Founder’s field notes — the one series here written in first person.
TL;DR
- A week before a 102 km night ultra in the Ukrainian Carpathians, I realized I wasn’t preparing for a race. I was preparing for an exam I had invented for myself.
- An exam is a closed loop: you walk in asking “am I enough?”, you walk out with a verdict, and you learn nothing new either way.
- On an ultra, the inner examiner becomes a cost you can’t carry. Self-judgment is cognitive load, and a full day and night on your feet is too long to carry it.
- What I changed: closed the pacing spreadsheet, stopped watching other people’s race videos, ran once without a watch, and said one uncomfortable sentence out loud.
- This is not a method. It’s a field report.
The race, for those who came for the facts
Karpatia Trail is a mountain ultramarathon held in the Ukrainian Carpathians since 2012 by the organizer Tvoia Pryhoda — “Your Adventure” — with the race’s official site here. Start and finish are in the village of Pylypets in Zakarpattia, at the Shepit Karpat hotel.
The 2026 Ultra runs 102.5 km across the Borzhava polonynas — the high, treeless meadow ridges of the range — with 7,060 m of climbing and the same of descent, a 27 h 30 min cutoff, and a night start: June 5, 2026, at 20:00 (current edition details). Thirteen checkpoints loop from Shepit Karpat over the Magura spur through Bukovets, a trout farm, Osa, Chub’s hut, the stream below the cheese dairy, Volovets, Huklyvyi and Shypit, then back.
The nearest railway station is Volovets. Ultra runners hand in a drop bag by 18:30 on Friday; it waits at the trout farm, 57.78 km in. That’s the guidebook part. Now the reason I’m writing this at all.
How I turned running into a permanent exam
I’m not a beginner. Years of consistent training, half marathons, alarms at four in the morning. Garmin on the wrist, HRV every day, segment analysis, heart-rate zones. I knew more about my running than I knew about myself.
One evening, scrolling Strava while preparing for these 102 kilometers, I caught a thought: I don’t remember the last time I just ran. No metric to produce. Nothing to prove. Every workout ended in a grade — better or worse, progress or regress. Every race was a small exam in which I either confirmed, or failed to confirm, that I was enough.
That isn’t running. That’s continuous self-assessment in the shape of running.
The exam is a closed loop
An exam works like this. You enter with the question “am I enough?” and you exit with a yes or a no. Yes buys brief relief, then the bar moves up. No confirms the old belief that you fall short — and next time you’d better bring more.
Either way, you learn nothing new about yourself. You only confirm the hypothesis you carried in. An exam is a closed loop. It doesn’t teach. It judges.
And an exam always has a grader. Not the race organizer, not the timing chip. An invisible judge in your head who is never satisfied. You’re not running for yourself. You’re running for him.
If that sounds familiar from outside running — reviews, dashboards, step counts — that’s rather the point. The exam travels well.
What running as experience looks like
Experience is being present with what’s happening, instead of comparing it with a plan, a metric, or the previous attempt.
On a trail, concretely: you run a mountain path along the Borzhava ridge. Roots and wet earth underfoot, the tread marks of runners ahead of you. The air smells of pine and night. At some point your quads hurt — not “a symptom of overload to be monitored.” They just hurt, you know it, and you run on.
You watch the sky lighten over the ridge — somewhere between the trout farm and Osa, around kilometer forty-one, five in the morning. You hear your own breathing. Somewhere past halfway, a thought surfaces that’s connected to nothing — someone important, or childhood, or something you haven’t recalled in years. You don’t analyze it. It’s there, and then it dissolves.
That is the experience. Raw, unprocessed, never converted into a report.
Why an ultra forces the issue
Over 102 km with 7,060 m of climbing, you’re on your feet for up to 27.5 hours — from a Friday 20:00 start into Saturday evening or night (the numbers are here). That’s long enough for the exam to strip everything out of you.
Because an exam requires keeping the inner observer switched on, and the observer is cognitive load. It burns your reserves by asking, on repeat: fast enough? heart rate too high? going to embarrass yourself? On a marathon you can grit through that. On an ultra you can’t. It draws from the same budget everything else does — the budget our whole energy cluster is about.
At three in the morning, ten hours in, somewhere between Chub’s hut and the stream below the dairy, when the body already knows it only gets worse from here, the inner examiner starts saying genuinely ugly things. If you came to prove something to him, you break — because he cannot be satisfied. That isn’t what he’s for. If you came to live an experience, you can continue. The body hurts, you walk, you run again, you watch dawn come up over Borzhava, you hobble through Volovets, you finish or you don’t — and none of it defines who you are.
The paradox, as far as I can tell from runners who work this way: they’re often faster, because they aren’t spending half their processing power on self-surveillance. But speed isn’t the goal. The goal is to reclaim the right to live a moment without immediately turning it into data.
What I changed a week before the start
This is not a training plan. It’s what I tried myself.
Closed the finish-time spreadsheet. I had a full segment budget: how long from Bukovets to the trout farm, where to make up time, where I’d lose it. Closed it. For good. I don’t know my finish time, and that’s fine.
Stopped watching other people’s reports from this course. I used to search YouTube for Karpatia videos — how people ran the route, suffered on the climbs, finished in the dark. I called it inspiration. In practice, I was comparing myself with them before the start — living someone else’s trail instead of mine, and losing a battle I hadn’t even begun.
Ran one workout without the watch. Not easier, not harder — just no data. For the first twenty minutes, my arm kept rising on its own. Then it passed. Around the one-hour mark, I noticed I was interested in simply running. I hadn’t felt that in a long time.
Said it out loud: I can fail to finish, and it will not make me worth less. It sounds like a fridge magnet. But if you actually believe it, panic loses its fuel — and panic around kilometer eighty is what pulls people off this course.
What race night will look like
Start at 20:00, first stretch in the dark toward the Magura spur. The temptation will be to push while the legs are fresh. I won’t push. I’ll just run.
At Bukovets — 12.46 km, the first serious checkpoint with a chip, water, drinks and light food — I won’t check whether I’m on target pace. I’ll eat, drink, and move on.
Mid-race, when I catch the thought “this pace is bad” or “I should have trained more” — that’s not my body failing. That’s my head arriving on the trail and trying to turn it into an exam. I’ll note it, skip the self-flagellation, and put attention back where it belongs: foot, breath, the ground ahead.
After the finish: no analysis for at least three hours. No results page, no comparing. Sit. Drink the Hutsulske beer they hand you at the line. Talk with someone who ran nearby about anything except time. Sleep. This is the hardest part, because right after the finish, the inner voice shows up demanding conclusions. It won’t get any. The experience stays an experience. In three days, the data can have me back.
| The exam frame | The experience frame |
|---|---|
| Pace targets are pass/fail marks | Pace is data about the day |
| The inner examiner rides along all 27 hours | Attention goes to terrain, food, light |
| A DNF is a failed exam | A DNF is an expensive data point |
| Finishing proves something about you | Finishing is one more long day done well |
The boring bottom line
A race can be an exam or a journey. The training is identical; the experience is not. The exam version spends your limited energy on a judge who cannot be satisfied — the journey version leaves that energy for the mountain, which is roughly the trade we describe in 12 rules for protecting your energy. You don’t have to choose forever. You only have to notice which one you’re running today.
Sources
- Trail Karpatia — official race site (organizer: Tvoia Pryhoda): https://carpathia.tvoiapryhoda.run/
- Tvoia Pryhoda, race organizer — main site: https://www.tvoiapryhoda.run/
- Karpatia Trail 2026 — current edition listing and registration (VsiProbihy): https://vsiprobihy.org/race/2361
The Ukrainian-language original of this field report (2026) is preserved in the archive.
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