A Half Marathon That Went Horribly Is Helping Me Recalibrate

I ran 76:40, which is around 5:50 pace for a half marathon. A lot of people might think this is still fast and a good race, but I have run that pace for long distances during training all the time, and this race was incredibly disappointing.

While I ran a 2:35:40 marathon last year, I believe myself to be in much better shape now. I spent the last six months and most of the summer running 80 miles per week, with some weeks being as high as 100 miles. I did many runs in very high heat or humidity, with some at 100 degrees Fahrenheit with 90% humidity.

Thus, I had pretty high expectations for this half marathon — I know from my training that I am likely in 71-minute half-marathon shape. My personal record is 73:53, run about a year and a half ago when I was only running 40 miles a week. I am in the best shape of my life — besides the raw volume, I had stellar long runs and workouts where I hit the best interval paces of my life for the longest time possible.

I did everything right; I ran a lot of hill repeats, ran twice a day, multiple times a week to avoid injury. While I wasn’t hitting these paces on days with very high heat and humidity, I ran enough in these conditions (and in conditions that were much worse), that I felt like I had acclimated well.

So I expected to run a huge personal best because I was in the shape to run my personal best.

I did not. I ran a terrible race. I tried hard, did my best, and executed what I thought was a good race plan. I thought I went out at a conservative pace. I was fine for about four or five miles, but as any runner can tell you, there are days when you feel good until you don’t. It felt harder at three miles than the half marathons I’d completed. I encountered more hills than I expected, and while I eased up well on the uphills, I ran too fast and overextended my stride on the downhills.

The humidity also got to me more than I realized. What once felt like 5:35 mile pace now felt like a 5:25 mile pace. I realized that I cooked myself too fast, too soon. I am not a quitter, so I tried to hang on, but I inevitably slowed down. I reflected later that I should have set a pace that I refused to go faster than, instead of just going with my gut.

There were plenty of times in the past couple of years when I would have shaken the race off, where I would have just let it go. I know bad days happen. I know I worked hard and hung tough despite my bad day, and I didn’t drop out, and I should take pride in that.

It’s easy to see now that I’ve had lofty expectations for myself. I had expectations that even on a bad day, I would run a big personal record. It was a bad day — it was about 62 degrees with 90% humidity, which is not the worst conditions to have for an easy run, but can lead to a big performance decline in races of long distances. I also underestimated the difficulty of the course — I saw it was a net downhill course, but did not know about the rolling hills or the overall terrain of a trail race.

Every bad thought that came into my head did. I thought I might have been overdoing it and overtraining. I thought all the training I did might have been wasted. For a good portion of the day, I felt like a failure.

The attitude that helped me get over it was to say, “Screw this.” I had cared so much about running for a long time. I also realized there could be a lot more rational and logical explanations for the poor race other than me being overtrained, cooked, and slow. First, one race is too anecdotal to really take too much away from. If I had two or three bad races in a row, then there’s a problem I could extrapolate a big takeaway or pattern from.

This race, however, was a lesson that I could do everything right in my training, be extremely consistent and work hard, and still falter, especially on a bad day. Running as a sport has always been incredibly frustrating in that regard — the amount of effort I put in has, a lot of the time, not correlated directly to running faster and having good results.

In fact, often, caring less and taking it less seriously has resulted in running faster. There is a natural lesson in this. I have a tendency to take running too seriously, to have a series of mental barriers get in the way of my physical fitness, to overthink and mentally self-sabotage. This was especially the case earlier in my running career, like high school and college, where I regularly ran slower than everyone thought I would run.

I hate to say that sometimes there is a part of me that is scared of the unknown. I recall a race during my freshman year of college. I was on our conference team to run the 10k as the last person to make the team. Throughout the race, I felt great and was competing in a championship environment with plenty of runners who were faster than me. But when I came through the midpoint at the 5k, I heard the split: 16:20. My personal record in the 5k was 16:20. I immediately started slowing down and panicking, and the rest of my race cratered from there when I thought I was going out too fast and made a terrible mistake.

These barriers have always been a part of my profile as a runner. In that race, I should have thought, “Yes, I just ran a personal record in the 5k, but I feel great and have to commit to the situation now.” Perhaps I should have seen a sports psychologist to analyze why I psych myself out, why the idea of success is what I want so deeply, yet what my mind often sabotages me out of. Perhaps many of these underperformances can be a result of a lack of confidence.

In the years since, I have done much better in not psyching myself out, executing a race plan, and believing in myself. I have done so much better in realizing that bad races happen, that you can’t run a personal best and hit a home run every time. I know this so well intellectually, and it’s what I preach to my friends who are just taking up running. But when it comes to my own running and processing the same lessons myself emotionally, I do struggle.

For now, I will have no choice but to shake it off. It was my first race in over three months. I know that the first run, the first race, is often not the best because it takes a while to break the rust. I know this race was a rust buster, and I will need to get that experience more mentally and physically to be able to maximize my potential. I will take a step back from working harder and let myself recover more, to just race, compete, and not focus so much about the time.

I don’t know if anyone else needs to hear this after a bad race or a bad day, but this is what I will tell myself: it was just a bad day. It doesn’t need to mean anything or have a deeper meaning. There will be plenty more opportunities for a fresh start, and what matters isn’t that I ran horribly, but that I will bounce back.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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