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I HAD BEEN following the path for just over two hours when I finally thought to look at my watch to check my pace. I was making my way through the Alps during the MCC, a 40-kilometer race that’s part of the legendary Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB) series, a weeklong, multi-race event many consider to be the Super Bowl of the trail running world.
Before this, I had never run a trail race. My competitive experience was on the roads or the track, and that mentality bleeds into my workouts in the way I typically prioritize speed over everything. When I’m running on the street, I check my watch every few minutes (if not on the minute) to monitor my pace, obsessively keeping up with the plan I had for my workout or race goal. I do my best not to stop (or even slow down for traffic), even though there’s no one forcing me to keep going. When I’m running more than 10 miles, I carry water with me and take fuel on the run so I don’t have to pause my watch. I constantly compare myself to my best race performance, and I don’t want to fall behind.
But on the paths from Martigny-Combe to Chamonix, during the toughest running contest of my life, I wasn’t stressed by the numbers. I was too busy keeping my eyes on the rocks and roots on the ground ahead of me and the sweeping mountainscape on the horizon. I leaned into my trekking poles to make my way up the steep paths, my heart pounding and breath ragged as if I were moving three times as fast. This felt completely different than my years of experience on the road. Trail running helped to calm my anxious runner brain—and it could do the same for yours, too.
Dealing With Data Overload
MY JOURNEY TO the trail was a frustrating one. Like lots of runners, I had reached a sticking point. I had taken on at least one major race a year since 2023, and I didn’t feel like I was getting any faster. Part of that stasis is due to injuries, shifting personal and work priorities interrupting training cycles, and the simple fact that I’m not bouncing back as quickly as I age.
But my road malaise was also due to my weariness with chasing benchmarks. Most runners know them: The sub-4, then sub-3 hour marathon. The sub-2 hour half marathon. The minutes-per-mile pace that will put them at the front of their run club pack.
I bonked (runner-speak for reaching a point of exhaustion after depleting the body’s energy stores) pursuing a sub-three hour time at the New York Marathon in 2023, and since then, I’ve been haunted by the standards I haven’t been able to hit. And thanks to the relative uniformity of the road, I could quantify everything down to the second. Even workouts were affected, since tracking and sharing every session on Strava showed how I struggled to keep up with faster friends.
I wasn’t alone. “People post their splits, but then it's like you can't even just be happy that you went for a run anymore,” says Jes Woods, a Nike Run Coach and founder of the Brooklyn Trail Club. “It's like, ‘Oh, now I also have to be proud of what pace or whatever.”
“When it comes to trail running, the dumber the better.”
Tracking progress is important to achieve goals. But getting caught up in the stats can become self-defeating, according to mental performance consultant Luis Torres, M.Ed, CMPC. “A lot of times we can become data-driven by this and have an idea of ‘this is what peak performance looks like, that I have to hit these numbers.’”
When that data-imposed pressure becomes overwhelming, Torres suggests taking a moment to consider what else constitutes success. “Let's identify everything within my control that I can directly impact to get me closer to [the goal],” he says, citing non-running factors like sleep and recovery. “It's kind of like working backwards from where you want to be, and thinking about how we get there.”
I mentioned this struggle to Woods. She says that when the athletes she coaches have these issues, she recommends they explore new terrain. “If people are in a running slump, or chronically injured, or even if they just finished a marathon build and they don't know what to do with themselves, I'll always recommend them to try trail running instead,” she says. “I'm not saying that trail running fixes everything, but honestly, it can fix a whole lot of things.”
But I—and other people who do most of their running in urban environments—couldn’t transport myself to the trails immediately. What I could do was take a cue from trail running principles and find some other challenges to help me turn my brain off. Part of the appeal of trail, according to Woods, is that the challenges of the environment can help to ease the focus on data. “When it comes to trail running, the dumber the better,” she says. “As in, the more technical the terrain, the better. The steeper the climb, the better.”
Thankfully, I had some steep climbs on the horizon. I was offered the opportunity to the UTMB race via its sponsor, Hoka—and to be able to even finish the 40 kilometer (24.9 mile) race, with its 2,350 meters (about 7,709 feet) of elevation gain, I knew I would need to prepare like I never had before. But there was an exciting factor here for me: For the first time I could remember, I wasn’t chasing a time standard. I just needed to train to finish.
Training With Effort (in the Right Places)
THE WAY TO introduce new challenges to my stale routine was all about planning. I tended to step out the door with a rough idea about how far and fast I wanted to go on my runs, but no specifics otherwise if I needed to stop and make an adjustment. You can do that in a busy city, but you can’t get away with that on a trail. Changing that approach would take effort in a different sense. And as Woods told me, it's all about effort on the trails over pace.
Instead of putting all my focus into making my mile splits faster, I took more time to plot my routes and strategize how and where I would stop. And even though it was the peak of summer, I purposely carried less fuel than I knew I would need for longer runs. Instead, I made a point to pause my watch and grab something to eat (Nerds gummy clusters being my number one pick) and a sports drink if I felt drained. I had to either plan these stops ahead of time, or really keep my eye on my surroundings to know when I would have the chance to get what I needed. I wasn’t exactly dodging rocks and roots on a trail, but this took concerted effort. This was meant to take something else Woods had told me into consideration. “You're going to be paying more attention where you're going, and you know you have to stay mentally alert at all times,” she told me.
I also considered Torres’s advice to think more holistically about achieving my goals. I realized that not all my training needed to be on the roads—especially since I wouldn’t be able to replicate the steep climbs I’d face on the trails to Chamonix in New York City. I could break the run down beyond just speed, since even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to go fast for long portions of the race. I would need to spend time power-hiking and climbing on the course. So instead of just cranking a treadmill up to the highest incline, I strapped on a 20-pound weight vest and started walking up and down the five flights of stairs in my apartment building. Eventually, I added another 20 pounds. I would set a timer for 30 minutes, turn on an audiobook, and just march up and down the steps. It was much tougher than I expected. By the end of these sessions (and especially, on the following days), my calves were toast. But I felt much more capable.
Still, there were some moments during the training cycle that I felt overwhelmed. How would I be able to actually run through the mountains? Hoka athlete Hans Troyer, who placed third in the 107 kilometer (around 66 mile) CCC race at UTMB this year, shared a strategy he credits to ultra legend Courtney DeWalter that helped. “She talks about how she has a three-minute rule: In a race, if something's starting to go bad, she likes to take three minutes to have a problem-solving session in her head,” he told me (while also admitting he needs to get better at applying this practice himself). “Your entire race isn’t going to be ruined by three minutes.”
That advice applied doubly to workouts, which weren’t being tracked by anyone but me. Once I was able to give myself that permission to step back and be more thoughtful in my prep, most of the self-imposed pressure went away.
Taking to the Trail
BY THE TIME my race rolled around, I had shifted my training practices and adjusted my mindset on the roads. But I wasn’t sure how the run would go. I practiced on an actual trail only once through the whole cycle, and those Ohio hills were a far cry from the Alps. I waited at the starting line in the valley town of Martigny-Combe, Switzerland, alternating between pacing, stretching, and sitting to conserve energy, always with an eye on the mountains in the distance I would soon have to climb.
The first part of the race was an ascent out of the valley on asphalt roadways and sidewalks. This didn’t feel so different than my road running—aside from the absurd incline of the course. Immediately my heart rate spiked, and I worried I might blow my energy early in the race. Still, the old temptation to fixate on my pace roiled in the back of my head on the familiar terrain. But I also remembered something Troyer had told me about a week before the race: “In marathoning it's all about PRs, and then in trail running, it's completion. You finish the race, that's awesome,” he said. “I think it's kind of liberating—now it's kind of the purest form of racing for me. It’s people against people, and time doesn't matter because the course changes.”
“Your entire race isn’t going to be ruined by three minutes.”
I truly let go of my temptation to chase numbers on that ascent. And as I began to eye my competitors, I couldn’t help but think about the old adage that you can’t run someone else’s race. I realized as I was fighting to make my way up those first hills that on the trail, it goes a step further: You can only run the race the trail gives you. If you try to push beyond, there are too many factors that will humble you, quick. You can come prepared and equipped as best you can, but once the gun goes off, you’re going against the terrain, the weather, your stomach—the list goes on.
“There's so much more problem solving,” Woods said. “There are so many other factors that come into play.”
I walked, climbed, and ran up that hill. I buried my pride and stepped off the course to take my trekking poles out of my pack way earlier than I planned, using them as an extra push upward. Once the asphalt roads turned to wooded trails, I found my rhythm. I was climbing slowly, putting the deliberate training on my stairwells into practice. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, using my climbing poles for extra purchase, and eventually, I just found a rhythm. I didn’t feel like I had dismissed my mind’s compulsion to check my speed by flipping a switch; instead, I had quieted the impulse and embraced the process of moving through my environment, taking careful steps to avoid slipping and managing my energy for all the steps to come.
Woods had talked about this. “You're not turning your brain off—we're not like, meditating out in nature,” she said. “Your brain is still on, but in a different capacity. You're focusing on different things.”
Aside from staying upright and managing my energy, what I was most focused on was how lucky I was to be there at that moment. I ran through heavily wooded paths, jumped from rock to rock on scrambles, and felt like one of the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings out in the wide open, surrounded my mountains on every side. Time in nature has been shown to improve mental health—and the sense of wonder from being in the Alps felt like another source of fuel to keep me moving.
That’s around the time that I finally checked my watch to do more than just keep up with my fueling. I wasn’t as far along the course as I expected I might be, but I wasn’t concerned. It was hot and I was barely moving at a clip that would be considered running. I didn’t care. I was running with the trail, not against my watch. That was the key.
After almost eight hours on my feet, I finally entered Chamonix, where the town’s streets are staged for an epic last stretch to the finish line, people ringing the road and cheering for runners. After the hills, woods, and wide open valleys, I was back on pavement. But even as I steeled myself to go faster, running free of the obstructions I had mastered behind me, checking my pace wasn’t a concern. My sense of satisfaction and accomplishment beat any feeling I’ve had beating a benchmark. The trail gave me far more.
Brett Williams, NASM-CPT, PES, a senior editor at Men's Health, is a certified trainer and former pro football player and tech reporter. You can find his work elsewhere at Mashable, Thrillist, and other outlets.