After 7 Ultramarathons this year, These Are the 3 Lessons That Actually Matter

What thousands of miles and seven ultramarathons taught me about consistency, control, relationships, failure and the uncomfortable places where we actually grow.

There is a point in an ultramarathon when all the complicated things you thought mattered begin to disappear. Your pace stops being quite as important. You stop checking where you are compared with everyone else. The excitement that existed at the starting line has long since worn off, and nobody around you particularly cares how impressive your training looked on paper. Your world gets smaller. You need to eat. You need to drink. Something hurts. You need to decide whether that pain represents a real problem or simply the predictable discomfort of asking your body to keep moving. You look at the distance remaining and realize that thinking about all of it at once is useless, so you make a smaller agreement with yourself: get to the next aid station. Then you get there and make another agreement. Keep going.

I am preparing for my eighth ultramarathon, and lately my training has averaged around 118 miles a week. On some 20-mile training days, I eat between 700 and 1,000 grams of carbohydrates across the day because I have learned that asking more from my body requires giving more back to it. There are workouts, recovery runs, meals, bottles, shoes, strength sessions, alarms and an absurd amount of laundry. From the outside, ultrarunning can look like a complicated hobby for people who have somehow decided that a marathon isn't inconvenient enough. But the longer I have done it, the less interested I have become in what ultrarunning teaches me about running. I am much more interested in what it has taught me about being a person.

Running very far has a way of exposing you. You can carry a weakness through the first few miles without consequences. You might be able to carry it for 20 or 30. Eventually, however, the race starts collecting debts. If you neglected your nutrition, you will probably find out. If you went out too fast because your ego overruled your plan, you may eventually pay for it. If you didn't prepare your legs for the terrain, enthusiasm isn't going to manufacture that preparation at mile 40. The longer the race goes, the harder it becomes to hide from the things you should have addressed earlier. Life, I've realized, works in much the same way. We can hide from problems for astonishingly long periods of time. We can neglect relationships, avoid difficult conversations, ignore our finances, refuse to acknowledge our own flaws and tell ourselves that everything is fine. For a while, it might even appear to be true. But time is life's version of mileage. Eventually, it tends to expose whatever we have been unwilling to confront.

After seven ultras and thousands of miles of training, I keep coming back to three ideas. They are embarrassingly simple: keep showing up, nail the variables you can control, and understand that your greatest gains are often hiding inside your greatest weaknesses. None of these ideas belong to running. I see them in friendships. I see them in families. I see them in relationships and careers and mistakes. I see them in the way people treat themselves when nobody else is around. Running simply gave me a place where the consequences became obvious enough that I could no longer ignore them.

Keep Showing Up

We tend to tell stories about success by focusing on moments. Someone wins a race, gets married, sells a company, graduates, loses 100 pounds, earns a promotion or finally buys the house they wanted. The moment photographs well, so it becomes the story. What we rarely see are the hundreds or thousands of unremarkable days that made the photograph possible. There is nothing particularly exciting about doing what you said you would do on an ordinary Tuesday. Nobody applauds the tenth week of consistent work. There is rarely a celebration for the person who makes the slightly better decision for the 400th time. Yet most meaningful things in life appear to be built exactly this way.

Running makes this painfully obvious because no individual easy run feels particularly important. I can finish an ordinary training run and feel essentially the same as I did before it. I am not suddenly fitter. I don't look different. There is no immediate reward that matches the effort. But repeat that process for a week, then a month, then a year, and the person doing the running changes. This is one of the strangest features of progress: while it is happening, it often doesn't feel like progress at all.

Relationships seem to operate on the same principle. We like to associate love with extraordinary gestures because extraordinary gestures make good stories. Flowers arrive. Trips are planned. Anniversaries are celebrated. Someone makes a speech. Those things matter, but I don't think they carry a relationship by themselves. A relationship is mostly made from extremely ordinary interactions repeated for years. Did you ask how their day went and actually listen to the answer? Did you call when you said you would? Did you make time when life became inconvenient? Did you apologize when you were wrong without immediately explaining why you were also somehow right? Did you remain interested in the other person's life after the novelty of knowing them disappeared?

Showing up for someone once is easy. Showing up for someone repeatedly is love.

The same thing happens in families. We often assume that because someone is family, the relationship will somehow maintain itself. But a family is still made of individual relationships, and relationships deteriorate when nobody tends to them. Parents get older while we are busy. Siblings build separate lives. Children change faster than adults realize. One day you look around and discover that years have passed in what felt like a few months. You can love someone deeply and still fail to participate meaningfully in their life.

That possibility bothers me because it reveals the difference between feeling something and practicing it. You can love your mother and rarely call her. You can care about a friend and repeatedly cancel plans. You can value your relationship while consistently giving your partner whatever energy remains after work, training, your phone and everything else have taken their share. Our intentions may be sincere, but the people around us experience our behavior, not our intentions.

Running taught me that showing up is a behavior.

You don't become consistent by thinking about consistency. You become consistent by returning. Sometimes you return enthusiastically. Sometimes you return tired. Sometimes you return after screwing up badly. That last version might matter most.

There is a dangerous idea that consistency means never breaking the streak. Life doesn't work that way. People get sick. They become overwhelmed. They make mistakes. They lose jobs. Relationships end. Motivation disappears. There are periods when simply getting through the day consumes the energy that used to be available for ambition. If consistency required perfection, nobody would be consistent for very long.

What matters is the return.

An ultramarathon can change dramatically in an hour. I have learned not to make permanent judgments based on temporary moments. You can feel incredible at mile 20 and terrible at mile 30. You can be convinced your race is falling apart and, after slowing down, eating and drinking, feel surprisingly normal again later. The mistake is assuming that because something feels terrible now, it will feel terrible forever.

We make that mistake outside of races constantly. A person has a terrible year and begins describing themselves as a failure. A relationship enters a difficult period and suddenly every good year before it is forgotten. Someone loses a job and begins questioning their entire worth. A runner has a bad race and decides they simply aren't talented. We take temporary evidence and use it to construct permanent identities.

Sometimes the most important thing you can do is refuse to make that judgment yet.

Keep participating.

Call the person.

Go back to therapy.

Submit another application.

Try the business again.

Have the conversation.

Return to training.

Apologize.

Start over.

There are situations where persistence becomes stubbornness and leaving is the right decision. Showing up does not mean remaining forever in something destructive. But too many people abandon worthwhile things because they mistake difficulty for evidence that the thing is not working.

Sometimes difficulty is simply part of the mileage.

Nail the Variables

One of the frustrating things about racing is that you can prepare extraordinarily well and still lose. Someone better can show up. The weather can turn. Your stomach can revolt. You can trip. You can get sick the week before the race. There are countless variables between preparation and outcome, which makes the idea of complete control ridiculous.

Yet racing has also taught me that accepting uncertainty is not the same as surrendering responsibility.

I cannot control who shows up on race morning, but I can control whether I trained. I cannot control the temperature, but I can prepare for heat. I cannot guarantee that my stomach will cooperate, but I can practice fueling. I cannot control every bad day, but I can decide whether I slept enough, ate enough and recovered enough to give myself a reasonable chance of having a good one.

This distinction between controlling the outcome and controlling the inputs has become useful far beyond running.

A lot of anxiety comes from trying to control outcomes that were never completely ours. We want another person to love us. We want the employer to choose us. We want the business to succeed. We want everyone to understand our intentions. We want people to approve of our decisions. We want the race to reward our training.

None of those outcomes can be guaranteed.

But there are variables underneath them that belong to us.

In a relationship, I cannot control whether another person stays forever. I can control whether I communicate honestly. I can control whether I listen. I can control whether I keep promises. I can control whether I bring yesterday's anger into today's conversation. I can control whether I admit when I am wrong. I can control whether the person sitting across from me receives the same patience I would effortlessly give a stranger.

That doesn't guarantee a relationship works. Two people can behave well and still discover they shouldn't be together. But controlling your variables means that regardless of the outcome, you can look back and know you participated honestly.

The same principle applies to family. You cannot control whether someone forgives you. You can apologize. You cannot control whether someone changes. You can establish a boundary. You cannot rewrite what happened when you were younger. You can decide what role those experiences are allowed to play in the person you become.

This is difficult because humans love negotiating with variables that belong to other people while ignoring the ones sitting directly in front of us.

We complain about our boss while doing mediocre work. We complain that a friend never reaches out while never calling them. We complain about being tired while treating sleep as optional. We want deeper relationships while looking at our phones through dinner. We want to feel better but resist changing the routines that repeatedly make us feel worse.

Then we blame the outcome.

Training at high volume has made this kind of self-deception increasingly expensive for me. If I want to average 118 miles per week, I cannot only love the running part. I have to respect everything that allows the running part to exist. I have to eat enough. On large training days, that can mean 700 to 1,000 grams of carbohydrates throughout the day. I have to think about hydration. I have to sleep. I have to recover. I have to make easy days actually easy. I have to pay attention to the boring details because eventually the body sends an invoice for whatever you repeatedly neglect.

Life sends invoices too.

Ignore your finances long enough and the bill arrives.

Ignore your health long enough and the bill may arrive.

Ignore your partner long enough and one day you may discover they stopped asking for your attention.

Ignore your parents long enough and eventually there are fewer opportunities to call.

Ignore resentment and it compounds.

Ignore exhaustion and it becomes burnout.

The frightening part is that the consequences often arrive long after the behavior that created them. That delay makes it easy to believe we are getting away with something.

We're often just postponing payment.

Nailing the variables means asking a difficult question before blaming circumstances: What part of this actually belongs to me?

Not everything does.

But usually something does.

Find that part first.

The Gains Are in the Weaknesses

Of the three lessons, this is probably the most uncomfortable.

People naturally enjoy doing things that confirm the identity they already have. We like environments where we feel competent. We like conversations where we feel intelligent. We like people who reinforce our view of ourselves. We like exercises we're good at and avoid the ones that expose us.

Runners are especially talented at disguising this as training preference. Someone who is naturally fast wants to run fast. Someone with enormous endurance wants to pile on mileage. Someone strong in the gym wants to lift. Someone who struggles on hills somehow keeps finding flat routes.

Eventually, though, performance stops improving because strengths cannot compensate indefinitely for weaknesses.

The race always finds the weakness.

Life does too.

Maybe your weakness is not work ethic. Maybe you're incredibly hardworking. Your weakness is that you have no idea how to stop working, and eventually everyone you love receives the exhausted version of you.

Maybe your weakness isn't kindness. You're extraordinarily kind to everyone except yourself.

Maybe you're independent, but your independence has slowly become an inability to ask anyone for help.

Maybe you're confident professionally but terrified of rejection personally.

Maybe you're excellent at providing for your family but uncomfortable telling them you love them.

Maybe you're great at apologizing with gifts and terrible at saying the sentence, "I was wrong."

Maybe you are the person everyone calls when their life falls apart, yet you disappear when your own life does because being needed feels safer than being known.

Strength and weakness can sometimes be the same characteristic viewed from different directions.

That realization changed how I think about growth.

For years, I assumed improvement meant taking the things I was already good at and becoming exceptional at them. There is value in that. But eventually, another mile doesn't solve a fueling problem. More fitness doesn't fix poor pacing. More determination doesn't repair an injury. At some point, the thing holding you back isn't your strongest attribute failing to become stronger. It's the weakness you've been successfully avoiding.

This is particularly obvious in relationships because relationships expose parts of ourselves that achievement can hide.

You can be successful and emotionally unavailable.

You can be disciplined and terrible at compromise.

You can be charismatic and incapable of vulnerability.

You can have thousands of people interested in what you say and still struggle to listen to the one person sitting across from you.

No professional accomplishment automatically fixes those things.

Sometimes success actually makes avoidance easier because it gives you evidence for an alternative story: How could I be the problem? Look at everything I've accomplished.

But achievements answer a very narrow set of questions.

They cannot tell you whether you're a good friend.

Your race times cannot tell you whether you're a good son or daughter.

Your income cannot tell you whether your children feel safe talking to you.

Your followers cannot tell you whether the people closest to you feel close to you.

Those tests happen somewhere else.

And unlike races, they rarely come with a finish line telling you exactly how you did.

This is where weakness becomes valuable.

A weakness is information.

If every relationship ends because of the same problem, that's information.

If every job eventually makes you miserable for the same reason, that's information.

If the same argument keeps appearing with different people, that's information.

If criticism about one particular part of your personality makes you disproportionately angry, that might be information too.

Our first instinct is often defense. We explain why the other person is wrong. Sometimes they are. But if the same message keeps arriving from different directions, eventually it becomes worth opening the envelope.

The gains might be in there.

What Endurance Actually Means

When people hear that someone runs ultramarathons, they often assume the defining characteristic is an unusual tolerance for suffering. I understand why. Running for hours is uncomfortable. There are races where every part of you eventually negotiates for a reason to stop.

But suffering by itself isn't particularly useful.

You can make almost anything harder unnecessarily. That doesn't make it better.

I have become less impressed by people's ability to destroy themselves and more impressed by their ability to build something sustainable.

Anyone can work 100 hours for one week.

Can you build a career you don't hate for 30 years?

Anyone can be an extraordinary partner during the first three months of a relationship.

Can you remain curious about someone after three years?

Anyone can become intensely motivated about fitness in January.

Can you still take care of your body when nobody is watching in October?

Anyone can make a dramatic apology.

Can you change the behavior that made the apology necessary?

That is endurance.

It is not suffering forever.

It is continuing to participate.

There is an enormous difference.

As I prepare for another ultra, I know there will be moments when I feel great and moments when I don't. I know that despite the mileage, despite the food, despite everything I've learned, there will be variables I didn't anticipate. There will probably be weaknesses that get exposed.

I hope there are.

Because I no longer think the purpose of these races is to prove that I am already the person I want to be.

They show me where I'm not.

Then I get to decide what to do with that information.

That may be the closest connection between endurance and life.

Eventually, everybody encounters a mile they didn't prepare for.

A parent gets sick. A relationship ends. Someone loses a job. A friend dies. A business fails. A person you trusted disappoints you. You disappoint yourself. Something you were certain would work doesn't.

There is no training plan capable of preventing all of it.

There is no perfectly executed life.

When those moments arrive, we fall back on whatever we have practiced.

Can you keep showing up when showing up isn't exciting anymore?

Can you separate what you can control from what you cannot?

Can you look at what hurts without immediately looking away?

Those are simple questions.

They are not easy ones.

After seven ultramarathons, I don't think I've learned some secret about life that people who don't run long distances cannot understand. If anything, running has simply made certain truths harder for me to avoid. A hundred-mile race compresses them. Actions have consequences. Small mistakes compound. Preparation matters. Ego is expensive. You will have bad moments that feel permanent and aren't. You will discover weaknesses you didn't know you had. Other people can help you, but nobody can take every step for you.

And eventually, no matter how carefully you prepared, something will happen that wasn't in the plan.

Then you make a decision.

You can spend the next hour angry that the race isn't unfolding the way you imagined.

Or you can deal with the mile you're standing in.

Eat something.

Drink something.

Adjust.

Ask for help if you need it.

Put one foot in front of the other.

Life rarely gives us the satisfaction of knowing exactly how much farther we have to go. There are no mile markers telling you that the difficult part of your marriage ends in six months, that your career makes sense in three years or that the grief becomes manageable somewhere around mile 70.

You just keep participating.

You keep showing up for people.

You take care of the variables that belong to you.

You pay attention when life exposes a weakness instead of immediately hiding it again.

Then you wake up tomorrow and do it one more time.

Maybe that's endurance.

Not being the person who can suffer the most.

Being the person who can continue to care.

About the work. About the people around you. About the promises you've made. About becoming better without requiring yourself to already be perfect.

The race eventually finds every weakness.

That used to scare me.

Now I think that's one of the reasons I keep signing up.