Entering the 'Pain Cave' with Courtney Dauwalter

When you hear about ultra marathon running, races ranging from 30 to 200+ miles, the visions that come to mind aren’t pretty. Broken toe nails and bleeding feet. Terrible shin splints. Vomitting. Altittude sickness. Flashes of individuals fighting through their demons, sitting in chairs at the aide stations with 1000 stares. You imagine a gritty athlete wearing top notch gear, looking like a super hero come to life, like a david goggins.

The mind doesn’t go to cheese quesedillas, pancakes and french fries. It doesn’t go to the beautiful views that you see along the way. You don’t envision an athelete in baggy basketball shorts, smiling while they sit at aide stations cheering on their competition. However, that is describing one of the greatest ultra-marathon athletes to grace this planet.

Courtney Dauwalter takes what is inherintly a grueling and tough sport, and frames it as an adventure. The grit, the pain, the suffering and the ugly parts are still there. However, in her own unique way, she highlights what is beautiful about ultra marathon running and outperforms other badasses in the process.

When it comes to sports, there is always a time disparity between women and men. Due to the inherent biological adavntages that come with being a man, they usually place higher in competitions. However, ultra marathon running is a great equalizer. As the distances get longer, and your run further, the grittiest individual wins out, regardless of gender.

MOAB 240 - Courtney’s rise to fame

Moab, Utah. The year is 2017, the month october, there are 126 people lining up to start one of the hardest endurance races on the planet. The MOAB 240 is, as the name suggests, a 240 - actually 238 - mile race. It is one large singular loop, that crosses through the dessert, goes into the mountains and has over 29,000 feet in elevation gains. At some points you will be in the burning heat, at other moments running in the frigid cold of the night with your path only lit by a headlamp.

Of the 126 that year, only 98 warriors finished the race. Of the 98, courtney dauwalter beat out all the competition, male and female, for first place. Not by a few miles, or a few minutes, instead she finished the race over 10 hours ahead of the second place finsiher! That means she could have gotten a solid 8 hour snooze, woken up and showered, then have eaten a hearty breakfast by the time the next person came rolling in.

In the ultra community, this result pushed her to international stardom. Astonishing as it is to finish a 200+ mile race, she did this with only 21 minutes of sleep, hallucinating at times, and beat out every person in the process. 5 years later, and she still holds the female record for the MOAB 240, by over 10 hours.

The Crucial Conversations

During ultra-marthon races, you run throughout the day and the night. As your body begins to breakdown, it begs you to stop. That is when the game changes from a physical test to a mental one. It is at this time that the crucial conversations with the voice in your head determine if you make it, or if you will hang up your shoes and call it a race.

“My mantra when the going gets tough? “You’re fine. This is fine. Everything is fine. Keep moving.” On repeat. For as long as it takes…” Courtney said in an instagram post. The body often quits before the mind, and if you can have a positive conversation with it, the body will have no option but to follow.

“You’re fine. This is fine. Everything is fine. Keep moving.” On repeat. For as long as it takes…”

Research looking at positive self talk and its effects on performance has shown that putting a positive spin on the inner voice not only leads to better performance, it can also have physiological changes. Study done by Basset and Colleauges, showed that altering self talk can have hormonal changes, modulate cardiorespiratory function, and most importantly affect your perception of exertion. Meaning Courtney telling herself that everthing is fine on repeat does infact play a positive role in her performance.

It’s insane to think that she went into this race and had a positive attitude throughout, considering 5 weeks prior during the 'Run Rabbit Run' she went temporarily blind for the last 12 miles of the race. Yah, that happened.

Running with blinders on

Held annually during the month of september, Run Rabbit Run is a 100 mile race. 50 miles out and 50 miles back. With approximately 22,000 feet of climbing. It’s a brutal test considering the altitude and terrain. Made even harder if you run it blind, and that is exactly what Courtney ended up doing in 2017.

During the last 12 miles of her race, starting with her peripheral, her vision began to decrease. It was as if a white curtain was closing in front of her eyes. Slowly her eyesight began to decrease until all she could see was the arc of her shoes. Did any of this stop her? Hell no.

She ended up tumbling and stumbling along the last few miles, and even injured her head in the process. Still she ended up finishing in first place. Once her vision cleared a few hours later, she went into problem solving mode and decided to not wear contacts in her next race. Problem solved!

To find the guts to push, and huff through the rest of course, she went into what she like to call her ‘pain cave’.

The Pain Cave

The point in an ultra marathon race where every muscle in your body is aching bloody murder, and refusing to move is usually where most people quit. Courtney has aptly named this, "the pain cave".

Whats really interesting is not the idea of the pain cave itself, rather it’s her outlook on the pain cave. In the past, courtney was aware of the pain cave, and made sure to avoid it all costs. In fact, during her first 100 mile race (2012), she came to the ‘pain cave’ at mile 60. Standing beyond its entrance, she saw this as her limit. Being too scared to go in, she backtracked away, and called it a race and DNF’d (did not finish). Thus, avoiding the treachourous trekk into the pain cave. As she evolved as an ultra-marathon athlete, and became more experienced, she began to view the pain cave as something she intends to go into.

She seeks out the pain cave and all the challanges that come with it. Saying that "... changing it (the pain cave) to a place where I get to celebrate that I made it there, and then thats where the work actually happens"

"Four or five years ago, I viewed the Pain Cave as this place that you should try to put off as long as possible . . . but in the past couple years, it's been the place I want to get to" - Courtney Dauwalter

Changing the storyline of the pain cave and thus her outlook on it, there was also an improvement in her performance. Now with each race she walks into the cave, unfazed and ready, shovel and pickaxe at hand ready to dig deeper. Carving out new tunnels and forging new pathways in the pain to see what she is ultimately capable of.

“It’s not always going to feel great,” she tells herself. “But that’s going to make us better. We’re going to get better from visiting it…When it feels scary or sounds too hard,” she says, “that’s the thing we should probably try to do.”

The pain cave is something all of us can visit without running a 100+ miles. The entrance to our pain caves lie just beyond the boundary of our comfort zones. It can be going into the gym, having a tough conversation, even just getting out of the house. Rather than avoiding it, see it as an adventure. Rather than seeing the pain as negative, change the storyline and see it as a stimulus for growth. Grab that shovel and walk into the cave ready to dig deeper and carve out the possibilities of your potential. (Alright, preaching over, back to courtney)

Every ultra-marathon runner has their own tactics to push through the pain. Courtney has the pain cave, david goggins has his mental roledex of people who didn’t believe in him. However, what is the most astonishing thing about Courtney is how she finds the beauty in what can be described as some of the most gruelling experiences.

Finding The Beauty

She often gets no sleep on her runs. Food finds it’s way out more than it stays down. Her thighs get so swollen they seem to absorb her kneecaps. Her feet are in so much pain it may seem as though she is walking on glass. Through it all, her personality shines bright. She is laughing, often has a smile plastered on her face, and finds ways to be grateful for where she is at. Others may see 100 mile races as hell, she sees them as adventuring on two feet. Always looking forward to what she might find along the way. Not motivated by results, but rather by a yearning to test her own limits and soak in the beauty of her surroundings.

High performance often gets envisioned as this single minded focus, the ‘dog mentality', or this gritty and rough push to be better every day. Courtney is a prime example of how pursuing high performance can be a fun adventure. The pain is an inevitable part of the process, and rather than focusing on it, you can choose to focus on the good parts, have fun along the way, and still perform at an elite level. She chooses to enjoy her beer at the end of the race, not follow a strict diet, run in basketball shorts because that’s what is comfrotable, and rather than worry about the competition she chooses to uplift others to find the joy in pushing past their limits. What an absolute gangster.

High performance thy name is Courtney Dauwalter.