coaching

Want to be better at ultrarunning? I don’t have a tip for you—I have a MINDSET! That’s right, a way to shift your thinking that covers multiple aspects of performance.

What are my principles of a 24/7 athlete? It’s the small daily actions that supplement the running—not JUST the running—that make you a more durable athlete. The small 1 or 2% improvements in daily actions lead to huge progress OVER TIME. Sorry, this isn’t an overnight success story. It’s one filled with long, slow progress that you slowly start to love, are OK with some backslides, and are OK with being uncomfortable the entire way.

These are, in no particular order:

Strong, Flexible, Fast, Endure, Mouth, Mind, Recover—or “Super Fit Folks Excel Mentally, Move Rapidly” to remember it better.

If you want your ability to endure at its highest level. Let’s start with the first one and how you can incorporate it into day-to-day living:

STRONG

Why are people afraid of strength training? Because they think it has to be a full dedicated day or gym session. This can just be a daily push-up or pull-up challenge. You know what’s cheap to purchase? A pull-up bar. You know what’s great to get you in shape? Bodyweight exercises. Have you ever tried rucking? It’s just walking with weights on your back! This is NOT hard, people. Stop telling yourself you don’t DO strength. LIES! It just needs to be EASY. Do 10 push-ups every hour during your entire workday when nobody’s looking. Do some pull-ups or sit-ups while watching TV, but have a set goal you will do every day. Check in with someone. You don’t need a gym membership or a personal trainer. You just need to be consistent.

FLEXIBLE

Do you know why you get injured? Because you’re tight. Do you know why you’re tight? Because you prioritize the chair or sitting more than movement. You know how you fight that? Standing, or only sitting for set periods. I set a very high priority on sitting cross-legged. Yoga once or twice a week. Is it hard to find classes? Guess what?!?! You can do them in the privacy of your home with sites like https://www.doyogawithme.com/ or stretch while you watch TV. Check out YouTube. You have no excuse, but you will keep getting more inflexible as time goes on and you age.

FAST

If you want to be fast, you gotta run fast. There’s no PR fairy that just magically waves her wand over you. If you want to run faster than ever, you need to run FASTER THAN YOU NORMALLY DO! SPEED BURSTS, strides, hill repeats—it’s not that hard. Stop going out on a run at the same pace you’ve done for 15 years. HIT THE GAS once in a while!

The PR fairy is paying you a visit in your race.

ENDURE

You gotta be able to go long to run ultras. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts. Your endurance block will, odds are, be your most important. Back-to-back long runs are critical. Spending lots of time on your feet helps. Adaptations that happen when you are on your feet for 4-5 hours are unique to the challenges on race day.

MOUTH

Eat real stuff—like things that are alive or as close to living as possible. Take that any way you want, but it shouldn’t “live” on a shelf. You can’t perform at a high level if you fuel with crap. PERIOD. Take your crap foods on your long runs—that’s the only time they WON’T spike blood sugar and cause you to store it as fat. Save your junk foods for your long runs.

One more thing: there’s no amount of alcohol that’s good for you. This year, I plan to take it off the list. As much as I love it and enjoy having it at social events, I’m done with it and looking for a healthy alternative. Tea or maybe kombucha as a tasty substitute? There’s a whole bunch of non-alcoholic beers coming out.

MIND

Read, meditate, and get quiet. Get inside your mind. Don’t consume crappy content. Read, take walks, and SIT IN SILENCE! It’s a superpower, and it’s one you need at mile 87 when you have to quiet your mind. Do you listen to every voice you hear, or can you quiet them? Box breathing is a thing! Try to focus on breathing instead of toxic thoughts. The mind loves to think, but sometimes it has to STFU.

RECOVER

“I only need like 5 hours of sleep.” Sure you DON’T! That’s horrible, and you’re either eating late at night, watching TV late, or having a terrible sleep routine. FIX THAT! You can’t work out hard without a hard recovery. Workouts are traumas to the body. If you never recover properly, it’s a matter of time before you are sidelined by injury.

To recap, you want to be strong, flexible, fast, endure, and watch what you put in your mind and mouth while focusing on recovery. I am not saying any of these are EASY, but they are needed 24/7. A 24/7 athlete is mindful of how often they do vs. don’t do these things. That’s it. That’s my goal for 2025. If I screw up, I will be letting myself down, and I can’t let that happen.

The PR fairy is coming to a race for you this year!

Patrick Durante

Patrick is an ultrarunner and coach from Philadelphia who loves documenting his running career. His mission is to provide useful tips and tricks to assist others along their ultra journey. You can find his coaching services at https://ultraruncoach.com.

bouncingsoles.com/about-patrick-durante/

Blues Cruise has been a staple of my ultrarunning career. I’ve come back to this race 11 times now, and it’s a great way to end my season. For me, the story hasn’t changed much—except this year. This year, I was coming back with my second coached athlete, Chris. This is his story.

I took up coaching last year because I was looking for something new within the confines of the ultra world. Those who are able to teach a subject must know it well. While I am no expert, I am a certified UESCA coach, and have completed several ultras over the past 13 years. Chris came to me intrigued by the distance, and in passing, I mentioned that he could do it if he trained for it. I actually suggested to him that this would be an amazing misogi for him to take on. The idea around the misogi is you do something so hard one time a year that it has an impact the other 364 days of the year. You put one big thing on the calendar that scares you, that has a high chance of failure, and go out and do it. This idea was introduced to me, like it was to many people, from the book “Comfort Crisis.” My firm belief was that anyone could take on and complete a 50K. I knew he was athletic to some extent—an avid tennis player who did yoga once in a while—and he was committed enough to put in the training and succeed come race day. The issue was whether I could convince him of the same thing. The furthest he had ever run in training was a 10K, which he did in high school, and he had never run any farther than that.

Our first run together at the Wissahickon in Philly

Training progressed slowly at first; it was about getting consistent. Most of his runs were completed on a simple 3-mile loop across from his house. A cinder path, it was easy access and comfortable enough for him to complete a few laps and come home. As training progressed, I stressed the importance of race specificity. The race terrain is rocky at times but the vast majority runnable. From the start, he had a very high heart rate for his age, but this was just an indication that aerobic fitness takes time—sometimes years. Training was going to take time before running became “comfortable.”

From there, we moved on to runs at local trails near him, like the Wissahickon and other parks near Lansdale. Trail running was a complete departure from anything he had ever done before. Trail running develops all those tiny muscles in the ankles and feet as you run on surfaces that vary in many ways. Training runs have to match the elevation and terrain type for success on race day, which I stressed knew.

We met up twice for some longer runs, and during those, I conveyed the importance of controlling the variables you have control over: pace, nutrition, and hydration. Those three things are your dials to turn when things get difficult, and sometimes it’s unclear which dial to turn. But that’s what you learn in training. When do I slow down? How many calories per hour? How much fluid should I take in? These were all things that Chris executed on race day, but are specific to him. It’s one thing to practice them in training, but when it comes to the actual event, it can be difficult to execute, or you just forget as you get caught up in the excitement of the race.

In training, we made sure that he was running efficiently. I had him film himself on a treadmill and slow it down using video tools to ensure he maintained good form and body mechanics while running: high cadence, low bounce, standing tall, forward lean, high knees, etc. A new runner will experience growing pains; things hurt if you keep showing up, but it sends a message to the body that you must adapt because the movement is important. It took time, but he slowly built fitness, and his heart rate in training continued to drop, and his form improved.

Chris and I at the start of the race taking in the beauty of the lake

Race Day

I spoke with him after the event and one issue he had were his knees started bothering him after mile 20. He was feeling slight pain, but he pushed through it. He kept running and realized, “Wait, maybe this isn’t an issue.” He said to himself, “What other tricks will my body throw at me to stop?” In a post-race discussion, this showed me he understood the idea that ultras are a mental game. Yes, there’s a lot of physical effort, but at their core, ultras are a deep conversation with yourself and your perceived limits. Limits that were put there BY YOU. Once you shatter those limits, you start to have conversations about potential and where you might go versus where you think you are stuck.

He talked about time dilation in the race, and this is common for most once the pain really kicks in. Minutes seem like hours. The last 20% of an ultra feels just as long as the other 80%. Explaining that to someone can be hard, but when your body is in a constant state of trying to send you a message that you are just NOT listening to, it’s another way it rebels. You will hear people discuss the “flow” state that you need to try to achieve in running, but for those with underdeveloped aerobic systems, the flow state of an ultra doesn’t last as long when new to the sport. Intense pain tends to make staying in that flow state difficult, as its demand for constant attention never seems to waver.

Chris was very efficient at aid stations, spending only 20-30 seconds at most.

One thing I stressed with Chris was mindset, but it’s the hardest thing to train. While on runs with him, we discussed practices similar to meditation, where you bring focus back to the present moment instead of letting it travel ahead or narrowly focusing on just the finish. Focus on the breath, focus on your stride, focus on getting to the next landmark that’s close, or focus on getting to the next aid station. That was the main focus for Chris: to break the race into smaller, manageable chunks. You can’t focus on just the finish line or when the end is going to get here. If you do, there is a negative downward spiral of hope. Our minds are geared for little wins, constantly knowing that these mini battles will lead to a greater victory in the war. It’s almost like a way of affirming yourself constantly; with each win you get in the confines of a race, the end goal seems more attainable.

Your bar is raised by constant daily actions toward a goal you feel you can attain. His path looks nothing like mine, and Chris’s path will look nothing like yours. We each have a unique experience that brings us to the ultra distance. What’s great is to see someone else get their first win, their first victory. He completed his first half marathon in training, then his first marathon, then ultramarathon on race day. Not many people can say that, or take that much risk, but Chris did.

Shortly after his finish, a text from Chris.

My final advice for Chris was about Post-Race Depression

It’s normal that once a massive goal is completed, you lose focus. The reason for training becomes vague. What am I fighting for? Why do I need to get back in the gym? It’s normal; a massive goal has been completed, and now our minds want to shift focus toward the next big goal. For him, I recommended two paths going forward: 1) Jump right into a March 50K if he is over the pain of the first experience and wants to keep going, or 2) a trail marathon in April. These were two different choices for keeping forward momentum. It’s a lot harder to get a fire going than it is to keep it burning. So setting your target on that next race keeps the post-race depression at bay. Finally, I leave you with a favorite quote related to ultras that you will need to remind yourself of daily: