands where her strengths now lie. That combination of experience, openness, and mindset is what allows performances like hers to happen.

Then there’s Chelle White, who brings a completely different dynamic. Chelle has an exceptional ability to tolerate discomfort and a deep belief in her own capabilities. She doesn’t always fit neatly into a structured approach, particularly when it comes to pacing. Where many athletes benefit from strict control, Chelle performs best with a degree of freedom.

That creates an interesting balance from a coaching perspective. There is always a desire to guide pacing and bring control to the race, because pacing is often one of the biggest determinants of success. But at the same time, removing that freedom entirely would take away something that makes her unique as an athlete.

So the approach becomes one of guidance rather than restriction. Allowing room for instinct, while gradually introducing more control over time. That does come with risk. There are races where things don’t go to plan, where early decisions have consequences later on. But when everything comes together, that same approach can produce exceptional results, as seen in her recent British 100-mile record.

Despite their differences, what connects all three athletes is not a specific training method or mileage target, but a shared approach to the process.

First and foremost, they are disciplined. None of them rely on motivation to get things done. Motivation is inconsistent, and if you wait for it, you’ll miss more sessions than you complete. Discipline is what gets you out of the door when it would be easier to stay in bed. It’s what ensures consistency over weeks, months, and years. At the level required to break records, discipline is non-negotiable.

They also trust the process. There is no constant searching for something new, no jumping from one approach to another at the first sign of difficulty. They commit to a direction and follow it through, understanding that progress takes time and that short-term fluctuations are part of the journey.

Equally important is the nature of the coaching relationship. This is not about blindly following instructions. Each of these athletes brings their own experience, insight, and understanding of their body. The process is collaborative. Conversations matter. Adjustments are made. That partnership allows for a level of individualisation that is essential when working at this level.

And then there is fatigue. At the highest level, fitness alone is not enough. The ability to continue making good decisions, to maintain form, and to keep moving efficiently under significant fatigue is what separates strong performances from exceptional ones. This is something that has to be trained deliberately, not left to chance.

Where many runners go wrong is in assuming that more is always better. More miles, more sessions, more intensity. When progress stalls, the instinct is often to change everything. A new plan, a new coach, a completely different approach. But in most cases, that isn’t what’s required.

There is no secret formula. High performance comes from consistent work over time, supported by the right balance of training and recovery. It requires a strong mindset, an understanding of when to push and when to hold back, and the patience to allow progress to unfold.

From a coaching perspective, the goal is to push the athlete as close to their limit as possible, without crossing it. That line is different for everyone, and it shifts over time. Getting that balance right is what allows for continued progression. Too far, and the risk of injury or burnout increases. Not far enough, and potential is left untapped.

Not everyone will go on to break records. But that doesn’t mean the principles don’t apply.

Every runner is capable of more than they are currently achieving. Not necessarily through doing more, but through doing things better. More consistency. More discipline. More attention to the details that often get overlooked.

Because in the end, record-breaking performances aren’t built on motivation or one standout session. They’re built on discipline, trust, and the ability to do the right things, consistently, over time.

But something vital is being lost.

I’m an online running coach, yet I find myself deliberately moving in the opposite direction of the AI age. Not because I reject science or technology (well maybe I do reject technology a little bit), but because I believe coaching is, and always has been, a fundamentally human craft. And the more digital the world becomes, the more valuable real human connection becomes alongside it.

Most athletes don’t fail because their plan was missing a metric. They fail because life intervenes, Motivation dips and confidence wobbles. Fatigue appears in disguise sometimes. These moments don’t announce themselves neatly on a screen. They’re heard in tone of voice, read between the lines of a message that says “I’m fine”, or felt when something just isn’t quite right.

That is where the ART of coaching is.

The art of coaching is understanding the person as an individual. Knowing when to push and when to protect. Recognising that two athletes with identical data may need entirely different responses. It is the blend of experience, intuition, context, and trust that guides decisions when the textbook answer isn’t the right one.

Science definitely matters. I use it every day. Training principles, physiology, load management, adaptation, recovery. These form the foundation. But science fails when it is applied without judgement, It fails when numbers are followed blindly, when context is ignored, and when the athlete is treated as a system to optimise rather than a human to develop.

No algorithm knows when an athlete is carrying emotional fatigue from work, family, or pressure they haven’t yet named. No AI feels the shift in energy during a long build-up or senses when belief is starting to erode. No software can stand on a track at 3 a.m., or on a trail, and say the right words at the right moment.

The most meaningful coaching I’ve done hasn’t happened when writing the plans. It happened on calls made at the right time, not scheduled weeks in advance. It has happened crewing athletes through some of the worlds toughest races, Badwater, Spartathlon, 24-hour races, being there as a person, when things got dark. It has happened by acting early, not because a metric flashed red on an app or software, but because experience told me that something was off.

Technology can support coaching, but it should never replace the relationship at its core. The future I believe in isn’t anti AI (maybe a little bit) or anti data. It’s just pro human, pro connection. It’s coaching that values conversation as much as computation, trust as much as tracking, and wisdom learned over time more than information delivered instantly.

As everything becomes more automated, choosing human coaching becomes a statement, a choice for depth over ease and experience over speed.

That’s the kind of coaching I believe in and it’s the kind I’ll keep practising, however smart the machines get.

At 2:00 a.m. during my first 24 hour race, I hit a mental wall. My legs were screaming with pain, every part of me wanted to quit, and in the darkness those tiny doubts grew by the minute. But I remembered why I signed up in the first place, to test my limits, and realised this was the moment that truly counted. By adjusting my mindset, taking one step at a time, and refusing to give in, I pushed through that low point. Hours later, I crossed the finish line exhausted but victorious. This experience taught me that success in ultrarunning is as much about mental strength (The Ultramarathon Mindset) as physical endurance.

Ultramarathons are often said to be more mental than physical. Whether it’s your first ultra or your tenth, you quickly learn that mental strength is just as important as physical training. The ultramarathon mindset, characterised by resilience, grit, and relentless forward progress, not only helps you go the distance on race day, but can also transform the way you approach challenges in everyday life.

In this blog, I’ll explore what the ultramarathon mindset is all about, how to train your brain for endurance events, and how to carry that “ultra” mentality into your daily routines and big life goals.

Why Mindset Matters as Much as Training in Ultramarathons

In ultramarathon training, it’s not just about logging miles; it’s about training your mind to endure and overcome. There’s a popular saying among ultra runners: “Ultrarunning is 90% mental, and the rest is in your head.” This tongue-in-cheek adage highlights how mental toughness often distinguishes those who make it to the finish from those who don’t. After a certain point, your legs and lungs can only take you so far, it’s your mental endurance that keeps you putting one foot in front of the other when fatigue and pain set in.

Ultramarathon distances (50K, 100K, 100 miles, or more) push you into uncharted territory. You might face extreme fatigue, sleep deprivation, harsh weather, and inevitable lows where negative thoughts flood in. For first-timers, this mental onslaught can be shocking. Experienced ultrarunners still face those battles, but they become better at riding out the lows.

For example, an athlete I coached in a 50-mile race missed a turn and ran extra miles, and in that moment he was panicking and ready to quit. Because we’d practiced mental strategies beforehand, he took a deep breath, problem-solved his way back on course, and eventually finished strong, learning that staying calm and positive in the face of adversity can turn a race around. Stories like this are common in ultras – the victor is often not the one with the freshest legs, but the one with the strongest mind.

Key Elements of the Ultramarathon Mindset

What exactly is the “ultra mindset”? It’s a collection of mental qualities and attitudes that ultrarunners cultivate to survive and thrive over hours (or days) of running. Here are some core elements of a strong ultramarathon mindset:

• Resilience and Grit: Ultramarathoners develop an uncanny resilience, the ability to bounce back from setbacks and keep moving forward through tough stretches. This grit is built over time by facing challenges in training (like back-to-back long runs in miserable weather) and treating them as opportunities to grow stronger. Every bonk or bad race teaches you how to suffer a little better next time.

• Embracing Discomfort: In an ultra, discomfort is not a possibility, it’s a guarantee. Successful ultrarunners learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Instead of fearing pain or fatigue, they accept it as part of the journey. You might develop mantras like “Embrace the suck” to remind yourself that pain is temporary, but quitting lasts forever. By leaning into the discomfort, acknowledging it without letting it defeat you, you rob it of some power.

• Positive Self-Talk and Mindfulness: The conversations you have with yourself during an ultramarathon profoundly affect your performance. If you start thinking “I can’t do this” or “This is impossible,” it quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ultra mindset involves practicing positive self-talk, like telling yourself “I am strong, I’ve got this,” even when you feel weak. Staying present, focusing on your breath or the current step rather than the entire distance prevents your mind from spiraling into anxiety. Positive self-talk and mindfulness are powerful tools to keep the mind calm and focused under extreme stress.

• Adaptability and Problem-Solving: No ultramarathon ever goes exactly to plan. You might get blisters, lose a water bottle, encounter a sudden storm, or find that your nutrition plan isn’t sitting well with your stomach. A hallmark of the ultramarathon mindset is the ability to adapt on the fly. Instead of falling apart when something goes wrong, you become a problem-solver: you change socks and tape that blister, you adjust your pace to cool down, you nibble some ginger to calm your nausea. By staying flexible and composed, you turn potential race-ending issues into mere speed bumps.

• A Strong “Why”: Ask any ultrarunner why they do it, and you’ll get a deeply personal answer. Whether it’s to test the limits of their potential, to honor a loved one, to raise money for charity, or simply the love of adventure, having a strong motivation or “why” is crucial. In the darkest moments of an ultra, remembering your purpose can light the way forward. Your “why” acts like an anchor that keeps you grounded when your mind is screaming for you to stop. It’s a source of inner strength. Every challenge you face is another piece of mental training that prepares you for future tests, in running and in life.

Training Your Mind for Ultra Endurance

Just as you train your body to handle long distances, you can actively train your mind to be stronger and more prepared for ultramarathons. Mental training techniques for ultrarunners can be incorporated into your daily routines and long-run practices. Here are some effective strategies:

1. Visualisation and Mental Rehearsal: Spend time imagining yourself in the race, especially tackling the hardest parts. Visualise hitting a low point at mile 40 and then see yourself problem solving and pushing through it. Also vividly picture yourself crossing the finish line strong. This kind of mental rehearsal builds confidence and prepares you for the real event.

2. Mantras and Positive Affirmations: Develop a short phrase or mantra that empowers you, and practice it during tough training runs. It could be as simple as “Relentless forward progress,” “One step at a time,” or “I am unbreakable.” When your inner critic pipes up with negativity, override it with your mantra. Repeating a positive affirmation can steady your mind when the going gets tough. I have a go-to mantra, “Stay strong, Stay with it,” which I recite whenever I feel a wave of doubt.

3. Simulate Discomfort in Training: One of the best ways to build mental toughness is to occasionally make training harder than it “needs” to be. For example, occasionally do a long run in challenging conditions, tackling big hills, bad weather, night running, or running on tired legs the day after a hard workout. These tough runs simulate an ultra’s discomfort and let you practice your coping skills, staying positive when exhausted, solving problems on the go, and proving to yourself that you can keep going when you want to stop. That way on race day you’ll remember you’ve thrived in difficult conditions before.

4. Chunking and Small Goals: Facing 50 or 100 miles all at once is mentally overwhelming. I suggest a technique called “chunking” – breaking the race into manageable pieces. Rather than thinking about 20 miles to the next checkpoint, you focus on getting to the next hill, or even just running 5 more minutes. During training runs, practice this approach by setting mini-goals (run to the next tree, or keep going for 5 more minutes) – each small win builds your confidence. In an ultra, focus only on the next milestone (the next aid station or your next gel) and celebrate when you get there. String together those little victories, and before you know it you’ll have covered an incredible distance.

Taking the Ultramarathon Mindset into Everyday Life

One of the beautiful things about cultivating an ultramarathoner’s mindset is that it doesn’t just make you a better runner, it can make you more resilient and positive in everyday life. The lessons you learn on the trail at mile 80 translate surprisingly well to challenges like work projects, personal goals, health struggles, or any situation that requires perseverance. Here’s how you can apply the ultra mindset beyond running:

• Resilience and Patience in Daily Challenges: The persistence that carries you through an ultra’s lowest moments also helps you handle life’s setbacks and long-term challenges. After slogging through miles of pain and doubt, you understand that setbacks are temporary and just part of a longer journey. Ultrarunning is a masterclass in patience and delayed gratification, you learn that worthwhile achievements (like training for months for one finish-line moment) take time and consistent effort. This perspective helps you stay calm and committed through any slow, difficult process (whether it’s building a career, earning a degree, or recovering from an injury), trusting that if you keep moving forward steadily, you’ll get where you want to go.

• Breaking Big Goals into Small Steps: Big life goals can feel as overwhelming as a 100-mile race if you stare at the finish line without a plan. The ultrarunner mentality of one step at a time is a powerful antidote to procrastination and fear. If you have a huge project or goal, approach it like an ultra: break it into milestones and focus on the next step. Celebrate each small victory along the way. This approach keeps you motivated and makes even enormous goals achievable.

• Adaptability and Problem-Solving: Life, like an ultramarathon, rarely goes exactly according to plan. When unexpected obstacles arise, a job loss, a sudden expense, a change of plans, etc, you lean on your ultrarunning adaptability. You calmly assess the problem and work out a solution. The ability to adjust on the fly becomes an invaluable life skill. You’re less afraid of the unknown because you know you can think on your feet.

• Confidence and Self-Belief: One great gift of the ultramarathon mindset is an unshakable confidence. Once you’ve run an ultra distance, your perspective broadens, other challenges don’t seem so intimidating anymore. The memory of crossing an ultra finish line, knowing you fought through low points and kept going becomes a touchstone you can return to whenever you face doubt. It reminds you that you’re capable of more than you think. This self-belief can inspire you to go after big goals and approach everyday hurdles with a can-do attitude.

Embrace the Ultra Mindset

Ultramarathons test the limits of human endurance, but you don’t have to run one to benefit from the lessons they teach. Whether you’re gearing up for your first ultra or simply seeking growth in daily life, focusing on your mindset can be transformative. Make mental training as integral to your routine as physical training: practice resilience, embrace discomfort, speak to yourself kindly, and break big challenges into small steps. These habits will help you go the distance on the trail and make everyday obstacles feel more manageable.

Remember, the ultramarathon mindset is about consistent, determined forward motion, in running and in life.“Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up.” Dean Karnazes… That mantra sums up the ultramarathoner’s never-say-die mindset, carry that spirit with you into every challenge, and there’s very little in life you can’t overcome..

Most people think a running coach simply writes a plan. In truth, effective coaching goes far deeper. It’s about understanding physiology, psychology, and human behaviour, then blending all three into a system that develops resilience as much as fitness.

As an ultramarathon coach, I’ve learned that what separates the finishers from the broken isn’t just VO₂ max or weekly mileage, it’s durability. It’s how well an athlete’s body and mind hold together when fatigue has set in, when every fibre says “stop,” and the race is only halfway done.

Find the rest of this article on my website here: https://www.nathanflear.co.uk/inside-the-mind-of-an-ultramarathon-coach/

They fail because they don’t understand what it actually takes.

Not physically. Mentally.

And definitely not consistently.

I’ve spent the last 15 years in endurance sport, as an athlete and as a coach.

I’ve represented Great Britain and Wales.
I’ve run hundreds of miles in training weeks.
I’ve coached athletes to British and World records and guided others through some of the toughest races on the planet such as Badwater, Spartathlon, Marathon des Sables, the Spine.

And here’s the truth:

The gap between average and elite isn’t what people think.

It’s not some secret session.
It’s not a magic training plan.
It’s not even talent.

It’s mindset, consistency, and a willingness to do what most people won’t, especially when it stops being fun.

Why I’m Writing This

There’s a lot of noise in endurance sport.

Too many “tips.”
Too many hacks.
Too many people talking about things they’ve never actually done.

This isn’t that.

This is where I’ll share what really matters:

• How to train properly for endurance events

• What mindset really looks like when things fall apart

• The mistakes I see runners make again and again

• The realities of ultramarathon running that no one talks about

Some of it will be practical.
Some of it will challenge you.
Some of it you probably won’t want to hear.

That’s the point.

Who This Is For

This isn’t for everyone.

If you’re looking for comfort, shortcuts, or motivation that disappears the moment things get hard, this won’t be for you.

This is for runners who want more.

• More discipline

• More structure

• More understanding

• More performance

Whether you’re chasing your first ultra or trying to compete at a higher level, the principles don’t change.

The standard just gets higher.

What Endurance Really Is

Endurance isn’t just about how far you can run.

It’s about how long you can stay committed.

To the process.
To the work.
To the uncomfortable middle where progress is slow and no one is watching.

Anyone can start.

Very few can continue when:

• Progress stalls

• Motivation drops

• Life gets in the way

• Training becomes repetitive and hard

That’s where races are nailed.

Not on race day.

Months before it.

What You Can Expect

I’ll be writing here regularly.

No fluff. No recycled advice.

Just real insights from:

• Competing at a high level

• Coaching athletes across all abilities

• Years of trial, error, and experience

If you stick around, you’ll start to see things differently.

About training.
About racing.
About yourself.

Most people overestimate what they can do in a week.

And underestimate what they can become in a year.

If they actually commit.

That’s what this is about.

-Nathan