I noticed the obvious signs late in the season last year. It was my umpteenth time trying to finish Lead Challenge. I was starting to abhor Leadville. The vibe around the race series was getting under my skin. The people at the starting line of both the hundred-mile bike and hundred-mile run were grating... I was annoyed with everything about the race, the scene… besides the fact that on this last race I couldn’t sleep more than hour because of a screaming child in a campground.  I was going through the motions to get it done. I wanted to get it done, don’t get me wrong but I was going through the motions…I was starting to get burnt out. I may not have fully been there – there were pieces that were missing as you’ll see here - but I was definitely on track to burnout and I’m sure if I did another year of Leadville training, I’d be in it – deep.

Mile twenty-two of an ultramarathon. A technical ridge at altitude with a storm building on the horizon. These are the moments when the mind becomes your fiercest competitor — not fatigue, not terrain, not weather. A single thought — "I can't do this" — can hijack the body. But what if you didn't have to fight it, silence it, or believe it?

That's the central promise of cognitive defusion, a cornerstone technique from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It won't make your legs lighter or the summit closer. What it does is fundamentally shift your relationship to the mental noise that arises when things get hard — and in endurance sport and mountain environments, things always get hard.

The Voice in Your Head at Mile 40

You've trained for months. You've run thousands of vertical feet. You've been out in the dark, in the cold, eating gels you've stopped tasting. And yet — somewhere between the trailhead and the finish line — a voice creeps in:

"Who do you think you are? A real ultrarunner wouldn't be struggling this much."

Sound familiar? If you just nodded your head — you're not alone, and you're definitely not a fraud. What you're experiencing has a name: imposter phenomena. And in mountain sports culture, it is absolutely everywhere.