Not even going to try and catch up with this thread. Work got intensely busy as I knew it would, but now I'm clear and can resume running again. I only train during that intense time of year work wise if there's a goal race on the immediate horizon after the race.
QOTD: How do you get over a bad race?
I really had to wrestle with this during my half marathon last September. I signed up for the race as a test to see how things were progressing since I was committed to the marathon/Dopey by that point and needed to test out some changes. Since I knew it was a race without the Disney distractions, it was perfect. For a few years now, I told myself that I needed to run a sub 3 hour half marathon before finishing a full marathon. That number was very arbitrary in my head, but that's what I told myself. And on this day I was going to do it.
Until everything went south. Work was way too stressful in the weeks leading up to the race. I was worn out physically the week before the race and in a bad place mentally. More stress the day before the race picking up the bib. I hit the starting line stressed out, tired, and not at all ready to run my best race. Which I then attempted to do so anyways. 3 miles in and I hurt all over. My back screamed so badly that I realized I could either continue another 10 miles absolutely miserable or slow down and be less miserable. I chose the latter.
Eventually, I finished. And I felt like a failure even though I had finished the race and somehow knocked 3 minutes off my PR despite everything going wrong.
@DopeyBadger wisely forced me to revisit the race to identify everything leading up to the race.
@OldSlowGoofyGuy reached out to me and gave me outstanding advice about how to stop thinking about my "failure" and focus on what I learned instead, reminding me that finishing the race is not actually failure.
So at the very least, I think reaching out to this community is a good thing to do. Sometimes we understand what it feels like to "fail" even when accomplishing something few people ever do. Feel good about qualifying for and then finishing Boston. Yes, the race didn't turn out the way you dreamed. But you finished.
Ohh and personally I think finishing a sucky race can be more challenging than finishing a race where everything just seems to be going great. I'd keep the Boston stuff. Just because you didn't have the race you wanted, doesn't mean you didn't keep relentlessly moving forward.
I came to believe after my disappointing Giant Race that the bad worked out for the best. Maybe I would finished the marathon if the Giant Race went perfectly for me anyways, but the bad race exposed so many weaknesses and shortcomings in my preparation. I had time to address them, make a few more mistakes in training, learn from those mistakes, and keep going. A bad race never defines you.
I think maybe taking a bit of a break after a bad race can do you good. Reset a bit.
Reset and a little bit of time away is never a bad thing. While I needed to examine and learn from my failures, I also had to get out of my own head about them too.
- Take some time to mourn. It's OK to be upset about how things went and be down about it.
- Once you've had some time to get over the initial "in the moment" disappointment and mourning, take some time analyzing what went wrong. Why didn't you have the race you wanted? Were the circumstances in your control (too little training, wrong training focus, non-ideal training cycle) or out of your control (weather, uncontrollable/unforeseeable factors). Let this guide you to the reason why you had a disappointing race. Did you do the best you could on race day given adverse conditions or were you not ready to perform because your training or other preparation didn't support your expectations?
- Hopefully, the answers to 2. will give you both a path to acceptance of your result and a pathway to avoidance/improvement in the future. If circumstances were beyond your control, then accept them and come to terms with the fact that you did the best that you could, given those circumstances and be proud of what you did. If there were flaws in your training or preparation, then you have a decision to make. You hopefully will have found the root cause for the disappointment. Then you have to decide whether it's worth the effort and energy to fix those flaws for the next race.
- Given the results of your analysis, put another race on your calendar. Set your sights on either fixing the flaws you've found or hoping for better conditions on race day that are more conducive to your goals. It's better to have a new goal and plan to start working positively on than to sit and let the disappointment fester. It can feel a bit helpless and rudder-less not having a goal to fix the issues. Keep moving forward!
While I did not enjoy reliving what didn't go well during my bad race, I really needed to. I was able to identify specific things I had done leading up to the race and make certain that I did not repeat those same mistakes for my first marathon.
I think what's different is that I know how much I love running, and I've experienced bad races and saw that it didn't change how I felt about the sport. So this time, my attitude was, "Whatever: it's just not my day. At least I get to run at all." It's a bit of a mantra for me: I get to run. I don't have to; I get to. I did spend some time later trying to ID what went wrong and if it was anything I could control going forward, but I just didn't dwell on it because I still get to run, even after a lousy race.
The night before my first marathon, I listened to an interview with U.S. Olympian Jared Ward, who also just finished top 10 at Boston this week. In the interview, he mentioned how your mind will give out before your body does and that as soon as your brain decides I'm done, your body will follow. I used that extensively the next day as needed. And just kept going. When I came to mile 22 and 23, I thought back to all those nights when I really did not want to run, but did so anyways and told myself that now was the moment. I did it then precisely so I could do it now.
They also had no idea I was thinking to myself in that moment that I was already destined to fail in Chicago this fall if I can't even cover 13.1 in a local race I run every year. This is obviously irrational, especially since I did just cover the 13.1, but that is exactly where our heads are at when we are dealing with disappointment.
My irrational belief was that I needed to run a sub 3 half in order to finish a marathon. I have yet to actually run that sub 3 half marathon. But it turned out that not being able to run a sub 3 half had no impact on my ability to finish a marathon.
