I am not a professional athlete. I am a freelance translator from Olomouc, Czech Republic. I started ultrarunning in my early forties, after triathlons. I have no sports science degree.
What I do have is fourteen years of putting one foot in front of the other on some of the most demanding roads and trails on four continents — Badwater 135 in Death Valley, 400km across the Gobi Desert, 506km from Athens to Sparta and back, 450km alone through Swedish Lapland. Finishing races and personal challenges that most people would describe as excessive, and a few that most people would describe as insane.
In all of that experience, the most consistent truth I have found is this: the legs are never the problem. The mind is always the problem. And the mind, unlike the legs, can be prepared.
A marathon tests your fitness and your ability to manage pace. An ultra tests your relationship with discomfort — specifically, your willingness to keep moving through suffering that has no clear end point in sight.
In a marathon, you suffer for a few hours and then it is over. The suffering has a known duration. Your mind can hold on to that.
In a 100km ultra, you may be in a rough patch for 3 or 4 hours. The suffering has no obvious end point visible from inside it. Your mind, which is very good at protecting you from unnecessary pain, will start producing extremely convincing arguments for why stopping is the reasonable choice.
That is the mental event. Not the suffering itself — the argument.
There will be a moment during your 100km — probably more than one — when you do not want to continue. The legs ache, the distance remaining seems impossible, and some part of your brain will produce a very convincing case for stopping.
The argument takes many forms. Sometimes it is practical: my knee is hurting and I should not risk injury. Sometimes it is philosophical: why am I doing this? what does it prove? Sometimes it is purely emotional: I just do not want to do this anymore.
All of these arguments feel completely rational from inside them. All of them, in my experience, are almost always wrong.
I have had moments in races where I was genuinely convinced I could not take another step. An hour later, after soup and a rest and sometimes a beer, I was running again. The crisis was real. The permanence I felt was an illusion.
Almost nothing is as permanent as it feels at 3am.
Before you start your 100km, make one commitment: you will not make any decision to stop during a low point.
Instead: you will always walk to the next support stop first. You will eat something and drink something. You will give yourself 20 minutes. And only then will you assess.
In fourteen years of ultrarunning, I have almost never wanted to quit after that sequence. The body responds to fuel and rest faster than you expect. The crisis that felt absolute and permanent at kilometer 63 looks very different at kilometer 65 with food in your stomach and 10 minutes of walking behind you.
This is not motivational advice. It is a practical protocol. Walk to the next stop. Eat. Drink. Wait 20 minutes. Then decide.
Ultra running culture — at least the version I practice — has a fundamentally different relationship with walking than marathon running culture.
In marathon culture, walking is failure. You trained to run and if you are walking you have failed to hold your pace.
In ultra culture, walking is strategy. Walking the uphills preserves your legs for the flats and descents. Walking through a rough patch allows recovery. Walking to the next support stop instead of stopping entirely keeps you moving and gives the body time to stabilize.
The runners who walk strategically finish. The runners who refuse to walk until they physically cannot run often don't.
On a hilly 100km like the Yanbaru route in northern Okinawa — approximately 1,800 meters of cumulative ascent — walking the uphills is not weakness. It is correct pacing.
I describe my approach to ultrarunning as the punk approach. I have never followed a rigid training plan. I do not obsess over equipment. I have started races undertrained. I have drunk beer at checkpoints. I have stopped at pubs mid-race. And I have still finished — sometimes faster than people who prepared more conventionally.
Before the Grand Union Canal Race — 235km from London to Birmingham — my preparation consisted of saving the route on my GPS watch and assuming the canal towpath would be pleasant gravel. It was not. It rained heavily, the path turned to deep mud, and I was wearing road shoes entirely unsuitable for the conditions. I spent long stretches in the dark sliding toward the canal edge. I still finished, in 37 and a half hours.
I am not telling you this to recommend recklessness. I am telling you this because the ultrarunning world has a tendency to make preparation feel like an arms race — the right shoes, the right gels, the right heart rate zones. Some of this is useful. A lot of it is anxiety dressed up as science.
What actually decides whether you finish a long run is simpler and harder than any of that:
If your 100km includes a night section, prepare for a specific psychological experience.
Your headlamp creates a small circle of light. Without visual variety, your mind produces its own content. Thoughts become strange. Time distorts. Objects can look like things they are not — I have had full conversations with fence posts I was convinced were checkpoint staff.
This is sleep-deprivation hallucination. It is normal. It is a signal that your body wants sleep, not a sign of a medical problem.
The useful response is: acknowledge it, slow down slightly, stay fuelled, and keep moving. It passes. The dawn, when it comes, produces a psychological effect completely disproportionate to the change in light levels. Almost everyone finds the post-dawn section significantly easier than the pre-dawn section, regardless of how they are feeling physically.
The Yanbaru 100k guided ultra runs November through March on the coastal roads of northern Okinawa — from Ogimi Village north to Cape Hedo and back. I run every kilometer alongside you.
One of the things I try to do in the days before the 100km is help runners understand the mental shape of the day before they live it — so that when the argument arrives at kilometer 65, they recognize it as a known phenomenon rather than a new emergency.
Details at yanbaru100k.okinawaultra.run.
Michal Činčiala is a Czech ultra runner and coach based on Hamahiga Island, Okinawa during the camp season. Key races: Badwater 135, Ultra Gobi 400km (10th overall), Ultra Milano-Sanremo 285km (3rd overall), Spartathlon, MOAB 240, Authentic Phidippides Run 500km. He coaches marathon runners through their first 100km ultra on the roads of northern Okinawa.
Running your first 100km in Okinawa — guided, coached, semi-supported on the Yanbaru coast.
Learn about the Yanbaru 100k →