No Pity Party

At some point in a long enough ultra, there is a pretty good chance you are going to feel sorry for yourself.

You are tired, Your feet hurt, You are sick of eating, The climb in front of you looks ridiculous, The next checkpoint feels much further away than it did on the Race Plan and you are starting to question some of the life choices that got you here.

That is normal.

I do not think the answer is pretending everything is fine or trying to convince yourself that you are having a wonderful time when you clearly are not.

My rule is much simpler.

The five minutes is my personal rule. It is not a scientifically established threshold and there is no research saying minute six is where your brain suddenly becomes useful again.

What matters is the change in question.

The five minute rule

There are times in an ultra when everything feels unfair.

The weather is worse than expected, The food you packed tastes disgusting, You have been climbing forever, Everyone around you looks better than you feel, You are behind the schedule you spent weeks building and the next section suddenly looks impossible.

My response is not to tell myself those feelings are wrong.

If it is miserable, it is miserable.

Give it five minutes.

Complain internally, Swear at the hill, Be disappointed, Admit that you are exhausted and Acknowledge that right now you would quite happily sit down and never move again.

Then draw a line under it.

That shift matters because feeling miserable and having an unsolvable problem are not the same thing.

A bad patch may be coming from hunger, dehydration, heat, cold, sore feet, poor pacing, sleepiness, a stomach problem, an equipment issue, disappointment about your time goal, or simply accumulated fatigue.

Those are different problems and they need different responses.

This is not fake positivity

I do not think there is much value in standing 120 kilometres into a race telling yourself everything is fantastic when your brain knows perfectly well that it is not.

Your brain says:

Fine.

You do not need to win an argument with it.

You can acknowledge the thought without letting it become the entire race.

That is very different from suppressing emotion. It is also different from allowing the emotion to sit there in your head for the next three hours.

The point of No Pity Party is not to become emotionally bulletproof. It is to move from emotion into action.

Why low points feel so convincing

A long ultra gradually removes many of the things that make good decisions easy.

You become physically tired. You may be hungry, cold or hot. In longer races you may be sleep deprived. The original finish target can start slipping away. Small problems have had hours to become annoying and the remaining distance may still be enormous.

That is important because your perception of the problem changes with your state.

Research on endurance performance has repeatedly linked psychological factors with perception of effort, while ultramarathon research has shown that sleep loss and extreme exertion can impair reaction time and aspects of executive function. In other words, late in a race is not necessarily when your brain is doing its finest work.

That does not mean every negative thought is wrong.

It means a thought such as “I cannot possibly do another 50 kilometres” deserves the same treatment as every other race problem: examine it before you make a permanent decision from it.

Pity party over. What is the problem?

Once the five minutes are up, I want to make the problem specific.

Not:

Something useful:

This is where the mental side of an ultra becomes surprisingly practical.

You do not always need more motivation.

Sometimes you need calories.

Sometimes you need a jacket.

Sometimes you need to slow down.

Sometimes you need to stop staring at the finish line and get yourself to the next checkpoint.

Solve the smallest useful thing

When everything feels wrong, solving everything is a terrible target.

Choose the smallest action that improves the situation.

One of the biggest mistakes is expecting the solution to make you feel brilliant immediately.

You may eat and still feel terrible for twenty minutes. You may put a jacket on and still need time to warm up. You may slow down and still be tired because you have been running for eighteen hours.

The first test is not always “Do I feel good now?”

Sometimes it is simply “Is this getting less bad?”

Make the race smaller

There is very little value in trying to mentally carry the whole remaining race at once.

If you are 110 kilometres into a 100 miler and you feel awful, thinking about the remaining 50 kilometres can turn a difficult moment into something enormous.

So shrink it.

The next checkpoint.

The top of the climb.

The next hour.

The next gel.

The next time you see your crew.

The next ten minutes.

Ultramarathon specific research has repeatedly found runners using small goals and race segmentation as coping strategies. Popular ultrarunning writing arrives at the same place from experience: break a huge task into something your tired brain can actually deal with.

Useful self talk beats pretending

There is evidence that self talk can improve sporting and endurance performance, but I think the practical interpretation is often made too complicated.

Self talk does not have to sound inspirational.

I prefer it to be instructional.

The useful statement points toward an action.

That is why “Pity party over, What is the problem?” works for me. It is not trying to change how I feel. It is trying to change what I do next.

Plan the bad patch before the race

We spend a lot of time planning the physical race.

Pace, Nutrition, Hydration, Shoes, Drop bags, Lights, Crew, Checkpoints and Cutoffs.

It is probably worth having a plan for what you are going to do when your brain decides the whole thing was a terrible idea as well.

Before the race, think about the low points you have had before.

• What normally goes wrong first? Food, heat, cold, feet, sleepiness, pacing or mood?
• What has brought you back before? Food, caffeine, warmth, a slower pace, five quiet minutes, humour, company or simply moving again?
• What should your crew say when you arrive feeling sorry for yourself?
• What should they not say?
• Which decisions should wait until a fixable problem has been addressed?
• What are your non negotiable safety boundaries?

This is essentially an if then plan.

Research into endurance psychology specifically recommends this kind of conditional planning because a strategy is much more useful when you have already thought about when to use it.

Where crew can help

A crew can be enormously useful because they are looking at the situation from outside your tired brain.

They can notice that you have stopped eating. They can see that you are shivering. They can remind you what happened the last time you felt this bad. They can simplify choices and solve practical problems while you sit there wondering why anybody invented ultramarathons.

But they need to know how you want to be helped.

My separate rule for crew is Never Quit in the Chair. The principle is closely related: do not make a permanent race decision from a temporary low before the obvious fixable problems have been dealt with.

No Pity Party adds the runner side of that conversation.

Sometimes stopping is the right decision

No Pity Party is not a rule that says you must finish at any cost.

That would be stupid.

There is a difference between normal ultramarathon suffering and a situation where continuing is unsafe.

There are also times when you can make a clear, rational decision that continuing is no longer the right choice even without a medical emergency.

The important part is that the decision comes after you have separated the actual situation from the emotional spiral around it.

What the research says

The psychology of ultramarathon performance is still a developing research area, and the evidence is nowhere near strong enough to reduce success to a single trait called mental toughness.

A 2026 systematic review of 53 studies on long distance and ultra endurance runners found the clearest recurring association around maladaptive pain coping: it was linked with poorer pain adaptation and a lower likelihood of completing races. The same review found mixed results for mental toughness, resilience, self efficacy, motivation and other psychological traits, and warned that most of the available studies were observational and had methodological limitations.

That is useful because it moves the conversation away from the idea that some people simply possess more toughness.

How you respond to the problem may matter more than whether you can convince yourself you are tough.

In a prospective study of 204 runners in multi stage 250 km ultramarathons, runners used more adaptive than maladaptive pain coping strategies. Maladaptive coping was more common among nonfinishers, and each one point increase on the study's six point maladaptive coping scale was associated with roughly three times the odds of not finishing.

A qualitative study of runners attempting the Canadian Death Race found that athletes dealt with race stressors by making small goals, monitoring pace, nutrition and hydration, using social support and working through the mental and physical battle.

Broader endurance research also gives support to goal setting, imagery and self talk, while an expert endurance psychology paper recommends five practical strategies for moments when athletes want to slow down or stop: goal setting, motivational self talk, relaxation, distraction and pacing. Importantly, the same paper also says there are situations where resisting the urge to stop is not advisable because injury or environmental risk may make stopping the correct choice.

None of that proves my five minute rule.

It does support the thinking behind it:

The No Pity Party checklist

Common questions

The final thought

You can plan the course, pace, checkpoints, cutoffs, nutrition, hydration, crew and gear.

You should.

But in a long enough race, there will probably be a point where none of that changes the fact that you feel completely miserable.

When it happens, I give myself five minutes.

I acknowledge it.

I am allowed to feel sorry for myself.

Then the five minutes are up.

Find the thing you can do next.

Then do that.

Related guides:
Never Quit in the Chair: Crewing an Ultra
Planning Your Ultramarathon Aid Station Strategy
How to Plan Your Race Day for a 100K or 100 Mile Ultramarathon

Research notes and sources

Research snapshot: 28 September 2026. The evidence base for ultramarathon psychology is growing but remains less mature than the physiological literature. The most recent systematic review found substantial methodological limitations across the field, so associations should not be presented as proof that a particular psychological trait causes better performance.