If you listened to our recent episodes with Dr. Erin Ayala and Dr. Scott Frey, or you read my Runners World article, you know mental training is at the top of my to-do list for 2026. It’s something I’ve put off / haven’t honed in on in the past, but after a few good-but-not-quite-there results last season, I realized that it’s a space where I can potentially make some gains to get that .005 percent that I need! And when Erin suggested making a mental training plan the same way you’d make a training plan for your workouts, as a very Type A organized human, the concept really resonated with me. So, I figured I’d share my blueprint for how I want to approach mental training this year.
I’ve said before that we can all benefit from some mental ‘work,’ whether that’s leaning into some sports psych practices like visualization or actually talking to a therapist or just making meditation a priority. And I do some of the things: I meditate relatively regularly, I do a bit of visualization, and obviously, if you’re here, you know I love to goal set. But I want 2026 to be the year that I get these concepts truly dialed in so that on race day, I’m fully prepared to find my flow and stay focused on the goal.
Daily/Weekly Mental Training
Meditation / Mindfulness
Cliche for a reason, but daily meditation is always on my list of goals. I’ve been pretty decent at it, and the clarity that comes from a 10-day midday meditation break is always worth it. You know what they say: If you’re too busy to take 3 minutes to meditate, you need to take 30.
Journalling
We have a workbook coming out at Strong Girl Publishing next week that’s actually all about self compassion—the Beyond the Mirror Workbook—and I am so excited to get into the exercises again with my ultrarunning and cyclocross in mind. I also want to work on just journalling more about my athletic life, taking myself more seriously as an athlete without taking the fun out of it. Take it seriously, but not let it consume my identity.
One Offline Run per Week
This is going to be a hard one! But it’s one of Scott’s top tips: I don’t race with music or podcasts, so why am I doing all of my runs with an airpod in? I’m going to do one of my workouts each week just silent, letting my mind free flow—I know every time my headphones die mid-run, I get great ideas, so I want to lean into that more.
Skill Acquisition
This will play into one of my before-race mental goals, but skills acquisition is a big one for me with mental training. Erin talks about the weather as a great example of this: If you know your race could be in pouring rain, you need to train in pouring rain on occasion. If I know I need to be good at following a route and having the course on my watch GPS, I need to practice trail runs following a loaded route on my watch GPS. If I’m going to be racing at night, I need to run in the dark.
Do Some Hard (Short) Races
This is already on my bingo card for 2026 with cyclocross in the mix, but in the spring, I want to make sure I hop into a couple of short 5K type races, just to get that start line experience again AND to push my “go all out from the gun” pace, which is something that rarely gets turned on in a 100.
Before Race Mental Training
Actually get clear on my race goal(s)
Now, I won’t say that I haven’t had race goals in the past. But I did realize that I wasn’t as clear on them this year as I should have been. Case in point: the 100 miler? I had the record written down wrong, so I thought it was 15 minutes faster and totally out of reach. I missed the actual record by 2 minutes. Now, part of that was because the record was never my actual goal, just something I had been using to get a sense of how fast you had to go to win, since it was set the year prior. So I have no right to be disappointed—yet I am. So next time? Yeah, you bet I’ll have A, B and C goals locked in and A will be a STRETCH.
Visualize the day—and look for sticking points
Having run La Cloche with Peter and hiked it twice, I didn’t spend a lot of time visualizing much beyond some of the pieces of the loop that I remembered. That wasn’t a good move: I should have spent more time thinking through issues like getting lost/not knowing where the next cairn or marking was, what I would do if I was low on water, et cetera. I really want to hone in on preparing for the down moments and how I’ll actually work through them in the fastest way possible.
Ask if there’s any way I could prepare more
Coming back to La Cloche, I looked at the map and roughly had a sense of where water would be, but didn’t do much beyond that in terms of course guidance. It wasn’t until I hit my first “oh no, where’s the blaze” when I realized I should have loaded the GPX file onto my watch. I had it on my phone, but pulling out my phone to check it constantly was a huge time suck, so I only did that three times when I was truly off the trail and lost. I knew that navigation was a major issue, but for some reason, didn’t prepare for it as well as I could have.
In Race Mental Reminders
”Yes, and”
This was my favorite concept that Erin and I workshopped for my Runners World piece—when something goes wrong or isn’t feeling great, acknowledge it, and then take a page from improv theater and say “yes, and…” and figure out what to do about it.
Keep an eye on clock—really.
This is going to be a big one for me in ultras, because until now, I’ve had a pretty strong “don’t watch the clock” mentality because I was afraid clock watching would make me do dumb things with my pace. But I now have plenty of proof that I can make it through a 50 or 100 miler, and it’s time to pay attention to time—and not just in the last 10 miles when suddenly, the record is going to come down to the wire. It’s time to have specific time goals in mind, and to keep checking in on them and acting accordingly.
