Last year, about halfway through two months of no standing, no walking and of course, no running (doctor’s orders) after a car accident and resulting surgery, I was over it. I still had as much time left stuck inside, do...
Articles by Pete Kostelnick
In the spring of 2015, while living in Los Angeles, Ruslan Shakin picked up running with a goal of completing a marathon by his birthday in the fall. Over the next couple years, Ruslan completed several ultras, including...
When I got into ultrarunning in my early 20s, I enjoyed thinking about the races I wanted to run. I’d jot them down in an Excel spreadsheet and start calculating what I would need to make the race happen, outside of hour...
The FKT (Fastest Known Time) model of running really took off in 2020 when we didn’t have many in-person races to mark on the calendar and gave some ultrarunners “something to do.” This format allows anyone, at any ti...
Ultrarunning is perhaps the grayest sport when it comes to defining success or failure. This is probably why I go into most races with about five or six layers of “goals.” Maybe you took a bad fall and still found a way...
The process of conversion in all aspects of life is downright annoying. Whether it’s converting kilometers into miles, a pdf to a word document, or getting ripped off for needing a few Euros before heading to...
We put in a lot of time and effort to be at our best in ultrarunning. This includes hours and hours of training, while balancing other commitments. A lot of us spend time and money analyzing fancy training plans and g...
“We should never be stopped from achieving our goals and dreams because of other people's outdated beliefs.” – Briar-Rose Honeywill-Sykes A little over a year ago, a man named Ben Honeywill reached out to me through...
Just like that, a new year is upon us. Hopefully, for the first time since leaving 2019, we have a full year of certainty to look forward to in both running and everyday life. We’ve been going with the flow that 2021...
Both of the times I ran across the US, I got asked a lot of the typical questions. “How much do you eat?”and “How many pairs of shoes have you gone through?” These are questions you might expect. These are all straigh...
Baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra said it best, “Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.” In ultrarunning, we know it takes much more than physical fitness to do well in races. Rooted even deeper than critica...
Art can be defined as the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature and dance. Meanwhile, science is defined as a systematically organized body of knowledge on a particular subject. Given...
“Excuse me, can you tell me what this event is?” I’ve been asked this question a few times by innocent but curious people who’ve stopped briefly along courses with a few extra minutes to spare. “We’re basicall...
Multi-week journeys are all about the itch. You have two options: scratch it with little thought for temporary relief or think intentionally about addressing it. I’m convinced that short of a NASA rocket launch, maki...
“My goodness, why?” It’s probably the question I’ve been asked the most over the 10 years I’ve been running ultramarathons. I’ve offered up a number of sarcastic responses as to why I partake in ultramarathons, such a...
I don’t have to remind anyone that 2020 was a complete disaster. If the year 2020 was a race, it would find a way to show up as both a DNS and a DNF in our online results. Luckily, we have a second chance to get it ri...