failure Archives - foultips.run

Failure and Running Growth

by Adolfo Salgueiro | Nov 19, 2024 | List, Opinion, Reflection

By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

All of us runners have been there. And if you haven’t, keep running, and you will: missing the PR we trained for, walking on a run we thought we were supposed to excel in, being beat by that one person who can’t even keep up with us in training, selling ourselves a valid excuse for what just happened. We have just failed!

Sure, failure sucks. There is no other way to put it or sell it to ourselves or to our friends. But it doesn’t have to be final. It critical to your growth as a runner. And as a person.

It happens, learn your lessons and move forward. (Photo: Polina Zimmerman, Pexels)

There is an excellent quote by Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks in the movie A League of Their Own, when one of the players tells him she’s no longer enjoying baseball because it has become too hard: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it weren’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great!”

So, how do we embrace something that sucks, hurts and yet could be beneficial, and make it the cornerstone of our running growth? I suggest these steps:

1 – Accept your feelings: Don’t suppress your emotions after the failure. Don’t put a façade for your buddies. These feelings are normal, healthy and must be worked through your system so they may be processed.

2—Step away from guarded mode: Okay, you failed. So what? Is your wife going to leave you? Are your friends disowning you? You have processed your emotions and accepted what happened. It is time to stop dwelling on it and move forward.

3 – Find the lessons to be learned: What happened? Why? Was it an external factor or was it something under your control? What will you do differently next time? Identify the factors that contributed to the failure and strategize on how not to allow this to happen again. If it was your error, own it.

4 – Embrace the failure: Now that you know what happened, why, and how to avoid it next time, it is time to focus on your next objective. You have accepted that a flop does not reflect your value as a person. Even if you missed the Olympic gold medal, it is an opportunity for growth. The runner who hasn’t failed, just hasn’t run enough.

5 – Enrich yourself by what you’ve learned: A long time ago, I heard someone (I can’t recall who) say that “what you get when you don’t obtain what you originally set out for, is experience”. Make this experience part of your narrative. Share your story with others letting them know that setbacks are a natural obstacle in the path to success.

I have compiled a list of failure-related quotes by people from all walks of life. These quotes corroborate that failure can only become a permanent mark in your life when you keep dwelling on it or learn nothing from it.

Tak advantage of the opportunity (Photo: Brett Jordan, Pexels)

► “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” – Thomas Edison.

► “Some sessions are stars, and some are stones, but in the end, they are all rocks and we build upon them” – Chrissie Wellington, four-time World Ironman Champion.

► “A bad run is better than no run” – Unknown.

► “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” – Samuel Beckett, Playwright, novelist, Nobel laureate.

► “Relish the bad training runs. Without them it’s difficult to recognize, much less appreciate, the good ones” – Pat Teske, Resilience expert, health advocate, coach.

►”We all have bad days and bad workouts, when running gets ugly, when split times seem slow, when you wonder why you started. It will pass”– Hal Higdon, legendary running writer.

► “There will be days you don’t think you can run a marathon. There will be a lifetime of knowing you have” – Unknown.

► “Get over it – If you have a bad workout or run a bad race, allow yourself exactly 1 hour to stew about it, then move on” – Steve Scott, former U.S. record holder in the mile.

► “If you never have a bad day, you’re probably doing something wrong; if you never have a ‘good’ day, you’re definitely doing something wrong” – Mark Remy, Runner’s World.

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER

$On Hitting the Wall$

On Hitting the Wall

by Adolfo Salgueiro | Dec 12, 2023 | Article, Reflection

By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

If you ran a marathon or know of someone who has, most likely you’ve heard about “hitting the wall”. And if you ever wondered why they call it a wall, imagine yourself running and hitting one. Head-on. Yes. No exaggeration. You may hit it because you ran too fast and burned out, because you’ve consumed your body’s main fuel source, carbs, because you got dehydrated or a combination of those.

What is left after such an encounter is yourself trying to finish your race or run in a depleted state. A failure after a hard cycle of hard training.

Just like this, but without the benefit of the padding

Meeting with the wall is not always a physical process. Sometimes you may be mentally fatigued, or unprepared for the task at hand. In his book The Runner’s Brain, Dr. Jeff Brown states that “your brain is a pretty awesome organ, but it\’s no magician. If you didn\’t train properly or if you starved yourself for a week, you\’re asking to hit the wall no matter how great and powerful a mental organ you possess.”

But if you have trained with diligence, most likely hitting the wall will be a physical rather than a mental event. In general terms, your body doesn’t have the resources needed to run a marathon. Yet, thousands upon thousands of runners complete one or more every year. How do they do it? They fuel and hydrate their bodies during the race, and they’re mentally prepared for the challenge they’ll face.

If you are not intentional about your fueling strategy and plan to depend on whatever they’ll serve at the race, you can’t be surprised when you start having issues. We’ve all seen someone jet-puking fluorescent green liquid, not unlike the girl from The Exorcist, because they overdid it with the Gatorade.

Of course, there is always the possibility you started too fast and exhausted yourself beyond recovery. That would be an error in strategy which will also lead you to the wall. But that is another issue for another day. Not the one discussed in this post.

In a recent interview, legendary ultrarunner Scott Jurek was talking about the importance of fueling your body for a marathon and stated: “Rather than how do you deal with the wall at mile 20, don’t let the wall happen at Mile 20. Yes, I know it is easier said than done. But when you are out there tomorrow [in your race], if it is the muscular fatigue thing, you probably went too hard, but it is usually the lack of carbohydrates.”

HOW TO PROCEED ONCE YOU HIT THE WALL

Yet sometimes you’ve prepared yourself physically, mentally, and fueled properly but still hit the wall. What to do? In “The Runner’s Brain”, Dr. Brown talks about choosing between four wall-busting mental strategies so you can deal with the issue at hand. Read again: Deal, not overcome.

INTERNAL ASSOCIATION: A total focus on how the body feels while running. Tuning into the contraction and relaxation of your muscles, the mechanics of your arm movement, your breathing, your heart rate, and so on. Internal association\’s boundary is your skin, and your focus stays inside of it.

INTERNAL DISSOCIATION: Doing just the opposite yet staying inside of yourself. This strategy distracts you by hitting the mental replay button on a great song, thinking of upcoming projects, or counting your steps. Runners around you may be surprised to learn that you weren\’t thinking about running.

EXTERNAL ASSOCIATION: Your focus is outside your body and outside the act of running itself, yet you keep track of important aspects of your run. You may pay attention to jockeying for position in the race, negotiating water stops, split times, etc.

EXTERNAL DISSOCIATION: means focusing outward but on events or stimuli unimportant to the race itself. You may focus on the scenery, cheering crowds, flowers, counting the number of times someone along the route yells the name written on your bib or someone dressed in a weird running outfit.

It would be easy to finish this blog post stating that I wish you never have to figure out if it really feels like hitting a wall, but if you keep training long distances, you will eventually figure it out yourself. It is inevitable. The key is to learn from such an experience, so it doesn’t happen again. It is only then that hitting the wall won’t be a checkmark in your loss column.

What is your experience hitting the wall? Let me know in the comments.

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER

Learning the Hard Way

by Adolfo Salgueiro | Sep 19, 2023 | Article, List, Personal

By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

When it comes to us runners, sometimes experience goes out the window, and we make stupid, rookie mistakes that derail our training, fitness, and/or goal races. Who can forget Daniel Do Nascimento, an Olympian and 2:04 marathoner, going so fast during the 2022 NYC Marathon and collapsing at Mile 21 on a hot and humid day? He also collapsed during the Tokyo Olympics. If he screws up monumentally in the biggest stages, what’s left for us mere aficionados?

Daniel Do Nascimento collapsed in both Tokyo and NYC. Lesson not learned

Failure must be embraced as an opportunity to gain experience, sure, but it doesn\’t make it any easier when we screw up and are forced to learn a lesson at an inconvenient time. So, here are eight areas of your running where you could avoid learning the hard way:

1. Starting too fast: The equation is straightforward. The faster you go, the less endurance you have. Racing a half marathon at 5K pace will end in disaster. Starting faster than your race plan is not conducive to PRs but to bonking. Don\’t fall for the \”I-feel-awesome\” fallacy at mile 8 of a marathon. You\’d better feel formidable there if you trained for 26. Execute your race plan as designed. The chances of a satisfactory race will multiply exponentially.

2. Expecting linear and/or unlimited improvement: Because the curve of progress is so steep at the beginning of a training cycle, especially for beginners with little to no historical reference, it becomes imperative to understand that each body has a performance ceiling. If we didn\’t, we would all eventually be setting world records. The apex of our curve can still move up as we get better, more experienced, and in better shape> But that process may take years, which requires patience. Too much, too fast, too soon is the cardinal sin of running and a sure path to injury.

3. More mileage is not necessarily better: If you are planning to run long distances, you must run a lot of miles. It is inevitable. Now, what \”a lot of miles\” implies is very personal. It may mean 120 miles for Olympians but just 30 for a newbie looking to finish strong in their first half marathon. If you run beyond your body’s capability, recovery will be affected, and injury, overtraining, cumulative exhaustion and burnout will derail your goal. Figure out what works best for you and apply it.

4. Bad races are part of the deal: You may have done everything right. You were dedicated to your training, you slept enough, hydrated properly, strength trained, didn’t miss a day, and rested. And yet, you had a bad race. Well, nobody can guarantee you a solid performance. That\’s why we compete on race day and not just pick up our medals and trophies by showing our training logs. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn\’t. Accept it and don\’t let it be the measurement of your worth as a person.

5. Not practicing race strategy during training: The place to figure out you can\’t stomach that 5th gel shouldn’t be mile 20 on marathon day. Discovering that you don\’t have enough pockets to carry all your needs should not be realized on race morning. And so on. Be smart. Go for more than just one dry run during the training cycle.

Not taking care of your rest will inevitably lead to burnout or injury (Photo: Nataliya Vaitkevich, Pexels)

6. Rest days are an integral part of any plan: Even elites take rest days. At the height of their training for a Marathon Major, it may mean 10 easy miles at a pace that would be a PR for you or me. But we are not training to win Boston or London. So, let\’s put our goals in perspective and understand what we want to carry out. Let’s not compare ourselves to other runners, and make sure we rest properly—enough so our body doesn’t have to choose a rest day for us, which I may bet would come at an inconvenient time.

7. Squeezing in one more long run: The body usually takes from 10-14 days to adapt to the stress of a particular training session. This is why we taper. Not much of what we do in the two weeks prior to the race will help us. Yet, it can harm us. So, refrain from squeezing in one more long run or an added speed session in during taper. Follow your plan.

8. Trying new things on race day: Is the cardinal sin of racing. This is not the day to find out how these shorts fit, if this brand of gel upsets your stomach, or the responsiveness of this brand-new pair of shoes. You\’ve been training for this day. You have sacrificed sweat, time, money, and emotion into this project. Don\’t screw it up at the time to see it through.

We would love to hear your advice for fellow runners. Leave a comment below; we appreciate every contribution!

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER

Keep Running and It Will Happen

by Adolfo Salgueiro | Feb 21, 2023 | Coaching, List, Reflection

By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

In a recent phone conversation with a runner I train, she expressed concern about two consecutive bad runs she had just experienced. She had an important race coming up in a few days, though not a goal race. She began to freak out a little bit, thinking she may not be ready, or she may fail, or she just wasn’t a good runner.

I told her that these things happen to everyone. That they are an inherent part of running. When you have good days, the bad days are around the corner. Just as when you feel on top of the world but then you feel underprepared and crappy when it counts. It is part of the process, one from which you should learn, so you can keep them at bay.

One of your running dreams will eventually come to die in porta potty (Photo Pexels)

Keep running and it will happen. “What will happen?”, you ask: Everything! Both the good and the bad.

One or more of these dreadful things happening, even simultaneously, doesn’t mean you are finished as a runner, or that your race is doomed. Just as one or more great achievements don’t mean you’ve made it. It only means you are travelling through one of the typical high-and-low cycles of life, which also reflects itself in your running.

40+ years in running have taught me that if it hasn’t happened yet, it is only because you haven’t run enough. Keep running and it will happen. Guaranteed.

The Bad:

You will fall. Hopefully, you won’t break a bone, but you will fall.
You will underperform in a race, just when you thought you’re PR was in the bag.
You will crap/pee in your pants.
You will twist an ankle. How bad, that’s another conversation, but it will happen.
You will have a close call with a car. Hopefully, it won’t go beyond that.
You will have a close encounter with an angry dog. Be prepared.
You will have to stop a run far from your finishing point and require help getting back.
You will eat something that unsettles your stomach and spend a pre-long-run night throwing up or sitting on the throne.
You will have a bad night of sleep, or two, or three; just before your goal race.
You will experience uncooperating weather during your key training run or goal race.
You will miss an important run because life just got in the way.

If any of these hasn’t happened yet, just keep running.

Remember: Experience is what we get when we don’t obtain what we originally set out for. Make sure you take advantage of the inevitable and learn a lesson, so you minimize the chances of it happening again.

Good things you haven’t experienced will happen if you keep running. Here is a small sample of them.

One day your battery will die and you will need help getting back to the start. (Photo Pexels)

The Good:

You will experience an unexpected PR on a race when you thought it wasn’t even a possibility.
You will overcome obstacles to realize you are stronger than you thought.
You will reap the rewards of having embraced the lesson from a previous failure.-
You will find the assistance from a running angel at the perfect time, or even better, you will be that angel for a runner in need.
You will run farther and longer than you once thought possible.
You will inspire someone who didn’t know he/she was a runner to fall in love with the sport.
You will become friends with people you couldn’t believe you had much in common.
You will find some of the best friendships of your life by hanging out with likeminded people.
You will surprise yourself and your doctor with the results of your annual physical.

If any of these hasn’t happened yet, just keep running.

Anything you may want to ad to these lists? Let me know in the box below.

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER

Rebounding From a Bad Race

by Adolfo Salgueiro | Nov 1, 2022 | Article, Reflection

By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

Wouldn’t be impressive if we could PR in every race, of every distance, in every season? Sure, it would be remarkable. But it is not possible, so let’s accept it cannot be done and move on, focus on what we can actually achieve and go for it next time, hopefully when conditions are optimal.

A bad race is part of our running life. An inferior performance is inevitable even if in the best of circumstances. There will always be parameters we can’t control, such as weather, wardrobe malfunctions or health setbacks, among many others. So, what to do when we don’t have an ideal performance despite the arduous work, effort, sweat, money and emotion we have invested into a race? We evaluate and we move on.

Frustration after a bad race is normal and healthy (Photo Gideon Tanki, Pexels)

Imagine if Eliud Kipchoge had given up after finishing 26 seconds late on the Breaking2 Project back in May 2017? After all the hoopla and the money invested by Nike, he failed in completing the task. He would have missed out on the success of the INEOS 1:59 Challenge, where he ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in October 2019. Had he not moved on, he wouldn’t have set up marathon world records in Berlin in 2018 and 2022, cementing his position as the greatest marathon runner of all time.

As the fall racing season gets into gear, be prepared. So, when it is our turn to fail, either miserably or just by running short of our time goal, you’ll know what to do. Invest in finding the courage, the drive and the motivation to continue pursuing your physical limits. You do so by:

Accepting it is normal to be frustrated: You worked hard for a goal, and you did not get it. That is infuriating. So, be frustrated, sure, but don’t bottle up your emotions. Not setting up a PR, having to walk part of the course or not getting onto the podium are all valid reasons to be upset, but not to feel like a miserable loser. Most likely this race was not the payday you needed to keep your family afloat. So, keep the perspective. Let the misery through your system and move on.

Debrief the race: Just after finishing a bad race, when you are hanging out with your friends at the finish line, may not be the best time to recreate the race and figure out what went wrong. Give it some time for all the memories to settle in and your body to recover. Then, do some introspection, talking it over with you coach or running buddies to see if you can pinpoint the issues that lead to the failure.

This is not your last race: There are 5K races every weekend, half marathons throughout the year and there are not many towns and cities these days that don’t have a marathon. So, fortified with what you learned in your debacle, set your sight on a race to redeem yourself, train hard and apply the lessons learned. Sounds promising already.

No need to think this is the end of your running career. You can redeem yourself on the next race (Photo: Cottonbro, Pexels)

Ask yourself the tough questions: Figure out what the main reason why you did not perform as expected. Asking the right questions should lead you to the answer you need. Did you bonk because you did not consume enough calories? Did you get dehydrated? Did you start too fast? Did you start too slow? Did you start too far back and had to weave around slower runners? Were you overdressed or underdressed for the weather? Did your experience stomach issues? Did you party last night? Did you eat and/or sleep properly the night before?

Learn a lesson: What you get when you did not obtain what you were looking for originally, is experience. Success doesn’t come just from achieving your goal every single time. It come from showing up, working hard, doing your best and failing. Sometimes, learning from a failure may be more beneficial to your future running self than completing one goal, one race.

Register for your redemption race, ASAP: Identify the race where you are planning to redeem yourself. Register for it and start working on it right away. The sooner you register, the faster you’ll apply everything you just learned.

Bad races are inevitable. Rebounding from them is mandatory.

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER

« Older Entries