What the Last Soul Ultra Taught Us About the Psychology of Enduring
Exploring the psychology behind the captivating Last Souls Ultra 2026.
Dan Lockwood
8/21/20266 min read
Last week, a strange kind of theatre played out in the forests near Bornheim, Germany. No finish line. No set distance to aim for. Just a 6.7 kilometre loop, starting on the hour, every hour, until only one person is left standing. It is called the Last Soul Ultra, and this year it ran for more than four days before a winner was found.
I have been thinking about it all week, not because of the distance covered, although 630 kilometres is a staggering number, but because of what the event reveals about the mind under sustained, open ended pressure. As a sport psychology practitioner, races like this are rare gifts. They strip away pace strategy, course tactics and almost everything else that normally sits between an athlete and their own thoughts, and leave you with something closer to pure psychological endurance.
A format built to break the mind before the body
The backyard ultra format is deceptively simple. Everyone runs the same loop, at the same pace, starting together every hour. If you finish quickly, you get a longer rest before the next bell. If you are slow, you get almost none. There is no pacing plan that saves you, because the clock resets constantly and nobody knows how long the race will actually last. It could end after six hours. It could end after four days.
That uncertainty is the whole point. Most endurance events, however brutal, at least offer a horizon. A marathon ends at 26.2 miles. Even a 100 mile race has a cut off and a known route. The backyard ultra removes the horizon entirely. You are not running towards an ending, you are running until either your body stops you or your mind decides it has had enough. And that distinction, between what the body can do and what the mind allows, is where the real story of this year's race gets incredibly interesting.
Two very different minds, running the same loop
By the fourth night, the field of 150 had been reduced to two: the American ultra runner Mark Dowdle and the German runner Ayyoub "Ello" El Osrouti. What made their duel fascinating from a psychological standpoint was not just the distance they covered together, but how differently they seemed to be managing themselves internally as the race stretched on.
El Osrouti ran with a quiet, almost meditative steadiness. Onlookers on the livestream described him as calm even as his body visibly began to fail late into the race, his effort finally ending after his legs simply could not carry him through another lap in time.
Dowdle took the opposite approach, at least outwardly. Rather than withdrawing into himself, he became louder as the race wore on, shouting into the forest between laps, at one point roaring with wide eyed intensity that he wanted more. It was a very raw, and theatrical moment, which by most conventional coaching wisdom it was an odd way to conserve energy during hour ninety of a race with no end in sight.
But that is exactly what makes it worth examining. Two athletes, running the same loop, facing the same accumulating fatigue, chose completely different psychological strategies, and both got remarkably far on them. There is rarely one right way to hold yourself together under extreme duress. What matters is that the strategy fits the person using it.
Naming the moments, not just enduring them
After his win, Dowdle spoke about something he has apparently thought about a great deal, not just from this race but from his previous backyard ultra victories too. He describes three recurring moments, on his website, (mark-dowdle.com) that show up in every hard effort he has faced.
The first he calls the comfort quit, the point where stopping would not look like failure at all. It would look sensible. Reasonable. Like good self awareness. He argues that most people who quit endurance events, or difficult things generally, are not stopped by pain. They are stopped by the moment pain becomes easy to justify walking away from.
The second is what he calls the dark moment, the point of genuine breakdown that every serious endurance athlete eventually meets. His view is that this moment is not a surprise to be feared but a certainty to be prepared for, and that the athletes who fall apart at that point are not weaker than the ones who continue, they simply have not yet decided what they are enduring it for.
The third is the extra step, the one taken after every rational argument for stopping has already been made and accepted internally. It is not a moment of motivation or inspiration. It is closer to a decision made in spite of how you feel rather than because of it.
I find this framework genuinely useful, not because it is new to sport psychology, we would recognise strong aspects of self determination theory, meaning based coping and mental toughness research in it, but because it came from lived, repeated experience rather than a textbook. That is often how the most durable psychological tools are built. An athlete faces something extreme, notices a pattern in how they get through it, and eventually gives that pattern language. Once it has language, it becomes something they can return to on purpose, rather than something that only happens to them by accident.
Suffering with meaning versus suffering without it
One phrase from Dowdle's own reflections has stayed with me since I read it: suffering without context breaks people, suffering with meaning transforms them. This is, in many ways, the entire discipline of sport psychology compressed into a single sentence.
Pain is not optional in endurance sport. Every athlete on that start line in Bornheim experienced roughly the same physical reality, the same sleep deprivation, the same accumulating muscular damage, the same hallucinations that tend to arrive somewhere around the third sleepless night. What separated the athletes who lasted seventy hours from those who lasted twenty was rarely raw physiology. It was how each of them made sense of what was happening to them, and whether that sense of purpose could survive contact with genuine despair.
This is not unique to backyard ultras. It shows up in far more ordinary settings too, in an athlete grinding through a long injury rehabilitation, in a young player struggling through a difficult run of form, in anyone facing a task where the finish line keeps moving further away the longer they look at it. The lesson from Bornheim is not that everyone needs to run 630 kilometres to prove something to themselves. It is that meaning is not a nice extra layered on top of hard effort. It is often the difference between enduring it and being broken by it.
Psychological gamesmanship in a race with no tactics
It is also worth noting the more theatrical side of what happened between the final two runners, the shouting, the visible attempts to unsettle one another, the almost performative displays of having energy to spare. In a race with no pacing strategy and no terrain to exploit, psychological pressure becomes one of the very few tactical tools left. Projecting strength, even manufactured strength, at three in the morning on the fourth day is itself a form of competition, aimed less at your own legs and more at your opponent's belief that they can outlast you.
Whether that kind of outward display genuinely reflects inner state, or is itself a coping mechanism, a way of talking yourself back into the fight by acting the part first, is an interesting question. My own view, shaped by working with athletes across very different sports, is that it is usually both at once. The behaviour and the belief tend to feed each other, particularly under extreme fatigue when the line between what you are performing and what you actually feel becomes genuinely blurred.
What the rest of us can take from it
Very few of us will ever line up for an event with no finish line. But the psychological territory the Last Soul Ultra exposes so clearly, the pull of the comfortable exit, the near certainty of a genuine low point, and the quiet decision to take one more step anyway, is not exclusive to elite endurance athletes. It shows up in exam preparation, in long term recovery from setback, in any pursuit where the reward for effort today is simply the requirement to show up again tomorrow.
What Bornheim offers, more than a remarkable athletic performance, is a magnified, uncomplicated version of a psychological process most of us go through in far quieter, far less visible ways. Stripped of pacing charts and finish lines, it becomes very hard to hide from the real question every endurance effort eventually asks: not 'can your body do this?', but do you still know why you are doing it.
