The Secret to Learning from a DNF
You train.
You race.
Something happens.
You DNF.
Now what?
You learn, right?
Every DNFing runner says they learned more from their DNFs than their finishes but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re learning as much as they could be.
Learning from a DNF seems simple but most of us do it wrong (I used to).
What Usually Happens
From the moment the DNF officially happens - whether you’ve timed out or dropped for some reason - you tell everyone it’s ok, you ran your best or made the right decision, and you’ve learned from it.
Inside though, you’re stinging from it. Feeling smacked down, embarrassed, and a little like hiding until it blows over.
You’d rather move on as quickly as possible. After all, a DNF means your race didn’t go as planned, hoped for, or expected. You were supposed to be celebrating.
You think what you learned is your lesson and no way are you making the same mistakes again.
The question you’re asking yourself is, “What am I going to do to avoid another DNF?”
You come up with a list of things to avoid:
No races with tight cutoffs.
No hard ones.
Only when you have a pacer and crew.
So you set limits.
You automatically rule out anything outside your new limits so you can stick with what you’ve “learned” works.
In the short term, you might avoid DNFing your next race but in the long term, you end up limiting yourself instead of learning and growing.
What Could Happen
Actually learning from a DNF starts with a better question - “What can I learn from race?”
Focusing on the race instead of narrowing in on the DNF part might not seem important but look at how it plays out.
Looking for what you can learn - not just what went wrong - means looking at the entire experience.
Including what went right.
And only after considering both sides of the experience - what went right and wrong - do you decide what you’ll do differently next time.
From my last DNF at Burning River 100 last month, that might be:
Pay attention to hydration, even when hydration is falling for hours from the sky
Prioritize running my own race, and assume I’ll cross paths with friends enough along the way to enjoy their company
Remember to carry a card with cutoff times so I can stay on top of them
Now, instead of avoiding things, you improve.
Instead of setting limits, you learn better strategies
Instead of staying in your newly-defined comfort zone, you become a stronger, smarter, more confident ultrarunner in whatever you choose to do.
Avoiding another DNF isn’t the same as getting better at ultrarunning.
You paid dearly for this DNF - get all the learning from it instead of just half.
If you want to walk through this process and more to grow into that confident ultrarunner, email me here or DM me. Let’s talk through the process we’d take to get you there.
Becoming the runner you want to be is way easier with a coach who sees what’s possible for you and can help you with overcome any doubts and setbacks along the way.
