3 Keys To Achieving Your Biggest Ultramarathon Season Goals

By Darcie Murphy,
CTS Ultrarunning Pro Coach

It is lottery season and an impending New Year. This means the sky is the limit for ultramarathoners when it comes to dreaming and scheming plans for the year ahead. Although planning is becoming more complex with the increasingly competitive lotteries, there are also more new events than ever. Even if you don’t get into your first pick, there are enough options to adequately fill your racing schedule for the year ahead. That’s the easy part. Achieving successful event outcomes is usually the more challenging aspect. Here are three simple things to consider when shooting for big goals on the horizon.

Vision

Design a cohesive vision with a framework that builds purposefully on itself. Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve, understanding that the reason behind those goals is arguably the most important part. How will early events build your fitness and skills for your ‘A’ events that will come later? Will you have a first half and second half of your season? Will you focus on mountain races and will they be at high elevations or is this a season for expanding your ability to do more actual running in events vs. hiking? Take time to understand the mechanical and physiological demands of the events you commit to.

Ideally, events you choose should be relatively congruent and allow you to narrow your focus to maximize your gains so you have the specific fitness you want at the start line. Don’t lose sight of everything that goes into racing, from travel (accommodations, taking time away from work/family, preparing meals, packing, unpacking), tapering and the need for recovery after the race. It’s easy to look at a race far off on the calendar and say ‘yes!’ while only considering the upsides. It’s important to create a full vision of what you’re undertaking. Take time to calculate the acute and long-term costs and how the necessary sacrifices may affect later events and your life as a whole.

Commitment

You most likely don’t need to decide every single event for the upcoming year immediately. Once you have some races locked into the plan, however, it’s crucial to fully commit to everything that surrounds what you’ve signed up for. Inevitably, life will throw a wrench into the works and that will affect your training. Commitment makes these speedbumps easier to navigate because you immediately move to solve the problem, rather than doubting if you should keep going. Creating objectives and a plan doesn’t mean you’ll be able to cleanly execute those plans or that the process will be easy. Achieving outcomes we want isn’t about motivation (at least not all of the time), but rather about committing to reaching those goals regardless of roadblocks that pop up.

Beyond a personal commitment, be sure the key players for your success are on board. Maybe that is just you and your coach, or maybe there are many people whose support is fundamental to your desired outcomes. Take steps to ensure your key players are 100% behind so your commitment can roll full steam ahead. Additionally, be realistic with what you can sacrifice and what you can achieve. Progress happens in small increments, especially for more experienced ultrarunners. Commit to creating opportunities for many small achievements to build into more significant gains.

Discipline

The last principle, which is almost a direct parallel to commitment, is discipline. Create habits, either new ones or re-established behaviors you successful utilized in past seasons. Repeat them day after day, week after week. These may be as simple as laying out your gear and nutrition in advance of an early morning training session, paying a strength coach to oversee your strength workouts to compliment your run training or meal planning every week, ahead of that week. It may be adjusting your commitments at work or making arrangements for childcare.

Sometimes, it may include temporarily carrying extra stress or a little extra fatigue. This is where the vision comes in. If you know your purpose and have some safety supports in place, you can comprehend that it won’t be ‘too hard’ every moment. Rather, you can understand the need to muscle through short periods where it feels overwhelming. Do this, and you’re more likely to keep making your inch-by-inch forward progress.

The good news is that the sooner you integrate discipline into your formula, the sooner the things that feel especially difficult will start to feel less intimidating. Then your systems are likely to build on themselves. You’ll see and feel progress and executing those small habits will be more fun and exciting. Then you’ll be able to step into the next harder phase, whatever that may look like.

Go Forward

None of the advice above is earth shattering. It’s the nuts and bolts of knowing what you want, finding ways to enact consistency and accepting the difficulties that naturally come with big goals. Know that at times there may be redundancies in the process. Usually, the simple solutions lead to positive outcomes. None of this needs to be overly complex. In fact, it’s probably right if it feels overly simple. But always remember that simple is not the same as easy. We don’t sign up for ultramarathons because they are easy, so we shouldn’t expect the process to be easy either. Let yourself find joy in the struggle. Challenge yourself in all ways, and that finish line will probably be that much more meaningful when you get there.