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Failure and Running Growth

by Adolfo Salgueiro | Nov 19, 2024 | List, 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 in which we were supposed to excel. Beaten by that one person that 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 foward (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 wasn’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: Ok, 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 assisted with 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, though, 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 either keep dwelling on it or you don\’t learn anything 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.

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The Importance of Embracing Failure

by Adolfo Salgueiro | Aug 26, 2020 | Article

By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

A few days ago I got a meme where two people are having a conversation. Maybe a job interview. The meme is the first illustration of this blog post. They talk about the key to success and how to accumulate experience to make right decisions. What was the key? Wrong decisions. Why? because failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of it.

This meme got me thinking on how this applies to our sport of running. It applies to life in general, for sure, but that is beyond the scope of this blog. As runners we are always pushing our limits, both in training and races. We strive for that PR. We sweat to hit the splits on each interval. We suffer the day we feel great but the training plan ordains an off day. We can’t sleep the night before an important 20-miler but still wake up ready for action. Yet.. then… sometimes… we fail.

Common knowledge teaches us to “listen to our bodies”, but as runners, we rarely do. We even struggle with what “listen to your body” actually means. What we need to remember is that the body is a machine. An exceptionally complex, fine-tuned machine, but a machine, nevertheless. This means that it doesn’t always perform at its highest potential. Sometimes it needs maintenance, sometimes a part breaks down, sometimes you forgot to add oil or coolant. Even the best F1 cars fail to finish races due to mechanic failure.

We must understand that failure is an intimate part of our running life. Is not if we will have a bad run or a bad race, it is a matter of when. And we cannot hold this one bad day as the defining moment of our day, our training plan, or our life. Running great Dean Karnazes tells the tale of his failed attempt at Badwater in his book Ultramarathon Man, and he is not ashamed of it. Alberto Salazar also opens himself about facing death after overdoing it in a race in his book 14 Minutes. The key is, as they both tell us, what do you take from those experiences, and then how you apply what you learned while moving forward.

Imagine if we were not going to run another marathon because we hit the wall that one time. Imagine how many people would participate in your local 5K if the failed to set up a PR or place in their age group, last year. How many runners would you see on the track on any given afternoon if they could not hit their splits last week? Not very deep thoughts, sure, but so simple, so real, and so close to us all.

Thomas Edison said: “I didn’t fail. I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. This also translates to your 800 repeats, your first-mile pace in that 5K when you bonked, and your stupid decision of pushing too hard at mile 8 on that marathon because you were feeling so good.

As runners, it is imperative to have a short-term memory when It comes to failure so we can keep moving forward. Some need of more encouragement than others. The key is to remember that we run because we enjoy it. We are choosing the suffering. Nobody is forcing us to put ourselves in a position where we may and will eventually fail. We just must extract the lessons from what happened, put them into practice, move on and forget whatever happened that day. If we learned nothing from bonking on that long run, if we learned nothing from going out too fast the first half of that race, if we learned nothing from that day we got dehydrated; then we are bound to repeat those mistakes, and very soon.

Always remember that experience is what we get when we don’t obtain what we originally set out to get. So make sure you take advantage, and even embrace, your running failures. They will be visiting you soon enough and you should be prepared to deal with them.

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