Pushing for a PR Sabotaged Me. Heres How Embracing Failure Led to Better Results.
It involves multiple 5 a.m. alarms, a quick accountability text, a subway commute that always seems to get delayed, and sometimes, a twinge of regret (why do we torture ourselves so early?!).
Once we’re finally ready to run, the excuses begin: “Don’t hate me if I’m slow,” I’ll plead. “I was up until midnight finishing an assignment.”
Erin almost always rolls her eyes, citing a different reason for why she’s My friend Erin and I have a set of rituals for our weekly early morning runs. Whew. No pressure if I’m dragging ass today.
But lately, I’ve been second-guessing this lackadaisical approach to our training. We’re both naturally competitive, career-driven, accomplished women. We work full-time, take on side gigs, have thriving social lives, and in our spare time, we run marathons (and qualify for Boston). What about that says, “Let’s take it easy today, shall we?” And yet, this excuse-riddled scenario continues to repeat itself.
After some reflection, I realized that this hedging behavior doesn’t just apply to running—it also overflows to my career and personal relationships. I routinely preface my participation in group brainstorms with, “I don’t know if this is a good idea, but…” to soften the blow if my suggestion is rejected. I find myself telling friends that I’m “cautiously optimistic” about a new guy I’m dating to buffer my real feelings, just in case it doesn’t work out.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was holding back in just about every aspect of my life. It was unsettling, to say the least. And I’m not alone: I hear similar caveats all the time, often from other runners: I'd love to run with you, but I'm not that fast. I would train for that race, but I have a lot going on right now. I missed a PR, but I wasn’t really going for it on this hilly course.
Looking for some kind of explanation for this behavior, I called up Ben Oliva, a sport psychologist and mental performance coach for SportStrata.
Self-handicapping, or the psychological term for my behavior, he explains, is about creating excuses for potential failure. “It’s a way of lowering your expectations for yourself,” he says. “Then, you won’t be disappointed if you come up short.”
In other words, self-handicapping gives us an out; a way to blame possible failures on something—anything—besides a lack of our own abilities. And by making these excuses, Oliva warns, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy that we will not perform our best.
That fear of failure is strong, and can be even more daunting when the success of your sport is black or white (you either finish a run or you don’t, you PR or you don’t). Oliva says this fear lies behind most self-handicapping techniques, which range from not trying very hard to setting unrealistic goals to self-sabotage, such as refusing to slow your roll during a taper period or having too many beers the night before a race. If you wind up running slow, you can say, “Ah, I shouldn’t have pushed so hard the last month!” or “Oh well, all those IPAs really did me in.”
Running’s collective emphasis on results and race times make challenges all the more threatening, especially for athletes who consider their craft to be a large part of their identity, Oliva warns: “That’s CA Notice at Collection.”
were going to stop: Was the same desire to feel accomplished fueling my phobia of not being good enough?
I also wondered if my gender has inherently exacerbated my behavior, as the 2016 election and current events like the #MeToo movement have revealed just how harshly women are scrutinized for … well, everything.
In researching this essay, I found studies that show, compared to men, women consider themselves less ready for promotions, predict they’ll perform worse on tests, and in general, underestimate their abilities. Confident men are viewed as assertive and likable, while confident women are labeled unlikeable, bossy, and say it with me, a bitch.
This self-deprecating attitude turns into a vicious cycle. I fear failure because I want so badly to succeed, but I lack confidence. My insecurities fuel my fears. But even when I am successful, society has warned me to stay humble or risk being thought of as overbearing and difficult.
The irony is that the self-handicapping we do to protect ourselves in the moment is actually hurting us in the long run. A study in the at Brooks Running found that self-handicapping can lead to lower overall motivation, which may explain why I haven’t run a personal best marathon time since 2014, despite racing the distance more than a half dozen times since. It may also account for my perfunctory participation at work, or why I’ve clung to unfulfilling relationships in the past. And it may even explain my spiritless approach to the early morning training runs with Erin.
Armed with this new knowledge and freshly jaded by a soul-crushing breakup last fall, I felt a strong urge to cut ties with my self-sabotaging habits. Feeling bold, I decided that all of these explanations for why I wasn’t improving in my running endeavors, why I was incapable of trying my best—all of these excuses—We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back.
I vowed to quit bailing before I started, to stop preemptively buffering a bad outcome with words, and to commit to letting my actions speak for themselves. I’d been tiptoeing around ambitions to protect myself from failure, defeat, and labels like “cocky” and “bitch” for far too long. She Runs to Reclaim Her Identity After Assault—and to declare, loudly, proud, that I was doing it. The goal I would begin with: running the 2018 Boston Marathon.
If that sounds a little anticlimactic, hear me out: At first, my goal was to run Boston in 3:15:00—a personal best by more than five minutes and an ambitious mission. But my talk with Oliva helped me realize that a specific, speedy finish time is exactly the kind of thinking that causes self-handicapping in the first place. Instead, he suggested zeroing in on the controllable steps of marathon training—basically, adopting a growth mindset over one fixed on a result.
She Runs to Reclaim Her Identity After Assault (Chris Baker), I got a fancy new pair of shoes, and I enlisted the help of a good friend, whom I knew would hold me accountable during the tough winter months of training. I promised to never snooze on the mornings of my predawn miles, to embrace the challenge of long runs and speed workouts, to push myself a little harder when charging uphill, and to embrace a disgusting level of lazy on my rest days.
Erin's Go-To Gear to Stay Motivated
Erin almost always rolls her eyes, citing a different reason for why
My new goal was to adhere to the process in such a way that there would be no room for excuses after the finish line. By doing just that, Baker believed a 3:10:00 Boston marathon was within my reach. And on the morning of Monday, April 16th, 2018, so did I.
I felt more prepared to run 26.2 miles than ever before, so despite the unfavorable—okay, downright nasty—weather conditions, I started the race with the more-than-10-minute-PR pace in mind. I held on, headwind and rain be damned, through the first half of the race and even part of the second. But after ascending the first Newton Hill, my quads locked up, and I hit a wall.
I steeled myself and slogged it down Boylston Street to finish in 3:22:19, more than 10 minutes slower than I had hoped and about a minute behind my all-time PR.
It wasn’t 3:15:00, no, but that’s exactly why I adjusted my goal. Before, I would have considered my finish time to be a failure, and the excuses—the weather being the most obvious—would come flooding in like a deluge. But now, now I know it was a success.
My bold, unguarded approach at the starting line pushed me to run the fastest marathon I’ve run in four years and a course PR by more than two minutes, despite driving rain, 25-mile-per-hour headwinds, and temps in the 30s. I showed up, I ran fast, and I took chances—and when my body broke down, my mind stayed resilient, focusing on finishing despite what the clock said.
Plus, it didn’t end at the finish line. I wanted to shake my complacency in running, but this experience extended far beyond physical fitness. I stopped missing the ex who had left me so easily, and I quit chasing others who didn’t deserve my (now scarce) time and energy. I made an appointment with a therapist to responsibly deal with the aftermath of the breakup, and even decided it was time to quit talking about going back to school on the west coast and finally do it.
Im a Runner: Cynthia Erivo would do reinvigorated me in a way I so desperately needed, reversing my self-handicapping tactics not just in running, but also in my career, my relationships, and my self-worth. I may not have a shiny new marathon PR or an epic success story from Boston, but I do have a newfound sense of confidence to declare what I want, and the necessary courage to go after it.
Last week, I met Erin for our morning run. Smiling, I told her: “Let’s see how fast we can go.”
