A bad race can leave you feeling like dead meat.

By Christopher Cudworth

Sooner or later, we all have a bad race.

Running into trouble

If you’re a runner, you might have planned all year for a marathon, and things went sour somewhere along the way. Or that half-marathon you planned to use as a tuneup turned into an injury-hobbled slog and a DNF. You shot for a PR in the 10k and blew up at four miles. Your 5K just pace just never got going. What do you do when those things happen?

Riding away from you

If you’re a cyclist, bad races can happen fast. You can crash, for one thing. That ends your race in a hurry. Or you can make a mistake, get stuck in the back of a pack and miss the break. It’s often “race over” at that point whether you’re in a road race or a criterium. In cycling, contact with the lead group of riders is everything. There’s no making up the difference when the group ahead is sharing pulls at 25 mph and you’re humping along solo at 22. The math is not in your favor.

Everyone blows up now and then. Misses the break. Has a bad day. The reasons are multitude. But the solutions must be simple.

Gaining perspective

Imagine if you are an Olympic athlete and have a bad day? You might have put in 4 years of intensive training, watching your diet and weight work and everything it takes to be world class and still find yourself sick with a cold or not feeling your greatest on the day of the race. The disappointment can be crushing.

The natural response is often to look for excuses. The weather was not in your favor. You can’t help your luck in a cycling pack. On and on.

There are better ways to process what happens during and after a bad race.

What to do after the tar snake of a bad race

1. Start by making no vows. Often the first thing we tell ourselves during and after a bad race is “I’m never doing this again” or “I quit” or “Why do I even (run) or (ride). Resist the temptation to make vows to quit. It’s natural to want to divorce yourself from the situation, but leave it at that. Confine your anger or disappointment to a single event. Do not case a negative net over your whole love of the sport. Even though you hate it at the moment, you can prevent digging yourself a mental hole by stating, in positive fashion, “Things did not go well today but I will reserve judgment until later how I really feel about this.”
2. Chronicle the “bad” event rather than ignoring it. You’ll be surprised how liberating it can be to take out a piece of paper and write down all the things that went wrong. Or make an angry entry in your journal if need be. It’s okay to be mad when things don’t go right. It’s even okay to carry that anger with you in constructive fashion.
3. Find a focus for your anger and frustration. Many times it is the anticipation and stress that cause us to fail under pressure in athletic competition. The first step in finding new focus for our efforts is to discover whether the reason behind your failure was temporary or permanent. If you have overtrained or become stale leading up to your target race, you cannot expect to bounce back out there and try another race. But if you simply got a side stitch running or made a dumb tactical move in cycling, it is possible to recalibrate your objectives and enter another race on the momentum and training you’ve built up. Many an Olympian athlete who failed on the big day goes out and races the rest of the season and salvages their soul by using that hard-earned fitness to other ends. Of course, there are times when it is better to back off completely and not go back out there an race. Which means you must first…
4. Analyze. Coming off a bad race, make sure you try to understand what contributed to your off day. It could be something simple like your diet leading up to the race, taking in too much or too little fluids, over or under training in the weeks leading up to competition.
5. Keep the motivation, but also forgive yourself. It’s good to look ahead, determined to do better next time. It is also important to forgive yourself if you screwed up somehow, got too eager or trained too many miles and wound up tired on race day. Everyone makes mistakes. Don’t bury yourself in blame and regret. That’s good advice in running and riding, and in life itself.

Listen to yourself

A bad race is not the end of the world. You don’t need to moan and complain to everyone you know about your misfortune. Your training partners can be a good sounding board if you ask them to help you analyze your training. Often they see mistakes even when you don’t.

Learn from mistakes

I recall clearly my teammates asking me in advance of a high school cross country race on a confusing course, “Do you know the route?”

Arrogantly I assured them I did. Yet when the course went straight on a second loop rather than taking the longer way around a track, I ran the longer way while a competitor went straight––the correct route––and my 200 yard lead vanished. I finished second.

That was a preventable mistake, and the lesson learned from that “bad” race was to pay attention to preparation right up to the minute of the event.

We all learn things the hard way sometimes. It’s how you respond to those lessons that can turn potential bad races into better future efforts.