You’re 80 km into a mountain ultra. Your legs are heavy, the light is going, and the trail has turned to loose rock. Somewhere in the last hour you started thinking about every step: where to put your foot, whether that rock will hold, whether you’re about to go down. The more you think about it, the worse it gets. Your stride shortens, your shoulders creep up, and you catch a toe on something you’d normally float over.
Most ultra runners know that feeling. It’s easy to put it down to tired legs. Some of it is, but a lot of what happens late in a race comes down to how movement is controlled, and that’s something you can train.
Same machinery, different programs
Think about your quads. You use the same muscles to run, to cycle, to climb stairs and to hop across a stream. In each case a different program is running them: which muscle fibres fire, when, how hard, and in what order with everything else.
Movement scientists have described it this way since the 1970s. We don’t store every single movement separately. We store a general program for a type of movement, then tune it on the fly for speed, force and terrain. The program is learned and stored in the nervous system, and the muscles carry it out.
I picture it like a controller. Ground coming. Run landing pattern A. Adjust on contact.
The controller doesn’t wait for your foot to hit the ground. It sets up the landing in advance. Your leg muscles switch on before contact, and how stiff your leg is when it lands depends on what your brain expects to meet. In one study, people hopping onto a surface they knew was hard raised their leg muscle activity by up to 76% in the last fraction of a second before landing. When the hard surface came as a surprise, the leg had to absorb it passively until the muscles caught up.
On a trail, that gap is where you get caught out. Expect firm ground and meet loose scree, and your prediction is wrong. That’s why time on technical terrain matters so much. As well as getting stronger, you’re getting better at predicting the ground.
How the programs get written
Every skill starts out conscious. The first time you run a technical descent, you’re thinking about everything. With enough practice, the movement drops below conscious thought and starts to run on its own. That’s what learning a skill is.
The best evidence that running patterns can be deliberately rewritten comes from gait retraining. Researchers have taught runners to land more softly by giving them live feedback on how hard they were hitting the ground, then slowly taking that feedback away over several sessions so the runner had to rely on their own feel. Impact forces dropped, and in some studies the change lasted a year.
My favourite example came from a six-month follow-up. By then, the runners’ new pattern had faded, but when they were simply told to “run as at the end of the programme”, it came straight back: impact roughly a third lower, with no feedback at all. The program was still there, stored, waiting to be called up.
Your body doesn’t only learn from the runs you meant it to. A distracted, shuffling easy run where your mind is elsewhere still counts as practice, of a pattern you didn’t choose.
What pressure does
Once a skill has become automatic, thinking about it can make it worse.
Sport psychologists have studied this for decades under the name choking. When skilled performers are put under pressure, they tend to start monitoring their own movement step by step, and the skill breaks down. Golfers who are told to pay attention to their stroke putt worse. Beginners don’t suffer the same way, because their skill is still conscious anyway; it’s the experienced performers who get tripped up by thinking. Researchers call one version of this “reinvestment”: under stress, you pour conscious, rule-based thinking back into a movement that was running fine without it.
That’s why I tell my athletes during a race to get out of their own way. Look after your breathing and your pacing, and leave the rest to your body. It knows what to do, because you’ve spent months teaching it.
The catch is that it will do exactly what you’ve taught it. Stress and fatigue strip away conscious control, and what’s left is whatever you’ve practised most. Running form shifts over the course of a marathon or ultra as fatigue builds. My view, and this is my synthesis of the research rather than something anyone has tested directly, is that sloppy training builds the patterns that turn up late in a race. When you’re tired and stressed, you fall back on your most practised running, whatever its quality.
The spiral
Deep in a long ultra, overthinking is the last thing you want, because it can turn into a spiral, physical and mental.
Each link in that spiral has research behind it. Ultras take a real toll on thinking: studies at races like UTMB have found slower reactions and, in some runners, hallucinations. Mental strain makes the same physical effort feel harder. In one well-known study, people who’d spent 90 minutes on a demanding mental task gave up on a cycling test about 15% sooner, even though their heart and muscles were working no differently. And anxiety narrows attention, so you read the ground less well.
Put those together and you get the loop. Worry pulls your attention inward, your movement gets ragged and your decisions get worse. You stumble, the effort climbs, and the worry grows. Nobody has measured that whole cycle in ultra runners, but anyone who’s been in it will recognise it.
There’s a physical side to it as well. When you get a fright, a slip or a near fall, the natural response is to draw in a breath and hold it. Your shoulders lift, your centre of gravity shifts, and you become less stable and more likely to stumble and fall.
Mid-race, the way out is what you’ve trained. A conscious exhale and a return to your breath rhythm resets you, and I teach it as exactly that: a reset.
Breath, the anchor
That’s why breath is our default anchor. It’s the one automatic system you can also steer, and it brings your attention back to the present without asking you to control your stride. There’s more to say on that, and it’s the subject of the next article in this series.
How we train it
At Mindful Runner every session runs through the same four steps: Intent, Focus, Practice, Reflection. Intent is why the session is on the calendar. Focus is the one thing you pay attention to, a cue like quiet feet or tall hips. Practice is the rhythm you hold while you do it. That might be quick feet as you pick up speed on a descent, but more often it’s the breath, because the breath is the quickest way to bring attention back to the present. Reflection is the honest look afterwards at how well you held all three.
None of it is complicated, and it makes sure the patterns you’re laying down in training are the ones you meant to lay down. Over time, the focus cue stops being something you have to think about and becomes the way you run, and that’s how we know it’s ready for race day.
That’s also why we ask for intent in every session, easy runs included. Each one shapes what your body will do later, once you’ve stopped thinking about it.
Back to 80 km
You’re tired, the light is going, the ground is loose. Now you know what’s happening: your thinking brain is trying to take over a job it isn’t built for.
So let it go. Look after the breath, keep the rhythm, eyes up, and leave the rest to your body, because the work was done in training.
This is the second of three pieces on how calm, practice and breath fit together. Next: how to use the breath as a gauge, an anchor and an engine.
Explore further
Breathwork for Runners: coming soon
Residential trail courses at Windrush in Hogsback: from Trail Skills to Advanced Mountain Ultra, learn to move calmly and efficiently on technical terrain
Coaching Plans: structured training for performance and longevity