There’s a moment in every ultramarathon where the wheels start to come off. For elite ultrarunner and coach Allie Bailey, that moment tends to arrive somewhere around the 160-mile mark of a 200-mile race. What happens next, how she talks to herself, who she calls, what she chooses to believe, is, she says, the entire point of the sport. In this conversation with Mel Berry, Allie unpacks why finishing was never really the goal, why failure is just a dirty word for learning, and why sobriety has taught her more about endurance than any race ever could.

Why Finishing the Race Can’t Be Your Goal: Lessons in Ultrarunning Mindset

Allie opens with a hard truth every ultrarunner eventually has to accept: you can be in the best shape of your life and still be taken out by a rolled ankle, hypothermia, or a wrong turn in the dark. None of that is within your control, so building your sense of success around simply finishing a race sets you up to measure yourself against something you were never in charge of.

For Allie, races aren’t the goal, they’re markers along the way. What she’s actually chasing is competence: the ability to look after herself well enough to keep moving through very long distances, and to bring the problem-solving that requires into perspective on everything else.

💡 Try this: Before your next goal, race, project, whatever it is, write down what’s actually in your control and what isn’t. If it’s not in your control, it doesn’t belong on your list of measures for success.

“Would You Do It If No One Was Watching?” A Question Every Athlete Should Ask

One of the most striking moments in the conversation is a question Allie borrows from her friend Kirsty: would you still do this if no one was watching and you could never tell anyone? For a lot of people, Allie suggests, the honest answer is no, because the activity has become less about the doing and more about being seen to be good at something.

Her point isn’t that ambition or achievement are bad. It’s that a quiet, private confidence, knowing what you enjoy and being able to do it well without needing applause, is rare, and worth protecting. Medals, she says, don’t define her. They sit in her office. The rest of her house is full of her dogs and her own interests, because that’s actually who she is.

💡 Try this: Ask yourself Kirsty’s question about the thing you’re currently working hardest at. Would you still do it if you could never post about it or tell a soul? Sit with whatever answer comes up.

Reframing Failure as Data: Why “Failing” a Race Is Actually a Learning Opportunity

Mel shares her own experience taking on Chase the Sun, a 240-mile bike ride, just three months after a total hip replacement. She made it 140 miles before stopping, and came away fitter and wiser for having pushed that far in the first place.

Allie pushes back hard on the word “failing” altogether. If you set out to do something and it doesn’t go as planned, that’s not failure, it’s information. The problem, she argues, is that we quietly load our day with unspoken goals (finish the race, beat a rival, hit the podium) that were never actually within our control to begin with.

Her practical fix: write down what a successful day actually looks like before you start, and leave the uncontrollable stuff off the list entirely. Her own examples are wonderfully specific, how many dogs she gets to pet, how many marshals she thanks, whether she manages to eat every hour, whether she listens to a few Girls Aloud albums along the way. Tick those off, and the day was a success, regardless of whether you crossed the finish line first, last, or not at all.

💡 Try this: Make your own pre-event checklist of small, controllable wins (a person to thank, a snack schedule, a song you love). Leave “win” or “finish” off it entirely.

How to Redefine Success Mid-Race When Things Go Wrong

When something goes wrong mid-race, illness, injury, a rough patch, Allie’s approach isn’t to abandon the goalposts but to move them. If she gets sick, the new marker of success becomes simply continuing until she feels a bit better, or finding a medic. That’s the shift: success stays flexible and responsive rather than fixed and binary.

She also describes a complete change in how she experiences being overtaken. Where she once felt threatened by faster runners, she now finds it humbling to share the trail with people putting in the same hard training, in the same brutal weather. Even being last, she points out, means you’ve been out on the course longer than anyone else, which is its own kind of endurance to be proud of, not ashamed of.

💡 Try this: Next time a setback hits, ask “what’s the new marker of success now?” instead of “have I failed?” Let the goalposts move instead of abandoning the field.

Changing Your Mindset Takes Daily Practice, Not Just a Podcast Episode

Asked how people can actually absorb this way of thinking, Allie is blunt: they can’t, just by listening. She compares it to learning French, you don’t become fluent by hearing about France once. You have to study it, live in it, practise it constantly. That’s why her book is structured as 31 daily chapters rather than something to be read in a single sitting. She’s already met readers who ploughed through it in a week and missed the point entirely: the value is in doing the daily work, not consuming the content.

From Addiction to Ultra Running: Allie Bailey on Sobriety, Trauma, and Mental Health

The conversation moves into more personal territory as Allie talks candidly about early sobriety. She describes it as being like a child stepping out of the woods for the first time, relearning basic questions: how do human relationships work, am I even worthy of love, how do I make people like me. For years, she says, she poured her trauma down her throat with alcohol rather than dealing with it, and it didn’t disappear, it just grew and spread into everything.

Her daily practice now is deliberately unglamorous: eat, drink water, walk the dog, talk to the people she loves. She calls it not optimisation, but simply learning how to live in her own skin, as opposed to living as a version of herself performed for Instagram, something she admits she did for a long time too. She credits a technique she calls “the wise observer,” borrowed from sports psychologist Brad Stulberg and Buddhist practice, where you deliberately zoom out and observe your own state without judgment.

Why Asking for Help During a 200-Mile Race Is a Strength, Not a Weakness

By the end of the conversation, Allie returns to the practical reality of a 200-mile race: the moment, usually around mile 160, when exhaustion hits and the old her would have quit. She describes calling in her support crew, her “girls”, not because she couldn’t physically continue, but because she needed someone to talk to. Three years earlier, at a different 200-mile race, that same exhaustion led her to call her crew home and abandon the race altogether.

The difference this time wasn’t more willpower. It was a kinder internal voice: you’re tired, you’re allowed to be tired, you’re doing a good job, take ten minutes, then get to the next aid station and have a sandwich. No forced positivity, no “you’re unstoppable”, just honest, practical self-talk, and the willingness to ask for support when she needed it.

Even her choice to run the Spine Race, a race where outside support isn’t just discouraged but against the rules, without a crew was itself a conscious decision to practise self-reliance. But in races where help was available, like Wild Horse, she made a deliberate choice to call people in when she genuinely needed to talk to someone. Knowing the difference, she says, is the whole skill.

As Allie puts it: the work never stops, but it’s a pleasure to keep doing it. Success was never about the finish line, it’s about noticing, one small honest moment at a time, that you’re responding to hard things a little better than you did last year.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation: Hear Allie and Mel go even deeper on this episode of the Voom Performance Podcast: Running, Sobriety & Mental Health: Allie Bailey’s Journey from Addiction to Ultra Running.

📖 Get the book: Ready to put in the daily work Allie talks about? Order 31 Days by Allie Bailey and use code VOOM15 at checkout for 15% off.