Hey Reader,

We got a great listener question on this week’s pod:

“How do you deal with a run or race that goes badly?”

“Do you let yourself feel disappointed, or do you have a system for moving on quickly?”

For context, a run is just any regular day in training, with nothing on the line.

A race is an actual event with an official time. There are other runners too, and you get to compete for an official time after months of training.

We ended up talking through both sides of it.

A bad run, we both let it go quickly.

It’s like water off a duck’s back.

If every run goes well, you’re not really preparing yourself for anything, so a hard one just means the training’s doing its job.

But with a race, we like to have a little moment just to sit in it.

We let ourselves feel a bit rubbish about it.

Reflect on what happened, what didn’t, what we expected, and be curious about what there is to learn from it, then set a new goal.

And to be honest, this question goes way beyond a bad race or run.

It’s about bad days at work and life too.

🧠 Rushing past a bad day too fast

When something goes bad, we tend to act tough, tell ourselves it’s fine, and move on to the next thing.

It’s almost like a pause to sit with the bad feelings is a distraction from getting back to work.

Or probably because it would make us feel weak, slow, or stuck.

Or it would make us feel the hurt and pain of losing or failing, and suck even more.

So we numb it out instead.

We never really look at what happened, so we never really learn from it.

Don’t get me wrong.

It’s okay to move past some things almost immediately.

But moving on too quickly from big mistakes makes you ignorant of the lessons that failure was meant to teach you.

So you keep hitting the same wall again and again.

❤️ Allow yourself to feel all the emotions

Never underestimate the power of feedback from a failure.

Whether we like it or not, bad days are part of success.

Come to think of it: if it’s all easy, no fails or hard days, where’s the growth?

Like, you’re chasing extraordinary goals, so it’s supposed to feel hard.

You’re winging through a higher level for the first time, so it’s meant to suck a bit.

It’s okay to win some and lose some.

It’s okay to feel disappointed, sad, angry, or confused, and then move on.

When you allow yourself to feel these emotions, you’re able to reflect on what really went wrong.

Your mind becomes more open to picking the lessons from what shouldn’t have happened.

You’ll spot the gaps in your training.

You’ll know exactly what to avoid next time, and what to double down on.

You trust yourself more, too, because you know you’ll still be able to make the best out of the bad days.

You’ll give yourself grace to experience the bittersweet growth of the journey to mastery.

So what happened today that made it a really bad day?

Or yesterday, last week, last month, or even last quarter?

Let me throw the question at you:

How did you deal with it?

Did you avoid the emotions, or did you allow yourself to feel the disappointment?

Like Henry Ford once said: “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

Feel it, pick the lessons, and move on.

You’ve got this.

With appreciation,

Huw

P.S. We talked about this and loads more fun stuff on this week’s pod.

Worth a listen.

Catch the full conversation here.

Ep 16. Western States 100 re... Jul 7 · Two Average Runners 64:02   ​

Huw Edwards Founder & CEO, h3.xyz​

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