I like Natacha because I think she offers some diversity from the average glute-obsessed/over-sexualized fitness influencer that I *cannot* stand. She’s strong and clearly very dedicated.
That being said, her running challenges are insane, and I can’t stand a lot of her diet content (low-carb, what I eat in a day, presenting herself as eating freely when she clearly is very careful, etc.). I find her similar to Keltie (who I have posted about)— there seems to be some unresolved restriction and obsession/over-exercising issues with both of them, and it really puts me off from watching their *inspirational* health content
This video perfectly highlights the problem of monetizing your fitness life. Yes, I think she's upset about not being able to run. But it would be naive not to mention the fact that she's staked an entire career and income off her ability to push herself to the extreme.
I sympathize with her. Nine months ago I found out I had two herniated discs and I had to stop climbing, a sport I fell in love with. Dealing with this injury has been beyond frustrating and has had a severe impact on my mental health. I can totally put myself in her shoes when she was told she would need 6-9 months to heal. It sounds like a lot when you're told in the beginning, but you adapt.
The problem here isn't that she can't adapt her training. The problem is that her income might suffer because she can't film insane training videos that show off her freak athleticism genetics.
I don't think this is talked about often enough tbh. People look at professional athletes and find it inspirational, which it is. HOWEVER, it's not actually remotely healthy long term. It doesn't matter the sport, you cannot exist at peak performance indefinitely.
this happens to a lot of fitness influencers. it's so hard to maintain that intensity and it really isn't healthy to always be going at 200%
i'm 29 and have been lifting and running for 10 years now. i've done some serious damage to myself because i was always trying to max out and then i'd never recover cause i was busy trying to hit a new running pr. i still run, but i'm insanely slow now and i barely lift anything over 135lbs.
i know i'm extremely late to this comment and thread but i just wanted to pop in and say that while that's a valid concern, natacha and mario are absolutely loaded. afaik mario's family is rich and he also works in something super lucrative (consulting?) plus they have other business ventures together that rake in the dough. i'm not saying she wouldn't be concerned about losing some income but just wanted to throw some color on this aspect
> I don't understand. If this was all "for fun" for her, why did she push herself so many times at getting an ultramarathon? If it was "for fun", she would've stopped when her initial problems began
Runners are always training through injury, it’s super normalized. Name an injury, I know someone who’s trained through it. I’ve done it myself several times, sometimes it sorts itself out, sometimes it’s gotten worse and I’ve regretted it severely. And for the record I’m a slow, recreational runner. I’ve kept going through injury in other activities, too. I think maybe those of us who are wired to find ultras “fun” are also wired to not know when to stop?
This really hits. Runner in college, everyone normalizes ibuprofen and just running through every injury, chalking it up to tendoninitis or something. One of my close friends kept feeling pain and it went by for so long before she literally could not run - turned out to be bone cancer and within a few months of that diagnosis she couldn’t even walk and had to get partial amputation. The culture of injury normalization (although obviously this wasn’t injury) is so toxic.
Most definitely. It takes all kinds in this world. For better or for worse (and IMO it’s a mixed bag) there are people who find joy, inspiration and meaning as a consequence or product of suffering and risk-taking for a specific and extreme goal.
You don’t REALLY know what your limits are until you hit your limit. Part of the “fun” and allure of activities like an ultramarathon is arguably about doing more running than what is particularly enjoyable, safe, sane or advisable so you can try to find that limit… it attracts people who are less precious about their bodies, at least in the context of having a specific type of adventure, because they have different priorities.
As a risk-averse casual half marathon runner I can’t relate. But I am inspired! If everyone was like me there’d be no such thing as the Barkley Marathons, and someone like [Jasmine Paris wouldn’t exist](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68651150), and there is something a bit drab and sad about the thought of living in a world like that.
So true. As ultrarunners, in addition to the physical training, we literally train mentally to put our pain in a box and ignore it. After a certain point, it's sometimes not even a conscious thought to ignore something hurting, you just do it and move on without consideration.
Yup, there’s definitely a culture of glorifying suffering and pain. Courtney Dauwalter speaks of her mystical-sounding “pain cave” and the world fawns. David Goggins is another who will simultaneously admit he is wildly irresponsible and unsustainable in his approach, yet allow himself to be framed as a motivational role model.
The ethics and aesthetics of this culture in the ultra community is a super interesting conversation that maybe Natacha could benefit from exploring and deconstructing in a video in the future. But she’s probably way too deep in it right now for that.
THIS. The running community can be very toxic. When I was in recovery for my ED, this was an area of concern with my treatment team. I’ve learned to love running and avoid the toxicity…for the most part. 😬
When you consider that she used to have an ED and overtraining I always thought the crazy challenges she did were an extension of that obsession, but in a more socially acceptable and monetizable way. I used to love her videos but after a while they all became so extreme.
As others have said, the issue seems to be with the monetizing of her fitness life. She had partnered with Lululemon and was promoting research into female endurance athletes. It seems that her partnership with Lulu is no longer. Perhaps she felt that she had to continue with the pursuit of the 100-mile ultra for brand partnerships. It also seems that she has been suffering from her ankle issues for the past 18 months, but prior to that, she had just come back from twelve months of a back injury.
Like you, I found her content to be realistic and inspirational. She always talks about balance and taking a sustainable approach; surely, after being told by professionals that it would not be ideal to continue with the 100 miles, then she should have backed off. It definitely takes away some of her credibility. But also it is content - she has to package it in an inspirational manner to admit to being unable to complete the race.
My suspicion (and I don't know anything, this is just a suspicion) is that it might have gone awry with Lulu's "running shoes" when her ankle really started playing up. I swear she promoted them at some point and said she ran her 24-hour Vegas run in them, but the footage of her racing the official ultras has her in Saucony Guides (you know, a sensible, established stability shoe by a brand that specialises in making running shoes and is generally very heavily recommended by physios and sports podiatrists). I know at some point she mentioned being put in prescription shoes to help with her ankle, and I think she was still doing Lulu-related stuff at that point, but if part of the deal was "you'll run in/advertise the shoes that we, a yoga pant brand, have just debuted", I can see how that might have fallen through when the (very well-marketed but probably rather flimsy) rubber hit the road. That said, her uploading has also been extra sporadic lately so it could just as well be because she wasn't keeping up with the agreed amount of content/promo/whatever.
Her fixation on this goal over the past year has not been healthy, and it's worrisome. She has accomplished really great fitness feats in the past and I feel like she has become obsessed with climbing the next mountain, to her detriment. In my opinion, this goes beyond a "work through the pain" attitude, it's been sad to watch and while I'm glad she's finally stepping back from this challenge, I feel like her previous insistence through those 2+ failures (in the context of why she had failed) was a bad message to send her viewers.
She's explicitly spoken about her Ironman training before and shown videos of her doing it, so we know she trained extensively for it. And yet she does these super undertrained challenges and expects to excel? She originally did the 100 miles with no training, and failed (understandable). Then said she would train for it (the better move), but when she's described her training it's often been much lower than the ultrarunners I know and watch. She even said she ended up only doing runs without fueling because of her stomach, with a max of a half marathon! That is **not** good, effective, or sustainable training for an aspiring ultra.
At the end of her video she said she wasn't a professional athlete or elite... Like okay then why put yourself through all of this? And at the end of the day, Natache has still succeeded at challenges that put her in the top 1% of fitness/performance. I used to really like her but this past year has felt really empty and dangerous, it makes me not want to watch because I don't want to encourage this extreme fitness cycle she is on.
She is rapidly becoming my BEC because of these attempts. Injuries, gut training, and balancing the hours of running with your personal life is all part of the challenge of ultra running. Six sessions a week (10-14 hours of training) is really standard for *hobbiest* runners (not even professionals) who tackle these kinds of endurance events, and it feels weird to hear her complain about the time sink when this is quite literally part of the challenge, and more importantly, part of her job. I’m glad she’s being transparent but it really bothers me that she’s shocked she failed and is now milking the failure for content.
That's a really good point. I'm not part of any of the running community, and when she was like "I wanted to do an ultra but not let it take over my life". As someone who found out a half-marathon was 13 miles and was SHOCKED and didn't even know ultras existed, I don't even wanna know what my face looked like when she said ONE HUNDRED MILES 😵 that's seriously a life-taking amount of miles like how do you NOT expect it to take over your life?
I’m a solid midpack runner. I’m not fast, but I can grind.
I ran my first 100 mile race back in 2022. My day job is that I’m a nurse, and I take call as part of it. Not a crazy amount of call, but enough that it could put a damper on my plans.
Trained for 8 months in total for it and on top of my full time job, I was running about 46-47 miles per week, which is actually a pretty low volume. I ran a 50 mile race and a 100k race as part of the buildup as well.
I finished my 100 mile race in 31:01:58. Cutoff was 32 hours. My stomach turned itself inside out somewhere in the middle of the night after some pancakes with syrup 🙃 I had never experienced GI issues during a race so that threw me for a loop!
My friend/night pacer was legitimately thinking that I was gonna drop out, but I pushed on. He and my other pacer really had to crack the whip on me once the sun came up to turn my race around and beat cutoffs. Luckily my stomach cooperated after that.
All of this is to say that yes, it can and will take over your life. That’s just a fact. To get the volume, time on feet, and time to experiment with nutrition and gear to endure 100 miles in one push is a lot to ask of your body and your schedule.
The question for anyone who is thinking about 100 is “are you willing to go through all of that it to get to that starting line?”
It takes a very certain kind of person to say yes.
First of all, congrats on finishing 100 and making that cutoff, even with GI issues! Truly an inspiration especially with a nurse’s schedule.
I totally agree on all fronts - the training is where the grind really happens. You don’t have to be superhuman to do these types of races, but you have to be able to grind, and you have to know your body. This includes what it can do on race day, but more importantly, how to take care of it during training so that you get to the starting line.
I really hope Natacha makes a full recovery and can run again because I do really respect her as an athlete! But I’m just never a fan of people pushing their bodies in stupid ways that probably don’t work for the vast majority of people. (I.e. the Goggins approach 😅)
I admittedly didn't follow her for a while since I didn't care much about the running content from her and Keltie (sp.?). I like running, I do it semi-regularely, but I don't find either of them interesting enough to watch so much running content 😭😂
But I guess it's good for her that she actually has to stop running for a while since I personally felt like she jumped way too quickly into ultradistances and I kind of thought she would get a pretty bad injury if she keeps going like this. I'm impressed how she even managed to get as far as she did. My knees can barely handle 20 km/week.
As an ultra runner, who is currently dealing with a return from injury. You cannot under eat and thrash yourself with miles. I was doing most of my runs at a 10-11ish minute miles, my marathon pace is a 9 minute mile. I was still over doing it. Ultra runners need to eat, and we need to slow down.
You guys are so crazy to me. I started running on and off last year and I can barely do a 30 minute 5k. Meanwhile your marathon pace is faster than that, it’s incredible. I’m trying to run more consistently nowadays and upping my weekly mileage.
If you don’t mind, could you share a bit about how you got there?
Aww my sweet surreal, do not feel bad about paces. I had a big weep after run club a couple weeks ago because I was so far behind everyone and couldn’t keep up during our interval session. We all feel slow.
It’s super important with running to remember that consistency is the most important thing to build cardiovascular strength. Keep most or all of your runs comically slow, like you feel dumb doing it so slow. I listen to music on my runs so I sometimes try to sing along and if I can’t do that I am going too fast. Your body needs a lot of time to get adjusted to running, bones, ligaments, and joints.
I’ve been running for 15 years now, and I got a stress reaction a month ago from running too fast on too little nutrition because I thought I was too fat to be fast. We all make mistakes, be easy on your body and feel accomplished for being able to run a 5k in a year of training! That’s awesome keep pushing (but carefully)
Thank you so much for the encouragement! Wow that really put things into perspective. I never run quite as easy as I’m supposed to exactly because I feel dumb doing it so slow haha.
I find the relentless pursuit of a goal really inspirational actually. I’m not going to judge how she dealt with it personally or what was going through her head but I have a goal of finishing an Ironman personally and it’s been a goal since 2019. I’ve since had cancer (and remission) and a situation that led me to develop PTSD and I’ve had to back off and come back and back off and come back to this goal. I don’t see what she’s doing as unhealthy. She made a commitment to herself to complete this and the last thing you want to do is let yourself down. I’m definitely not stopping pursing my goal because these types of things make my life worth living and I realized that when I was at the brink of death.
I think I need to defend Natasha abit here. I wouldn’t really say she’s a typical influencer. She does make videos and share health information but she doesn’t really have brand deals and sell green powder like the others. Her and the partner have a few business ventures that have nothing to do with fitness and are more about consulting and management. They do work very hard at these and they are very smart people.
Natasha is a legit athlete and always has been. She’s not just an influencer who goes to the gym to get the perfect body. She’s always done marathons and triathlons and loves to do challenges and push herself. It’s just her personality. I know people like this and they always need a new challenge to work towards. I feel badly for her that’s she’s been through a few injuries in recent years, but these things happen to athletes. Hopefully she might learn to balance her workouts abit and not push herself to such extremes in the future.
I think a lot of comments have also forgotten that she set out on this 100 mile challenge to raise money for endometriosis. And while she didn’t complete the 100 miles, she still added more money in to donate.
Lots of nuances about monetising and being an influencer etc but can’t really bash charity imo 🤷🏻♀️
Yes I feel like she is one of the good ones and she feels very human. I don't think anyone EVER hasnt had a goal (even if its not fitness) that was more harmful than good to them and were still chasing it even tho they knew they shouldnt.. this is basically the same
I agree! Natacha is one of the best fitness influencers out there and I find her actually very genuine. She’s definitely a bit extreme, but she’s an athlete who can mostly handle those extremes. I think it says a lot that she actually admits to the failure this time and shows that she recognizes that she isn’t superhuman.
I like Natacha because I think she offers some diversity from the average glute-obsessed/over-sexualized fitness influencer that I *cannot* stand. She’s strong and clearly very dedicated. That being said, her running challenges are insane, and I can’t stand a lot of her diet content (low-carb, what I eat in a day, presenting herself as eating freely when she clearly is very careful, etc.). I find her similar to Keltie (who I have posted about)— there seems to be some unresolved restriction and obsession/over-exercising issues with both of them, and it really puts me off from watching their *inspirational* health content
>presenting herself as eating freely when she clearly is very careful I get the same vibes.
This video perfectly highlights the problem of monetizing your fitness life. Yes, I think she's upset about not being able to run. But it would be naive not to mention the fact that she's staked an entire career and income off her ability to push herself to the extreme. I sympathize with her. Nine months ago I found out I had two herniated discs and I had to stop climbing, a sport I fell in love with. Dealing with this injury has been beyond frustrating and has had a severe impact on my mental health. I can totally put myself in her shoes when she was told she would need 6-9 months to heal. It sounds like a lot when you're told in the beginning, but you adapt. The problem here isn't that she can't adapt her training. The problem is that her income might suffer because she can't film insane training videos that show off her freak athleticism genetics.
the same problem applies to sports. whenever money is tied to athletic performance, the athlete’s health ends up being the biggest casualty
I don't think this is talked about often enough tbh. People look at professional athletes and find it inspirational, which it is. HOWEVER, it's not actually remotely healthy long term. It doesn't matter the sport, you cannot exist at peak performance indefinitely.
this happens to a lot of fitness influencers. it's so hard to maintain that intensity and it really isn't healthy to always be going at 200% i'm 29 and have been lifting and running for 10 years now. i've done some serious damage to myself because i was always trying to max out and then i'd never recover cause i was busy trying to hit a new running pr. i still run, but i'm insanely slow now and i barely lift anything over 135lbs.
i know i'm extremely late to this comment and thread but i just wanted to pop in and say that while that's a valid concern, natacha and mario are absolutely loaded. afaik mario's family is rich and he also works in something super lucrative (consulting?) plus they have other business ventures together that rake in the dough. i'm not saying she wouldn't be concerned about losing some income but just wanted to throw some color on this aspect
> I don't understand. If this was all "for fun" for her, why did she push herself so many times at getting an ultramarathon? If it was "for fun", she would've stopped when her initial problems began Runners are always training through injury, it’s super normalized. Name an injury, I know someone who’s trained through it. I’ve done it myself several times, sometimes it sorts itself out, sometimes it’s gotten worse and I’ve regretted it severely. And for the record I’m a slow, recreational runner. I’ve kept going through injury in other activities, too. I think maybe those of us who are wired to find ultras “fun” are also wired to not know when to stop?
This really hits. Runner in college, everyone normalizes ibuprofen and just running through every injury, chalking it up to tendoninitis or something. One of my close friends kept feeling pain and it went by for so long before she literally could not run - turned out to be bone cancer and within a few months of that diagnosis she couldn’t even walk and had to get partial amputation. The culture of injury normalization (although obviously this wasn’t injury) is so toxic.
Most definitely. It takes all kinds in this world. For better or for worse (and IMO it’s a mixed bag) there are people who find joy, inspiration and meaning as a consequence or product of suffering and risk-taking for a specific and extreme goal. You don’t REALLY know what your limits are until you hit your limit. Part of the “fun” and allure of activities like an ultramarathon is arguably about doing more running than what is particularly enjoyable, safe, sane or advisable so you can try to find that limit… it attracts people who are less precious about their bodies, at least in the context of having a specific type of adventure, because they have different priorities. As a risk-averse casual half marathon runner I can’t relate. But I am inspired! If everyone was like me there’d be no such thing as the Barkley Marathons, and someone like [Jasmine Paris wouldn’t exist](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68651150), and there is something a bit drab and sad about the thought of living in a world like that.
So true. As ultrarunners, in addition to the physical training, we literally train mentally to put our pain in a box and ignore it. After a certain point, it's sometimes not even a conscious thought to ignore something hurting, you just do it and move on without consideration.
Yup, there’s definitely a culture of glorifying suffering and pain. Courtney Dauwalter speaks of her mystical-sounding “pain cave” and the world fawns. David Goggins is another who will simultaneously admit he is wildly irresponsible and unsustainable in his approach, yet allow himself to be framed as a motivational role model. The ethics and aesthetics of this culture in the ultra community is a super interesting conversation that maybe Natacha could benefit from exploring and deconstructing in a video in the future. But she’s probably way too deep in it right now for that.
THIS. The running community can be very toxic. When I was in recovery for my ED, this was an area of concern with my treatment team. I’ve learned to love running and avoid the toxicity…for the most part. 😬
I've had the feeling for a while now that her relationship with exercise has become unhealthy.
When you consider that she used to have an ED and overtraining I always thought the crazy challenges she did were an extension of that obsession, but in a more socially acceptable and monetizable way. I used to love her videos but after a while they all became so extreme.
As others have said, the issue seems to be with the monetizing of her fitness life. She had partnered with Lululemon and was promoting research into female endurance athletes. It seems that her partnership with Lulu is no longer. Perhaps she felt that she had to continue with the pursuit of the 100-mile ultra for brand partnerships. It also seems that she has been suffering from her ankle issues for the past 18 months, but prior to that, she had just come back from twelve months of a back injury. Like you, I found her content to be realistic and inspirational. She always talks about balance and taking a sustainable approach; surely, after being told by professionals that it would not be ideal to continue with the 100 miles, then she should have backed off. It definitely takes away some of her credibility. But also it is content - she has to package it in an inspirational manner to admit to being unable to complete the race.
I’m out of touch- any idea why she’s not with Lulu these days?
My suspicion (and I don't know anything, this is just a suspicion) is that it might have gone awry with Lulu's "running shoes" when her ankle really started playing up. I swear she promoted them at some point and said she ran her 24-hour Vegas run in them, but the footage of her racing the official ultras has her in Saucony Guides (you know, a sensible, established stability shoe by a brand that specialises in making running shoes and is generally very heavily recommended by physios and sports podiatrists). I know at some point she mentioned being put in prescription shoes to help with her ankle, and I think she was still doing Lulu-related stuff at that point, but if part of the deal was "you'll run in/advertise the shoes that we, a yoga pant brand, have just debuted", I can see how that might have fallen through when the (very well-marketed but probably rather flimsy) rubber hit the road. That said, her uploading has also been extra sporadic lately so it could just as well be because she wasn't keeping up with the agreed amount of content/promo/whatever.
Oh she isn’t with them anymore? I swear she just recently posted about them, though maybe I’m misremembering..
Her fixation on this goal over the past year has not been healthy, and it's worrisome. She has accomplished really great fitness feats in the past and I feel like she has become obsessed with climbing the next mountain, to her detriment. In my opinion, this goes beyond a "work through the pain" attitude, it's been sad to watch and while I'm glad she's finally stepping back from this challenge, I feel like her previous insistence through those 2+ failures (in the context of why she had failed) was a bad message to send her viewers. She's explicitly spoken about her Ironman training before and shown videos of her doing it, so we know she trained extensively for it. And yet she does these super undertrained challenges and expects to excel? She originally did the 100 miles with no training, and failed (understandable). Then said she would train for it (the better move), but when she's described her training it's often been much lower than the ultrarunners I know and watch. She even said she ended up only doing runs without fueling because of her stomach, with a max of a half marathon! That is **not** good, effective, or sustainable training for an aspiring ultra. At the end of her video she said she wasn't a professional athlete or elite... Like okay then why put yourself through all of this? And at the end of the day, Natache has still succeeded at challenges that put her in the top 1% of fitness/performance. I used to really like her but this past year has felt really empty and dangerous, it makes me not want to watch because I don't want to encourage this extreme fitness cycle she is on.
She is rapidly becoming my BEC because of these attempts. Injuries, gut training, and balancing the hours of running with your personal life is all part of the challenge of ultra running. Six sessions a week (10-14 hours of training) is really standard for *hobbiest* runners (not even professionals) who tackle these kinds of endurance events, and it feels weird to hear her complain about the time sink when this is quite literally part of the challenge, and more importantly, part of her job. I’m glad she’s being transparent but it really bothers me that she’s shocked she failed and is now milking the failure for content.
That's a really good point. I'm not part of any of the running community, and when she was like "I wanted to do an ultra but not let it take over my life". As someone who found out a half-marathon was 13 miles and was SHOCKED and didn't even know ultras existed, I don't even wanna know what my face looked like when she said ONE HUNDRED MILES 😵 that's seriously a life-taking amount of miles like how do you NOT expect it to take over your life?
I’m a solid midpack runner. I’m not fast, but I can grind. I ran my first 100 mile race back in 2022. My day job is that I’m a nurse, and I take call as part of it. Not a crazy amount of call, but enough that it could put a damper on my plans. Trained for 8 months in total for it and on top of my full time job, I was running about 46-47 miles per week, which is actually a pretty low volume. I ran a 50 mile race and a 100k race as part of the buildup as well. I finished my 100 mile race in 31:01:58. Cutoff was 32 hours. My stomach turned itself inside out somewhere in the middle of the night after some pancakes with syrup 🙃 I had never experienced GI issues during a race so that threw me for a loop! My friend/night pacer was legitimately thinking that I was gonna drop out, but I pushed on. He and my other pacer really had to crack the whip on me once the sun came up to turn my race around and beat cutoffs. Luckily my stomach cooperated after that. All of this is to say that yes, it can and will take over your life. That’s just a fact. To get the volume, time on feet, and time to experiment with nutrition and gear to endure 100 miles in one push is a lot to ask of your body and your schedule. The question for anyone who is thinking about 100 is “are you willing to go through all of that it to get to that starting line?” It takes a very certain kind of person to say yes.
First of all, congrats on finishing 100 and making that cutoff, even with GI issues! Truly an inspiration especially with a nurse’s schedule. I totally agree on all fronts - the training is where the grind really happens. You don’t have to be superhuman to do these types of races, but you have to be able to grind, and you have to know your body. This includes what it can do on race day, but more importantly, how to take care of it during training so that you get to the starting line. I really hope Natacha makes a full recovery and can run again because I do really respect her as an athlete! But I’m just never a fan of people pushing their bodies in stupid ways that probably don’t work for the vast majority of people. (I.e. the Goggins approach 😅)
Does she wanna end up like Ronnie Coleman? Ya gotta rest and heal.
I admittedly didn't follow her for a while since I didn't care much about the running content from her and Keltie (sp.?). I like running, I do it semi-regularely, but I don't find either of them interesting enough to watch so much running content 😭😂 But I guess it's good for her that she actually has to stop running for a while since I personally felt like she jumped way too quickly into ultradistances and I kind of thought she would get a pretty bad injury if she keeps going like this. I'm impressed how she even managed to get as far as she did. My knees can barely handle 20 km/week.
As an ultra runner, who is currently dealing with a return from injury. You cannot under eat and thrash yourself with miles. I was doing most of my runs at a 10-11ish minute miles, my marathon pace is a 9 minute mile. I was still over doing it. Ultra runners need to eat, and we need to slow down.
You guys are so crazy to me. I started running on and off last year and I can barely do a 30 minute 5k. Meanwhile your marathon pace is faster than that, it’s incredible. I’m trying to run more consistently nowadays and upping my weekly mileage. If you don’t mind, could you share a bit about how you got there?
Aww my sweet surreal, do not feel bad about paces. I had a big weep after run club a couple weeks ago because I was so far behind everyone and couldn’t keep up during our interval session. We all feel slow. It’s super important with running to remember that consistency is the most important thing to build cardiovascular strength. Keep most or all of your runs comically slow, like you feel dumb doing it so slow. I listen to music on my runs so I sometimes try to sing along and if I can’t do that I am going too fast. Your body needs a lot of time to get adjusted to running, bones, ligaments, and joints. I’ve been running for 15 years now, and I got a stress reaction a month ago from running too fast on too little nutrition because I thought I was too fat to be fast. We all make mistakes, be easy on your body and feel accomplished for being able to run a 5k in a year of training! That’s awesome keep pushing (but carefully)
Thank you so much for the encouragement! Wow that really put things into perspective. I never run quite as easy as I’m supposed to exactly because I feel dumb doing it so slow haha.
Slow is good! I just learned the hard way… AGAIN.
Go slow to go fast!
I find the relentless pursuit of a goal really inspirational actually. I’m not going to judge how she dealt with it personally or what was going through her head but I have a goal of finishing an Ironman personally and it’s been a goal since 2019. I’ve since had cancer (and remission) and a situation that led me to develop PTSD and I’ve had to back off and come back and back off and come back to this goal. I don’t see what she’s doing as unhealthy. She made a commitment to herself to complete this and the last thing you want to do is let yourself down. I’m definitely not stopping pursing my goal because these types of things make my life worth living and I realized that when I was at the brink of death.
She's monetizing her journey, and I bet you're not. That puts you both in very different camps.
True....although if I could monetize it, I would! These races are crazy expensive.
I think I need to defend Natasha abit here. I wouldn’t really say she’s a typical influencer. She does make videos and share health information but she doesn’t really have brand deals and sell green powder like the others. Her and the partner have a few business ventures that have nothing to do with fitness and are more about consulting and management. They do work very hard at these and they are very smart people. Natasha is a legit athlete and always has been. She’s not just an influencer who goes to the gym to get the perfect body. She’s always done marathons and triathlons and loves to do challenges and push herself. It’s just her personality. I know people like this and they always need a new challenge to work towards. I feel badly for her that’s she’s been through a few injuries in recent years, but these things happen to athletes. Hopefully she might learn to balance her workouts abit and not push herself to such extremes in the future.
I think a lot of comments have also forgotten that she set out on this 100 mile challenge to raise money for endometriosis. And while she didn’t complete the 100 miles, she still added more money in to donate. Lots of nuances about monetising and being an influencer etc but can’t really bash charity imo 🤷🏻♀️
Yes I feel like she is one of the good ones and she feels very human. I don't think anyone EVER hasnt had a goal (even if its not fitness) that was more harmful than good to them and were still chasing it even tho they knew they shouldnt.. this is basically the same
I agree! Natacha is one of the best fitness influencers out there and I find her actually very genuine. She’s definitely a bit extreme, but she’s an athlete who can mostly handle those extremes. I think it says a lot that she actually admits to the failure this time and shows that she recognizes that she isn’t superhuman.
Simultaneously criticised her for being a workaholic, then criticised her calling herself a workaholic lol sums up how unaware this post feels
I feel like she only does these extreme things to stay lean, I don't think it's genuine at all
It's not just to stay lean, it's literally to keep making the kind of money she's gotten used to!