Courtney Dauwalter is the strongest mountain ultrarunner alive. She has, as of mid-2026, won Western States 100 (3x including the 2023 course record), Hardrock 100 (4x), UTMB (2x), Tahoe 200 (the overall, beating all men), Big Dog’s Backyard (2x including a record 283 miles), and a long list of races people forget she also won.
She’s not the fastest road runner in ultras. She’s not even necessarily the most talented. What she is, demonstrably, is the most resilient — the one who doesn’t blow up, doesn’t DNF, doesn’t have bad races at the marquee distances. The Dauwalter project, for the rest of us, is figuring out what’s actually transferable.
What she does (that we know about)
From her own interviews, public training discussions, and conversation with her coach (her coach is herself):
1. High volume, low intensity, single-paced. Her weekly mileage runs in the 100–140 mpw range during peak blocks. Almost all of it is run at a single, conversational pace. She doesn’t do tempo runs. She doesn’t do mile repeats. She doesn’t track heart rate. She runs by feel, and her feel says “comfortable.”
2. Mountain-specific volume. A huge percentage of her mileage is in the Colorado high country at altitude, on terrain that resembles the races she runs. Western States is run on the only course she trains on. Hardrock is run in her backyard.
3. The Pain Cave, in her words. Her metaphor for the late-race mental space is the “pain cave.” She talks about purposefully going there in training, and being comfortable in it. The mental skill she’s most famous for — running through the part where everyone else drops — she trains explicitly.
4. Bagels and Coke. Her in-race fueling is deliberately simple: candy, gels, Coke at aid stations, occasional real food (peanut butter on bread, mashed potatoes). She doesn’t follow a sports-science fueling plan. She eats what works, when it works, and the system is robust enough to survive 24+ hours of stress.
5. No structured taper. She tapers, but not aggressively. The week before a race, she’s still running near-normal volume. This is unusual; most coaches recommend a 3-week taper. Hers is closer to 7 days.
What we can actually copy
The honest answer: most of us shouldn’t copy her training directly, because we’re not Courtney Dauwalter. We don’t have her decade of accumulated mileage, her specific physiology, or her specific terrain. But there are transferable principles:
1. Run more, at one pace, easier than you think. Most non-elite ultrarunners under-volume and over-intensity. We do tempo runs because they feel productive. Most of us would benefit from cutting the tempo runs and adding 30 mpw of easy running.
2. Train your terrain. The single most replicable thing about her: her training course resembles her races. If you run desert ultras, train in the desert. If you run mountain ultras, train at altitude on technical terrain. Generalist training (track, road, easy trail) doesn’t prepare you for race day the way specific training does.
3. Mental practice as a deliberate skill. The pain cave isn’t a metaphor she invented during a podcast. It’s a tool she trained. Most of us never deliberately practice mental discomfort. She does — long runs in the rain when she’d rather skip, the last 5 miles of a 30-miler done with no music and no podcast, staying in the cave on purpose.
4. Simplicity in fueling. She doesn’t optimize. She uses what works. Most ultrarunners over-engineer their nutrition, then under-eat in races because the optimized plan didn’t survive contact with reality. A robust simple plan beats a fragile optimized one.
5. No coach can replace knowing yourself. This is the part most of us won’t accept. She self-coaches. She’s been running long enough to know what works. For most of us, a coach is a multiplier, not a substitute. But the eventual goal is to know yourself well enough to coach yourself.
What we can’t copy
She’s a genetic outlier in fatigue resistance. The runners who can comfortably run 140 mpw at a single pace and recover are unusual. Most people who try this get injured.
She lives at altitude, full-time. We can’t simulate that with a 4-week trip to Flagstaff.
She has the mental constitution of someone who stayed in the pain cave at Big’s Backyard for 60+ hours and won. That’s not a skill that copies in a 12-week training cycle.
The honest summary
Dauwalter’s example is mostly a permission slip. Permission to run more easy miles. Permission to skip the tempo run. Permission to fuel on candy. Permission to taper less. Permission to run the race you’ve been told you can’t run.
The danger is taking the permission and not the rest of the package — the years of base, the training-specific terrain, the deliberate mental work. The runners who fail copying her training are the ones who took the volume but skipped the discipline that supports it.
Steal the principles. Don’t copy the training. Run your own race.