How Courtney
Dauwalter Trains.

Who is Courtney Dauwalter

Dauwalter ran cross-country skiing and running at school, taught science, and started racing ultras seriously in her late twenties. She became known far outside the sport for winning the Moab 240 outright in 2017, about ten hours ahead of the next runner, and for running in baggy shorts and eating candy on the course.

How she trains

She has described it many times: no coach, no written plan, no structured intervals. Each morning she decides what to run based on how she feels and what she wants to do. In practice that still adds up to a lot of time on her feet, mostly easy, on trails and in the mountains around Leadville, Colorado, where she lives at high altitude.

• Running by feel. Effort, not pace or heart rate, decides the day.
• Mostly easy volume. Long days on trails, little that would count as a hard session.
• Altitude and terrain. Climbing and descending are built into almost every run.

The Dauwalter diet

She eats what she wants, when she wants, with no rules. Interviews mention burgers, nachos, beer and candy. In races she eats whatever works: gels, quesadillas, candy, soup. The real lesson is not the junk food. It is that she eats a lot, often, and never under-fuels a long effort. For race-day carbs in numbers, see how many gels you need, and for salt, electrolytes for runners.

What normal runners can take from it, and what not

• Copy: enjoying the running, lots of easy time on feet, and eating enough on long days.
• Copy: the mindset. She calls the hard part of a race the "pain cave" and treats it as a place to work in, not a reason to stop.
• Do not copy blindly: no plan works for her after years of experience and a body that tolerates huge volume. Most runners left to feel run the easy days too hard. Use a ceiling from the MAF calculator or zone calculator.
• Build the base first. Ultra volume comes after years of consistent running. Start with aerobic base.

Sources: Western States, Hardrock and UTMB results (2023); iRunFar coverage of the 2026 Hardrock 100; interviews with Courtney Dauwalter on training and nutrition. Run Mastery is a running coach, not a dietitian.