The Ultramarathon Mindset

Editor's note: Every so often we like to surface timeless pieces from our archive. This post from Lewis Kallow dives into the world of endurance athletes and explores what lessons entrepreneurs can glean from them. Learn about the strategies employed by Courtney Dauwalter, an ultramarathon runner who emerged victorious in a grueling 240-mile desert race back in 2017.

Moab, Utah is a popular setting for sci-fi films. That’s probably because it literally looks like another planet. It’s home to giant red rock archways, gaping canyons, mysterious craters and plenty of dinosaur bones. It’s also the staging ground for one of the country’s toughest ultramarathons: the Moab 240. 

The Moab is two hundred and forty desert miles of rocky mountain climbs and endless dirt roads. It can get as hot as 97°F (36°C) during the day and as cold as 15°F (-10°C) at night. The race takes the average competitor 90 hours to complete. It’s so long that the distance between two checkpoints can be more than an entire regular marathon’s length. Runners are regularly afflicted by sunburn, intense physical pain, crushing fatigue, and hallucinations, with some even reporting blindness.

And yet, in 2017, Courtney Dauwalter somehow made it look like a cakewalk. Not only did she win—she set the record for the race, and finished ten whole hours ahead of the next runner. 

Stranger still, Courtney has no specific plan or training schedule. Not even a coach. She eats whatever she wants, including right before a race. Pre-competition meals have included pizza, waffles, and McDonald’s. 

Now, obviously Courtney does train with high intensity and has an abundance of athletic talent. But perhaps the reason Courtney doesn’t need the fancy running gear or militant regimens is because she has something else that is critical for endurance: unstoppable mental resilience. 

During her races, Courtney deploys a handful of mindset techniques that allow her to stay in charge of her mind and body for hundreds of miles. These same techniques are now being validated across new studies at the frontiers of psychological science. 

They’re also universally applicable. Whether you’re running an ultramarathon or running a business, you somehow have to sustain your energy over long periods of time, deploy creative solutions to unexpected problems, and find a way to keep going when it all feels like too much.  

The same tools Courtney relies on to out-will the desert sun can also help you hold the line during a tough project, conversation, or workout. So the plan for today is to break down four of Courtney’s tactics, explore the evidence behind why they work, and then give you some ideas for implementing them in your daily life so you can become a lean, mean, persevering machine. 

I. Embrace the pain

Your brain is hardwired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. This single drive is so powerful that it’s sculpted every aspect of the modern world. From our temperature controlled buildings, to our home delivered food, to our infinite libraries of entertainment beamed down from the sky, we’re now surrounded by miracles designed to make every aspect of our lives comfortable. 

Courtney, however, has learned to completely flip this instinct on its head. What she craves is discomfort. When things get tough during a race, Courtney enters what she describes as the “pain cave”. She uses visualization to picture herself in a cave with a hardhat and chisel, and as she pushes through the pain of the run, she imagines chiseling tunnels through the rockface. Pain is gradually chipped away into progress as her cave gets bigger and bigger. 

“I believe that when we go in the cave, we can work to make ourselves better, and when given the opportunity I always go in.”  — Courtney Dauwalter

With this simple visualization technique, pain ceases to be something to avoid or simply tolerate, and instead becomes a welcome opportunity. Most of us arrive at the cave’s entrance with dread, but for Courtney, it’s where the real work begins. She has mastered the ability to take the discomfort associated with a goal and reframe it as a positive sign of growth. 

Recent studies have confirmed that this strategy is a powerful driver of persistence and motivation. One such study was published in March 2022 by two of the world’s leading experts on motivation and goal pursuit: Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell University and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago. 

The first of their five experiments took place across fifty-five improvisation classes at Chicago’s Second City—the comedy club and improv school that helped to train the likes of Steve Carell and Tina Fey. 

When a group of budding improvisers were instructed to interpret any awkwardness or discomfort they experienced as a sign of progress, they suddenly persisted 44% longer than a control group. They were also judged as bolder risk takers by outside observers and reported higher feelings of progress after the class. 

Trying to improvise on the spot with no preparation to a room full of strangers can be a deeply uncomfortable experience. But by encouraging the participants to see their discomfort as an indication of growth, they were able to stay in their real world pain caves for longer. 

The same persistence-enhancing effects of embracing discomfort were observed in Woolley and Fischbach's remaining experiments across several other domains: 

• When they asked participants who were writing about a difficult emotional experience to embrace discomfort, those participants felt a deeper sense of emotional growth from the exercise and were more motivated to work through challenging emotions in future. 
• When they asked Republicans and Democrats to embrace discomfort while reading an opposing political viewpoint, they were more open minded and more motivated to understand the other side’s perspective. 
• And when they asked participants to embrace discomfort while learning about a difficult topic—gun violence—they were more motivated to learn new information and read more deeply about the subject. 

So what’s the mechanism at play here? Well, reinterpreting discomfort as growth is a form of cognitive reappraisal—the deliberate act of changing the way you think about something in order to change how you feel. Reappraisal is one of the strongest tools in your toolkit for emotional regulation: your ability to influence which emotions you feel, how long you feel them for, how intensely you feel them, and the way in which you express them. 

Reappraisal works simply because your feelings about the situations, people, and subjects around you are influenced by the way you think about them. Change the way you think and you can change the way you feel.

In each of these examples, by “reappraising” discomfort as growth, people are ditching their belief that discomfort is a sign to quit, and replacing it with the belief that discomfort is a sign to lean in and press on. This new appraisal softens feelings of discomfort, facilitates emotional regulation, and thereby boosts persistence. 

“Once I changed my storyline around pain, I was able to celebrate it rather than just try to survive it.” — Courtney Dauwalter

We enter mini pain caves every day, whether it’s a tough conversation, resisting temptation, staying positive, sustaining focus, or finishing a workout. Our most valuable skills, achievements, and growth lie deep within the cave, and changing how we perceive the cave makes it that much easier to enter and lay hold of its inner treasures. The next time you find yourself faced with discomfort in pursuit of a goal, greet the cave with open arms, pull out your trusty chisel, and start digging. 

(Note: Discomfort is not the same thing as extreme physical or emotional pain. Courtney does not push through any pain that she believes will cause serious long term injury. Pushing past limitations should always be done with safety in mind.) 

II. Make the here and now awesome 

The next thing that makes Courtney so strange is that she’s happy. At least, happier than one would expect her to be given the sleep deprivation, physical agony, and hallucinations. Both on and off the trail, she is famed and admired for always having a smile on her face and maintaining a cheery disposition. 

Courtney will tell herself jokes, pause to give people high fives, daydream about eating nachos on the beach, and sometimes will just simply breathe in and enjoy the scenery. She makes the experience joyful wherever and whenever possible. 

“No matter how serious the training is, there’s always time for lounging and playing."  — Courtney Dauwalter 

Psychologists and behavioral economists would argue that Courtney’s playfulness gives her a competitive edge. That’s because enjoyment is a powerful but massively underrated driver of perseverance. 

In 2016, another study from Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach found that students who were given snacks, colored pens, and music persisted with their math problems for significantly longer than a snackless, penless, musicless control group. Another study found that watching Animal Planet videos helped people brush their teeth for 30% longer than those who watched a comparatively boring video. A third found that people go to the gym more frequently when they combine their workout with an interesting audiobook. 

More fun = more persistence. Why? Because it provides your brain with immediate rewards rather than it having to rely exclusively on distant rewards. Finding an activity immediately rewarding turns out to be one of the biggest determinants of perseverance that psychologists have uncovered. 

Woolley and Fischbach highlighted the significance of this effect in a series of five experiments in 2016. They tracked how well people persisted with a whole host of different activities, including New Year's Resolutions, eating more vegetables, sticking to a workout routine, and studying for an exam. 

Then they subjected everyone to a battery of tests to determine the degree to which people were motivated by the long-term outcome of a given activity (e.g. getting an A grade, losing weight) versus how immediately rewarding they found the activity (e.g. interested in the current subject material, enjoying the taste of healthy food). 

In each of Woolley and Fischbach's experiments, immediate rewards and enjoyment were around three times better at driving persistence than distant rewards! The people who studied the longest, worked out the most, and ate the healthiest were the ones who found those activities the most intrinsically rewarding. They have reliably replicated this effect across numerous studies since. 

Understanding and leveraging the power of immediate rewards is essential for sustaining long-term motivation. There are months of training and hundreds of miles between Courtney and the finish line—that distant reward by itself is not going to be enough. 

The mechanism we have to thank for this is delay discounting: the phenomenon where the subjective value of a reward declines as the time until its arrival increases. Generally speaking, the further you push a reward out into the future, the less certain we are that we’ll actually get it, and the less motivating that reward becomes. 

(If you’d like to read more about delay discounting, check out this great research paper or this one)

In light of such a risky time delay, your brain will often veto your long-term hopes and dreams in favor of lying on the couch. But if you can offer your brain some rewards now—like having fun or following your intrinsic curiosity—then it’s much more likely to play along. Courtney’s unique ability to find joy along the path and to use creative tactics that make the process more rewarding is undoubtedly a critical part of her superhuman endurance. 

Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit, recently asked Andrew Gazdecki, the founder of MicroAcquire, what secret strategy he used to grow his Twitter following from 30,000 to 70,000 in six months. Andrew responded, “So, Twitter strategy… there is absolutely none, aside from having fun,” and then continued: “If you want to be great at anything, you just have to enjoy it and then if you enjoy it you’re consistent at it.” 

(Andrew has since grown to over 140k followers as of writing)

Whether it’s growing on social media, eating your greens, or running a marathon, finding ways to make the pursuit immediately rewarding is the key to driving persistence:

• You’ll probably be better off learning how to make healthy food taste great instead of dreaming about the perfect body. 
• You’re more likely to feel motivated by the project that piques your interest than the one you think will look good on your resume. 
• Your odds of lasting in a relationship that brings you happiness is better than the one that looks good on social media. 

Now this is all well and good except for one slight problem: most of us seem hellbent on completely ignoring this principle. See, the professors also exposed the trap that many of us fall into—most of the study participants told Woolley and Fischbach that they believed distant rewards were a superior source of motivation! Even many of the most persistent participants (those who were deriving the highest level of immediate rewards from their activity) still said they planned to rely on distant rewards to motivate themselves moving forward: