How Courtney Dauwalter Trains (No Coach, No Plan, No Heart-Rate Monitor)

This whole series has been an argument for measurement: lactate meters, power files, threshold numbers held to a decimal. Courtney Dauwalter is the counter-example. The most dominant ultrarunner of her generation trains with no coach, no written plan, and no heart-rate monitor, deciding each day's run after her morning coffee based on how her body and brain feel. And it clearly works: she is the only person ever to win Western States, Hardrock and UTMB in a single year, and in July 2026 she won Hardrock for a fourth time. So what is actually going on, and can you copy any of it?

By feel, and she means it

Dauwalter is self-coached in the strong sense. There is no periodised block plan, no prescribed paces, no structured intensity distribution written down anywhere. Reporting on her method is consistent on this point: she runs on effort, doesn't track heart-rate zones, and doesn't even keep a public training log. Her husband gives occasional informal input, but there is no coaching relationship steering the week.

Her volume is high and self-modulated. She typically runs somewhere around 100 to 115 miles a week, with a personal sense that about 115 is her sweet spot and that around 130 tips into feeling overworked. Long runs are usually three to four hours, though she has done outliers, including a reported eight-hour long run "just playing" before Hardrock in 2022.

Here is the part people miss: training by feel does not mean no hard running. She does speed work, it's just improvised rather than periodised, often as simple as finding a hill she likes on the trails and running it hard. The structure isn't absent so much as internal.

Why it works for her (and might not for you)

Twenty-plus years of running have given Dauwalter an exquisitely calibrated sense of effort. When she runs "easy," it is genuinely easy, and when she goes hard, it is honestly hard. That calibration is the entire skill, and it's exactly what most amateurs don't have yet. If you run "by feel" with an uncalibrated sense of effort, your easy runs drift too fast, your hard runs aren't hard enough, and you spend your life in the unproductive middle.

This is where a heart-rate cap earns its place, and it's the honest bridge from her method to yours. A number like the MAF 180 formula is not the opposite of training by feel. It's training wheels for the same skill. It forces the discipline Dauwalter has internalised: keep the easy days genuinely easy so the aerobic base actually builds.

Enter your age, get a maximum aerobic heart rate, and cap your easy runs there. It will feel absurdly slow at first, which is the point. Hold that cap for a few months and two things happen: your aerobic engine grows, and your own sense of "easy" recalibrates until, eventually, you need the monitor less. That is the amateur's path to the thing Dauwalter already owns. If you want the full logic, our guide to aerobic base training covers it.

The pain cave is a separate skill

Dauwalter's other famous idea, the "pain cave," is a mental one and worth keeping distinct from her low-tech methods. She describes deliberately going toward the suffering-and-doubt phase of a long race rather than avoiding it, treating it as the place where the real work happens. That's a racing mindset, not a training prescription, and it doesn't require any of the by-feel approach to be useful. You can train with a heart-rate cap and still practise being comfortable with discomfort on race day.

Fuel like a normal person

Her nutrition is refreshingly unclean by elite standards. Race fuel is mostly liquid calories plus a lot of candy, and in very long races she'll eat things like a cheeseburger. Everyday eating she has described as a normal person's diet. The transferable point isn't the specific junk food, it's the absence of anxiety: she practises fuelling broadly and eats what she can stomach on the day, rather than optimising herself into a rigid plan that falls apart at hour six.

What she's done lately

Dauwalter is 41 and based in Leadville, Colorado. Her legendary triple came in 2023, not, as it's often misremembered, 2024. In 2026 she took second at the Cocodona 250 in May, a comeback from a rare DNF at the same race the year before, and then won Hardrock in July for her fourth title, running the fastest women's clockwise time in the race's history. Even the best have off days: she faded to tenth at UTMB in 2025 in brutal weather after leading early. The by-feel system is not magic, it's just remarkably durable.

What you can actually steal from it

• Build a calibrated sense of effort, don't assume you have one. Dauwalter earned hers over two decades. Use a heart-rate cap to build yours instead of guessing.
• Keep easy genuinely easy. This is the whole game, whether a monitor or a lifetime of feel enforces it.
• Do hard efforts, just don't over-plan them. "No structure" doesn't mean no intensity. It means the intensity is honest, not a spreadsheet.
• Fuel broadly, then eat what works. Practise nutrition in training so race day has options, and drop the perfectionism.
• Treat the pain cave as a separate, trainable mindset, not a reason to skip the aerobic base underneath it.

The paradox of Courtney Dauwalter is that her "no data" approach and your heart-rate calculator are aiming at the same target: honest easy running, repeated for years. She reaches it by feel because she's had twenty years of practice. You can reach it with a number, and gradually need the number less.

More in this series: Eliud Kipchoge, Kilian Jornet, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Cole Hocker and Marianne Vos.

Sources

Dauwalter's self-coached, by-feel approach and her decision to train without heart rate or a fixed plan are described in her CNN profile and detailed in secondary training write-ups; because those detailed accounts are not first-party transcripts, specifics like exact weekly mileage are given here as reported rather than audited figures. Her 2023 triple crown is reported by iRunFar, her 2026 Hardrock win by iRunFar and RUN247, and her 2026 Cocodona second place by iRunFar. The "pain cave" framing is drawn from her own repeated public descriptions of it.

Cover photo by Heike Maria Seitz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.