Why Disappointment on Race Day Leads to Greater Success - Coach Tip Tuesday

We’ve all been there: You have a day when (perhaps more specifically, a race where) you thought or hoped things would go a certain (positive) way.  You had a goal, and you also had a vision of yourself successfully achieving that goal.  Then race day comes, and things either go wrong (or at least differently than you anticipated), and you don’t get the result that you wanted.  Perhaps you even fail completely.  

When this situation happens to any of us, the disappointment that we feel is very real and often quite deep.  Along with that big serving of disappointment, we almost always wish that things had gone better and/or the way we expected.  However, there’s an important question to ask (and answer) here:

What if everything had gone perfectly?

Why Perfect Race Results Aren’t All They’re Cracked Up to Be

It might seem silly to ask, mostly because the answer (at face value) seems simple.  Most of us would probably answer this question the following way: It would be great and we would be happy if everything went perfectly.

I’m here to tell you that that’s not true.  If everything went perfectly and/or exactly how you expected every time you did a workout or a race, it wouldn’t actually be great and you wouldn’t actually be happy.

Why?  Because you wouldn’t appreciate or value a good and successful result if it just happened and you didn’t have to work or struggle to achieve it.  We need to spend time in “Discovery Mode” - that place where we effectively become laboratory scientists of our own lives.  Where we experiment, test something out, and see how it plays out.  That place where we open ourselves up to possible failure, or to possible success.  Where we do fail at times, learn from it, and deploy those lessons learned to refine our approach and move our needle closer to success.

I’ve observed that we humans tell ourselves (quite convincingly) that we will be happy and content if only everything would go as we hope or imagine that it would and if we could bypass all of the time that we spend in Discovery Mode.  For evidence of this, look no further than the pervasiveness of hack culture or our flawed notion that we can actually effectively multitask.  The idea that we can shortcut the process it takes to successfully achieve or complete something (especially a long or hard process) is very attractive to us and we’ve spent a lot of our existence as a species trying to do just that.

But that’s not how things actually work and there's a reason that these shortcuts have failed repeatedly over the course of our existence as a species; this is just a very alluring fantasy that we want to believe.  Since it is so alluring, it’s something that can be effectively marketed and sold to us.  We really want to believe that this might be possible.  

Unfortunately, the truth is something much less glamorous: We need to go through the process of working through a problem and seeing all the highs and lows along the way, and this means that we need to spend a significant amount of time in Discovery Mode.  We need to experience things, to learn from them, and then determine how best to combine our experience and acquired knowledge to try to reach a desired outcome.  There’s no shortcut to attain the wisdom that is gained through actual experience.

If there was a guarantee that we would be successful every single time we tried every possible thing in our lives, that success wouldn’t feel nearly as fulfilling.  In fact, I actually believe that it would not even feel like what we know success to feel like.  It would be just…normal.  And as such, it would feel mundane.  Vanilla.  Common.  Ordinary.  Dare I say….boring.

Yin & Yang is What Makes Success Feel Good

Only through the power of contrasts and opposites do we understand what feels good and what feels bad.  We need the yin and the yang.  The dark and the light.  The high and the low.  Only by both things coexisting and therefore having the possibility of experiencing both things do we value one thing and dislike another.  In the context of endurance sports: Only by having the possibility of failure can we truly appreciate its opposite: success.  

Success - whatever shape it takes in our personal definitions of it - is relatively elusive and hard to achieve.  Paradoxically, that elusiveness and that difficulty is precisely what makes it valuable to us and it’s exactly why we seek it out.  When something is rare, it’s more valuable to us.  To quote Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own: “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great.”  The hard is what makes it great.  Not “it being easy makes it great".  If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be great.  The struggle, the amount of time, the emotional investment, and the amount of trial and error that it takes to be successful is precisely what makes it feel so great when things do go well.   

Courage is Required

It is very, very difficult to open ourselves up to the possibility of failure.  It’s also very hard to be a beginner and to acknowledge (especially publicly) that we suck at something.  All of these things require courage.  This is especially true as we get older.

As we move through our lives, we acquire higher levels of skill and inch closer to Mastery level in the many areas that make up our lives: our careers, our hobbies, and even our families. 20 years into a career, we have proficiency and skills that enable us to feel confident in our work a majority of the time and we forget how scared we were on our first day.  After playing a musical instrument for many years, we forget how we first fumbled as we learned the right way to make sounds that translated into actual notes.  A parent who has a 25-year-old kid is (in most cases) a much better and more confident parent than the one who was taking a screaming newborn home from the hospital for the first time.

You get the picture.  Often without us consciously realizing it, we creep closer to that Mastery level as we grow older and we get very, very comfortable with our hard-earned knowledge, which makes it so we have greater probabilities of success a higher percentage of the time.  We forget - again, often unconsciously - what it was like to be a beginner, when we didn’t know what we were doing and were embarking on a new journey of discovery where we had a higher probability of failure.  It’s important to remember that no one starts off as being great.  We are all beginners in all areas of our lives at some point.  There always has to be a first time we do something.

All of this means that we often start to fear failure and disappointment even more as we get older, and we often avoid situations where failure and disappointment might occur.  We don’t necessarily want to shed our Mastery Cape and to don a Newbie Cape in its stead.  Staying where we are - where we have that higher probability of success - feels better to us because it is more comfortable than facing the unknown.  As Michael Easter notes in his best-selling book The Comfort Crisis, this tendency toward and desire for comfort is actually killing us.  We need to face the Discomfort Dragon and be willing to risk the possibility of failure so we can grow and give ourselves the possibility of success - perhaps even success beyond what we can initially imagine for ourselves.  

Especially as we get older, we need to recognize that we have a strong bias toward what we're comfortable with and we need to intentionally introduce ourselves to situations where we are not proficient and where we don't have any degree of Mastery.  We need to purposely seek out these situations not only so we can build our skill sets, but so we can build our mental strength and resilience.  This increase in mental strength compounds over time and ultimately builds us into overall stronger athletes and people.  We can leverage this acquired strength to help us attain success over time.  Endurance sports provide a wonderful setting and opportunity for this intentionality.  In fact, I would argue based on my experience as a coach and as an athlete that this is why so many people are drawn to endurance sports.

Use Disappointment as Fuel for Your Fire

In 2011, Des Linden came in second at the Boston Marathon with a finish time that still stands as her personal best for that distance.  Even though she completed a marathon faster than she ever had before (or has since), the winner of the race beat her by two seconds.  That loss was a massive disappointment for her.  Seven years later, in 2018, she became the first American woman to win the Boston Marathon in 33 years, and she did so by a margin of more than four minutes.  Her disappointment at losing the Boston Marathon in 2011 fueled her training for the next seven years and led to her building her strength and fitness to a point where she literally ran away from the rest of the field to come back and emerge victorious in 2018. 

Professional athletes like Des aren’t the only ones who suffer disappointments and use those disappointments to fuel their subsequent training and racing.  Over the years, I’ve seen first-hand through my work coaching athletes that disappointment and unrealized goals can be excellent fuel for an athlete’s fire.  In 2019, Tami Stone received a DNF (Did Not Finish) at IRONMAN Lake Placid because she missed the bike course time cutoff by six seconds.  That’s not a typo.  Six seconds is what separated Tami from her goal of becoming an IRONMAN.  Over the next two years, she changed her approach and her strategy, and in 2021, she went back to Lake Placid and finished the race with more than 97 minutes to spare.  While Tami’s experience is a very illustrative example of this principle in action, I have coached so many other athletes who had similar experiences of disappointment followed by resounding successes.

If you find yourself in a situation where your results are not what you expected or wanted, don’t see that disappointment as an obstacle.  Instead, see it as an opportunity for you to learn from the experience and deploy those lessons learned as you move forward.  Ask yourself the hard questions.  What went wrong?  Why did it go wrong?  What can you do differently or better next time?  What are you willing to change and try in the future?  When you do find success, you’ll appreciate it that much more because of the amount of work you had to put in and what you had to overcome to achieve it.

The Bottom Line

I should edit the question “What if everything went perfectly?” that I asked earlier.  Instead, I should ask, “What if everything went perfectly after you experienced setbacks and disappointments?”  That is when that perfect day will feel good.  You’ll be able to truly appreciate it because you’ll have overcome adversity and struggles in order to have that perfect day.  You will have experienced the yin (the dark).  And that will lead you to recognize when you do reach the yang (the light).  The success will be that much sweeter because it will have been hard-earned.

Perhaps surprisingly, disappointment on race day can lead us to greater successes over time.  And this isn’t just true for race day results; it’s true of any pursuit - athletic and non-athletic - that we take on in our lives.  By experiencing the negative, we can fully appreciate the positive.  The hard lets us see what is great.