How Am I Going To Do 40 More Miles?

You’ve got no more effort to give.

You’re 60 miles into a 100 and more drained than you knew possible.

You could lay down on the trail right now and fall asleep. You want more than anything to stop and rest.

“How am I going to do 40 more miles of this?”

Even if you could somehow tough it out to keep going the next 40 miles, you’re going so slow you there’s no way you’ll finish in time.

It’s not happening.

So you slow down - who cares? If they don’t pull you at the next aid station, you’ll drop.

And when you drop, you get rest…but later on, you also get regret. You know you could have finished. It was all in your head.

So what happened?

For the first 60 miles, you were following your plan. Running felt great and you were making good progress. All was well.

Then you got tired, lost energy, and started struggling. You were trying harder yet going slower.

You thought that meant your plan stopped working and you’d have to come up with a way to run the last 40 miles feeling this bad. Or drop.

You couldn’t imagine struggling through 40 more miles this way (and didn’t want to), so you dropped.

But the answer to “How do I run the next 40 miles,” isn’t dropping. That obviously doesn’t get the 40 miles or finish you want.

The answer is - you already do know how to do the next 40.

The same way you ran the first 60. 

Look, you started the race at 0 miles with a plan, knowing exactly how to do the next 100 miles even if you didn’t know exactly how the doing would unfold. You went forward one step and one mile at a time.

Now, instead of being at 0 miles, you’re all the way to 60. You still know how to do the full 100 miles, but now you only have to think about the last 40 of it. You only need to go forward 40 miles one step at a time instead of 100.

Hitting a low - getting tired, losing energy, and struggling - doesn’t mean you suddenly don’t know how to do the next 40 miles or that you have to do those miles feeling this way.

It only means you need to solve the low - the feeling bad part - and keep going like you were.

Nothing actually needs fixing but the low.

A good race plan tells you how to do the last 40 and plans for slowing down. But even if you don’t have a plan, don’t fall for thinking you don’t know how to do the last 40. 

You know how. You’ve been doing it. All you need to do is keep doing it.

You can relax - you don’t have to push through the last 40 miles feeling awful.

And you don’t have to drop.

You only have to fix the low and keep doing what got you here the rest of the way to the finish line.

That’s how you do the last 40 miles.