KEEP
← The ultra project

04 · The mistakes

What I got wrong,
and what I learned

The hard parts and the outright mistakes, each one with the takeaway it cost me a year or a race to get. Open any of them for the full breakdown.

Heart condition

Challenge

Four weeks off in the middle of a year built on racing every month

In May I stopped running. Not a taper, not a rest week: a heart condition, four weeks of nothing. My blood plasma volume dropped, my VO2 dropped, and my heart rate at an eight minute pace came back at 147 when it had been sitting far lower.

The comeback was two miles, then twelve, then thirty-seven, then eighty-one miles inside one month. No injury, no shin splints. The only reason that worked is that every one of those miles was genuinely easy, split into doubles, and backed with more food and more sleep than felt necessary.

What I learned

Start where you actually are, not where your ego is. My first week back was two miles.

When the miles stop and the heart speaks →

Fueling

Mistake

I under ate on purpose for years and called it discipline

I ate 1,800 calories a day and thought I was being disciplined. I was starving an engine. Now I eat 4,500 to 7,000 calories, 600 to 900 grams of carbs a day, and I am leaner and far faster at 180 pounds than I was underfed.

If you are exhausted, injured, and stuck, the first thing to check is not your training plan. It is what you are eating. You cannot expect a Ferrari to run on lawn mower fuel.

What I learned

Fix your fueling before you touch your training plan. Most bonking is a fueling failure wearing a fitness costume.

The maple syrup fueling system →

Volume

Mistake

I ran 70-mile weeks for a year and expected something to change

Nothing moved. Same paces, same heart rate, same results, and I kept telling myself the volume was fine. It was not the miles that were wrong, it was the total: I was doing the amount of work that maintains you, not the amount that changes you.

When I moved to 100 to 120 mile weeks with almost every day split into doubles, the same pace that cost me 154 beats per minute dropped to 129 inside a year.

What I learned

Add volume with frequency, not with longer heroic runs. Two easy sessions beat one hard one almost every time.

How I dropped my heart rate 25 beats →

Testing

Mistake

I let my watch tell me my threshold

My watch estimated my lactate threshold at 5:59 per mile. A real test with real blood put it at 5:25. Every zone I had trained in was built on a number that was 34 seconds per mile wrong.

Test the few things that actually change your training. Skip the gadgets that only make you feel measured.

What I learned

Measure the numbers your training is built on. Everything downstream of a wrong threshold is also wrong.

How to get a lactate test →

Specificity

Mistake

I took road fitness onto a technical desert trail

In March I ran Mesquite Canyon, rocky and exposed with real climbing, off the back of road-race fitness. Seventh place, 5:50 for a 50K, my weakest performance of the year by a wide margin.

The lesson was not that I was unfit. It was that specificity is not optional. If your race has climbing, technical footing, or heat, you have to rehearse the thing itself, not just the distance.

What I learned

Pick one race that scares you a little, then work backwards from its actual demands: the terrain, the heat, the hours on your feet.

Finger Lakes 50K: the race is never about the race →

Illness

Mistake

I got sick a week after a 50-miler and tried to train through it

A week after running 50 miles in six hours and twenty-seven minutes, I got sick. There are exactly two reasons to take a day off: you are sick, or you are injured. Both are your body telling you something specific.

Everything else, the soreness, the dull tightness, the stiffness that eases up in the first mile, you can run through. Sharp pain that changes your stride is a full stop.

What I learned

Good runners monitor pain. Great runners learn to interpret it.

What athletes get wrong when they are sick →

Race schedule

Challenge

Three weeks between finish lines means you never feel fresh

A normal season gives you one build, one taper, one race. I get three or four weeks. There is no version of this where I arrive rested, so I stopped trying to. I graded my races A, B, and C, and I only taper for an A.

That means showing up to a start line with 113 miles in my legs from the week before and racing anyway. It is uncomfortable and it is the point: running tired recruits more muscle fibers, forces you to hold form when it is falling apart, and trains your gut and your decision making at the exact moment they usually fail.

What I learned

Not every race deserves to be your best race. Most of them are there to teach you how to execute.

Why I do not taper for every race →

Heat and elevation

Challenge

One hundred degrees, then twelve thousand feet

I raced a 50K in 100 degree heat and ultras in Arizona at 95 plus. Heat is the one thing you cannot muscle through. I slowed a full minute per mile, accepted a higher heart rate at the same effort, and ran ice at my neck and groin.

Elevation is the harder problem, because I live in New York City. My answer is unglamorous: a treadmill at a steep grade, twice a week, banking thousands of feet of climbing the streets outside will never give me.

What I learned

Know your sweat rate and your sodium loss before the hot months, not during them.

My sweat test: 40 ounces an hour →

Time

Challenge

Seventeen hours of running inside a working week

I run a marketing agency with eight employees and I coach. I work eight to six. I still run twice a day, seven days a week.

The math is less romantic than people want it to be. If I run 122 miles in seventeen hours, that is about two and a half hours a day. Eight hours of sleep, eight of work, and there are still five and a half hours left.

What I learned

Most people do not have a time problem. They have a priority problem, and keeping the boring weeks is what separates the people who break through.

2026 is the year you stop waiting →

Train like it's programmed. Because it is.

Everything on this page is already built into the training I write. Bring the goal, I bring the system.

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