Why your toughest races are often the moments that build the strongest runners
“In the toughest of racing moments, you’ll learn more about yourself in those painfully dark times than you ever will in training.”
A bad run doesn’t mean failure. In fact, it’s often one of the few times we truly train our mental endurance.
Down on last year’s race time. Beaten by the runner you usually beat. Legs and lungs just not working like you know they can do.
That’s right — it’s just not your day.
You’ve blown, and now you’re suffering.
You’re just past halfway into the race. The course has looped back close enough to the start that it would be easy to call it a day. An acceptable effort was given, but you’re not feeling it, not enjoying yourself, and suffering more than usual.
It would be easy to convince yourself it’s better to stop now, live to fight another day, and come back for a top performance next time.
Or so you tell yourself.
Now, DNF’ing due to injury, decline in physical health, or serious risk is not what this blog is about. Having the experience and judgement to know when to pull out is an essential quality of a racer.
Instead, this is about the moment in a race when it all comes crashing down.
You’ve blown.
And you’ve still got a hell of a long way left to go.
Why a bad run isn’t failure
The moment you quit begins the new groove in the giving in habit.
We all have an inner monologue.
Most of the day it sits quietly in the background while we’re driving, working, or doing the general day-to-day.
Once we begin our run, it’s just us and our thoughts.
For the next hour or more, that voice becomes louder.
How are we doing?
Can we keep this pace up?
Do we need to cut this hill short?
Should we stop for a breather?
Endless questions asking whether we’re capable of what we’re doing.
Over time, we begin to tune this voice out. We learn what we can handle. We become more comfortable with discomfort.
But every now and then, racing takes us to places training rarely can.
In the toughest racing moments, you’ll learn more about yourself in those painfully dark times than you ever will in training.
That’s where mental strength is built.
How to stay mentally strong during a tough race
So, that voice in your head is screaming at you to stop.
What do you do?
If you please it immediately, guess what?
It’ll be back in your next hill rep session.
Your next long run.
Your next race.
And now you’ve given in once, it becomes easier to do it again.
Success breeds success.
Negativity breeds negativity too.
As endurance runners, allowing negative thoughts to control us makes it much easier to give in again and again any time things begin to hurt.
The problem is, if you never push through these limits, you miss out on the exact point in racing where we find out what we’re truly made of.
The more often you find yourself in these moments and refuse to quit, the quieter that inner voice becomes.
Eventually, you learn how to acknowledge the pain without becoming consumed by it.
That’s when you truly learn how to dig deep.
How bad runs build mental resilience
When we are tested beyond the point of fatigue is when we discover what we’re made of.
This is where we learn how we cope, adapt, and endure.
Learn to love this state.
Don’t escape it.
It may become your strongest characteristic as an endurance runner.
There is a difference between persistence and endurance.
We can persistently fail, quit, and come back another day without learning anything.
Or we can endure.
We can withstand the painful onslaught, learn from it, and come out stronger on the other side.
What once looked like failure becomes another layer of resilience.
Retrain how you think about bad races
A big part of bouncing back after a bad run is changing what it means in your mind.
Usually, we give in for one of two reasons:
- we weren’t fully prepared
- we had already decided where we were going to decline
If you visualise yourself getting around the course, the finish line can drag you towards it.
But if you’ve already accepted your end point before the race has even unfolded, chances are that’s exactly where it will happen.
Running is as much about training the mind as it is fitness and technique.
Knowing that we won’t always be at our best — and that there will always be a better day — is something that must be trained into our psyche.
Sometimes, the fear of failure means we won’t even reach the start line.
Set yourself 3 race goals
This is one of the best ways to build mental resilience.
Set three goals before every race.
Each should be achievable, but progressively more ambitious.
For example, in an ultra:
- Goal 1: Complete the course
- Goal 2: Finish under a certain time
- Goal 3: Finish in a certain position
The first should be your minimum standard.
A goal you know you can tick off.
This becomes your safety net.
That way, even if the race doesn’t go to plan, you still leave knowing you achieved something meaningful.
If you hit the second or third goal too, they become an added bonus.
Over time, this trains your mind to keep fighting for something rather than looking for the easy way out.
Why you can’t win them all (and why that’s a good thing)
Knowing you can’t win them all is freeing.
It means every race doesn’t need to be your defining moment.
Instead, you can appreciate the thrill of pushing yourself to your limits.
Some days you’ll feel brilliant.
Some days you’ll feel dreadful.
Some days the runner you usually beat will beat you.
Some days a climb that normally feels smooth will feel impossible.
That doesn’t mean failure.
It simply means it’s one of those days.
Today’s battle is not with your usual expectations.
It’s about getting through the struggle and coming out better for it on the other side.
If your only concept of failure is the moment you give in, then what once felt like failure becomes just another piece of information in the pursuit of self-improvement as a runner.
