Bad Races Build the Most Mental Strength

Want more mental strength?

If you’re like most ultrarunners, you do.

Because you want to run more challenging races.

Safe races are ok and challenging in their own way, but they’re getting stale. You miss the excitement you used to feel about races.

But the intimidating race will take more mental strength and you don’t know how to get it, so you’re stuck.

One reason is thinking mental strength only comes from good races.

Bad races are bad because you were weak. Otherwise, they’d have gone better.

So you think you need more good, confidence-building races to get enough mental strength for the harder ones.

But you don’t.

Having a good race doesn’t necessarily mean you built mental strength.

Often, what runners label a ‘good’ race is one they got through with average challenge and no significant problems and no need to dig deep. That might temporarily boost confidence but it won’t build much strength.

Bad races build the most mental strength.

When you write off a bad race or are afraid to even have one, you’re missing the best opportunity to build the mental strength you want.

Why?

Because a bad race puts you in a position where you might not reach your goal. And if you’re going to salvage the race, you need to do something you don’t want to do precisely because it takes strength.

Take three common examples:

1. Sucking at it.

You should be good at this - you trained - so it’s hard to struggle through a race.

When section after section of the race takes outsized effort with no respite, it’s easy to give up the fight and drop.

The opportunity is to allow yourself to be bad at it…and keep going.

It takes strength to be vulnerable enough to keep going while your body moves in slow motion and the pack leaves you in the dust. To keep trying - maybe the whole race - to find a groove.

But if you let yourself suck at it, you can relax, stop judging yourself, get down to the business of running the race, and finish.

And you know if you ever have to do it again, you can.

2. Going all out for a finish when you probably won’t make it.

You’re certain you’ll work uncomfortably hard, miss cutoff, and embarrass yourself in the process because you were foolish enough to believe you could finish.

It’s smarter, easier, and less humiliating to drop.

The opportunity here is to go for it…for your own sake.

It takes a ton of mental strength to decide that even if you won’t finish, you’re going for it because you want to see what you are capable of. You want to see how close you can get.

Once you go for it in spite of the odds, you know you have the grit to do it again.

3. Running through a low.

Your race is over. You’re out of energy and it’s just going to get progressively worse.

Might as well drop and save yourself the misery.

The opportunity here is to admit you don’t absolutely know for a fact the race will continue getting worse…it’s possible it could actually get better.

It takes mental strength to have the faith in that possibility to persist until you turn it around.

Once you do, you know lows have an end and you can outlast them.

So look at bad races as golden opportunities to build your mental strength.

You learn how to summon it and use it.

But only if you take the opportunity that bad race gives you, and make the most of it.