If you think you're reading this to find a milage plan or a nutrition plan, you will be up for a surprise. When I tell people about my New Zealand plan, there are often questions about how much I run and what my plan looks like. The secret is that nothing of that is important to me to prepare for 3000km of running. What youre about to read is something I have discovered during the past months and it is mind-blowing.
Pain Is Not What You Think It Is
Here is how I think about it. Pain is your brain being overwhelmed. The more overwhelmed your brain is with different types of pain, the more total pain you feel. Physical pain is one part of that system. The pain of boredom is another strong one. They often do not sit in separate rooms (even though you can learn some techniques can divide them).
What I have found, during my past weeks of going down a rabbit hole about dopamine, is that dopamine is strongly linked to pain. Dopamine actually shapes how intensively you feel pain and how much pain affects you. It actually acts in the same regions of the brain that processes pain. It's not just a coincidence. It's clean biology.
If we look at addictions for a moment... No matter the addiction, they all affect the brain in similar ways. They either chemically hijack the "dopamine brakes" in the brain (to make it simple) or they trigger the brain to release dopamine so that you learn to re-do it. The scale of how much it affects you is huge depending on person and drug, but no matter how we mess with the dopamine balance in the brain, I have a strong theory that is has a huge effect on our pain tolerance.
Does Social Media Actually Lower Your Pain Tolerance?
Before running my 3000 km through New Zealand, I am doing a so called "dopamine detox". If we look at studies on dopamine and social media there is a whole world of different philosophies and results, but personally; social media messes with my brain. I can remember how I used it to numb my feelings. If I was alone, I used it to be social. If I was in a real conversation, my attention was scattered. No matter what research says and who it is published by, I am certain that the social media companies are causing brainrot and robbing children of childhoods.
So how does this connect to running? Why is the detox so important to me? This is the interesting part and the answer is simple: I want to minimise my total pain tolerance as much as I can. I want to make the overwhelming feeling of pain less intense by normalising and stabilising an entire factor of the system: how used I am to pain.
Let us just put this into a real life example. If you are used to being on social media, you train your brain to expect a hit of dopamine very often. for some people it's every hour but for many it's actually every other minute . A notification. A like. A new piece of content. When the hit does not come, when you are out on a four-hour run with no signal, no one watching, nothing refreshing, your brain does not quietly accept the silence. It registers that silence as a kind of pain. A craving. And now you are running through physical discomfort and the withdrawal of something your brain has been conditioned to receive constantly.
What I have noticed in my own training: the more I am on social media, the less I want to run. Not because running gets harder physically. Because the gap between how my brain feels scrolling and how my brain feels at kilometre thirty of a long run becomes so wide that the run feels unbearable by comparison. The quick dopamine raises the floor. It makes everything slower feel like suffering.
We Don't Earn the Dopamine Anymore
Another very relevant factor is that we are getting soft. Not only is there more pain with the gap of dopamine or now, but there is also a lower tolerance. We don't experience any rejection, strain or hurt anymore. In the primal times, dopamine was there to help us survive. It gave us a boost when we had spent a day hunting for our food so that we would do it again. We needed to have motivation to go out for a hunt again so we could survive. Nowadays, when dopamine comes so quickly, being in pain to receive the dopamine would be stupid, naturally, right? Your brain learns the shortest path. Why run for six hours when you can feel something in six seconds? The logic is automatic. You do not choose it. It just happens, slowly, over months and years of the same pattern.
People still go out and do ultras though. That urge is still real for some people. Something in us knows that earned dopamine, the kind that comes from the other side of real difficulty, hits too but you need to be careful. If you are feeding your brain the fast version every hour, the slow version becomes harder and harder to do. The more dopamine we feed our brains, the less pain we can feel before it becomes unbearable. You are not weaker than you used to be. You have just been training your brain in the wrong direction.
Social Media Is a Practice for Avoiding Pain
There is another layer to this that I find hard to see. Social media is a way of being with people without the pain of getting hurt or judged. Comments are not as hurtful as real life. Dating apps let you swipe past people without direct rejection, which makes people scared to walk up to someone on the street and say something.
We are practising a version of connection that removes the cost. The risk of being seen and rejected is processed through a screen, at a distance, with a buffer. And slowly we lose the muscle for the unfiltered version. The one where the other person is right there, where the moment is real, where there is no undo.
Pain is pain. rejection, being judged and being hurt causes the same overwhelming discomfort as hurting legs, energy deficiency and lack of sleep. This is why I think the dopamine fast matters for the New Zealand run. I have seen the pattern and I have tested the theory and I see that it's exactly the same thing.
What I Am Actually Doing
I am staying off the things that directly lower my pain tolerance, because I need all the pain tolerance that I can get to get through my big adventure. That is the whole strategy. It is not complicated. It is not a protocol with rules and phases and cheat days. It is just removing the things that make waiting feel unbearable, that make silence feel like a problem, that make the slow reward feel stupid.
What I notice when I do this: the less quick dopamine, the easier it is to stay in my own mind while running. It creates withdrawal from not being on my phone. It also creates more of a kick when running the adventure itself. The trail becomes interesting again.
This is not about discipline for its own sake. I am not trying to prove anything by being offline. I am protecting something I need. The 3000km route through New Zealand will involve weather I cannot predict, terrain that does not care about my plan and days when I will want to stop. I need my brain to be as available for all of these pains as it can possibly be. It takes 30 days to feel better when quitting a source of dopamine. The ten first day of withdrawal are the worst. The dumbest thing I could do would be starting the fast on the day of the first leg.
To Make Something Feel Good, You Have to Stay Away from What Feels Better
To make running feel better, you might want to try to stay away from social media. Our brains are not made for the environment of these apps. They are designed to be the most fun thing in your head.
The apps win the comparison every time, because they are built to. They are engineered to be more stimulating than a long run, more stimulating than sitting with a hard thought, more stimulating than the slow satisfaction of getting better at something over months. Competing against them inside your own head is a losing game. The only move that works is to step outside the comparison entirely. You do not try to make the run feel as good as the scroll. You just stop doing the scroll for long enough that the run gets to be the best thing going.
This is what I mean when I say the dopamine fast is training. I am resetting what my brain considers normal. I am making space for the kind of reward that only comes slowly, and only comes if you stay.
If you are building something of your own, like a project, a coaching business or an audience, this matters too. The hardest part of building something that takes months is staying inside it when nothing is happening yet. If your baseline is quick dopamine all day, the months where nothing appears to be working will feel unbearable. The tolerance is the same problem, just pointed at a different kind of hard thing. If you are at that stage, posting, training, building and not yet seeing the return, this piece on becoming a running coach when nobody knows you yet addresses exactly that gap between effort and visible result.
The New Zealand run is mine. It is the thing I said I would do and the work of getting there is not only in the kilometres. It is in protecting the part of my brain that can actually tolerate what the kilometres will cost.
If you are training for something long, or building something slow, try it. You can probably already feel what you need to do for it to work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a dopamine fast and how does it relate to ultra running?
A dopamine fast means cutting out the quick sources of stimulation, like social media, passive entertainment and apps designed to keep you scrolling, so your brain recalibrates what it considers rewarding. In ultra running, I think the connection is direct: dopamine and pain tolerance are linked, and when your brain is conditioned to expect fast rewards, the slow grind of a long run becomes much harder to stay inside.
Does dopamine and pain tolerance really have a practical effect on training?
In my experience, yes, and it shows up before the race even starts. The more time spent on quick dopamine sources, the harder it becomes to settle into a long effort, because the brain registers the absence of stimulation as a kind of discomfort on top of the physical work. Reducing those sources lowers that extra noise and makes sustained effort feel more manageable.
How long does a dopamine fast need to be to make a difference?
There is no fixed rule, and this is not medical advice. The goal is not a specific number of days but a genuine shift in what feels normal. It is when silence on a long run stops feeling like withdrawal and starts feeling like space. I will want my pain tolerance to be on point all the time and my brain is sensitive, so I am not planning on ever using social media for attention.
Can this approach help with mental toughness for shorter races, not just ultras?
The principle applies to any effort that requires you to stay inside discomfort longer than your brain wants to. It applies to any pain. Whether that is a 10km race, a hard training block, or building something over months, the ability to tolerate slow reward without reaching for something faster is the same skill. The distance just changes how much of it you need.
Will you do anything else in your physical training?
Yes and the biggest focus is strength training. On a slow 3000 km run, what matters is pain tolerance and a body that doesn't break. I know that I can run. The months leading up to it, I am averaging 40km of running per week and five strength training sessions. It is totally different from what most coaches would recommend, but I know what I need.
What does this have to do with building an audience or a coaching practice?
The same tolerance that gets you through kilometre sixty of an ultra is what keeps you posting and building when nothing visible is happening yet. If quick dopamine from apps is constantly available, the slow months of building, feel unbearable by comparison. Reducing that baseline makes the long game survivable. I would recommend everyone to quit the consumption side of social media right now, and then build a system and learn strategies that allows you to work as an alcoholic in a bar without being sucked into it.