How to Recover From a DNF

A DNF can be painful.

You invested time, trained hard, and ran your best, but it wasn’t enough for a finish.

Our first reaction is to move on quickly and forget about it. You might feel the urge to take a break from running, shift your attention to the next race, or sign up for a ‘redemption race’ to prove the DNF was a fluke and restore your confidence. 

These seem like the best ways to bounce back, right?

But here’s the catch: when you rush to move past the DNF, it can linger in your mind, growing into something bigger than it really is.

The healthiest way to recover isn’t to run away from the DNF—it’s to face it head-on.

Think of a DNF as being stuck on one side of a river, pretending you're already on the other side. The only way to actually get across is to work through this river of misery - what happened and the emotional aftermath. You need to feel the discomfort and reflect on the experience—not to beat yourself up, but to process it fully so you come out stronger on the other side.

Here are five key steps to help you do just that:

1. Choose how you'll talk to yourself. Decide in advance how you’re going to frame this experience in your mind. Will you be kind to yourself or overly critical?

2. Allow yourself to feel the emotions. Don’t hide or suppress what you’re feeling, even if you want to appear okay to others. If you need privacy, give yourself that space to process, but open up and allow the sadness and disappointment in. Don’t worry - they won’t stay.

3. Separate yourself from the result. Remember that a DNF is something that happened, not who you are. It’s the result of a race, not your identity as a runner or human. You are more than this outcome.

4. Evaluate the race objectively. Take an honest look at what went wrong and what went right. What can you learn from the experience, and how can you improve next time? As the fortune I received the day before my Superior 100 DNF said, it's your opportunity to begin again with new learning.

5. Move forward. When you’re done with the other steps, there’s still one left - facing races again. Don’t let the DNF convince you that you shouldn’t race any more, or that you should stick with easier races you don’t really want to run. Keep going for your dreams, and give yourself the chance to improve and grow as an ultrarunner.

Working through a DNF won’t make it disappear but it will transform the heaviness of the experience into mental strength and wisdom. Avoiding the DNF only allows it to stick around, weighing you down. 

The real power comes from crossing the "river of misery"—not by avoiding it, but by fording bravely through it.

And when you do, you’ll come out on the other side, stronger and more resilient than before.