You Went Out Too Hard - Now What?
It happens.
You glance at your watch and see your heart rate is higher than you planned. Or you notice you’re running faster than your goal pace. Or you realize you’re working harder than you meant to this early in the race.
Oh no, you think. This is bad. I’ve blown it.
Fear sets in. You pull back. You’re sure you’ll pay for it. You start watching your numbers like a hawk, convinced that if you cross your limit again, you’ll crash and burn.
But slowing down—even if it feels better—can bring its own stress. You were running faster, and now you’re not, and that can intuitively feel like disaster—not because it is, but because in the past, slowing down has meant something’s gone wrong.
The problem isn’t that you went above your limit. It’s believing that going above your limit for a while means your race is doomed.
With that belief running the show, you can’t win.
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Your Limit Isn’t a Brick Wall
That “limit” you set—whether it’s pace, heart rate, or perceived effort—isn’t a defined line you must stay under at all times. It’s a guideline. A comfort zone. A range you ideally want to work within.
Yes, spending too long above your sustainable effort will wear you down. But you can go above it for a bit and recover. And you don’t have to overcorrect and drop to an uncomfortably slow pace.
What you want to do is come back down and settle into something sustainable.
When you treat going above your limit as a one-way ticket to disaster, you hold yourself back from running your best. You start racing scared and reacting instead of racing smart and confident.
But once you understand it’s something you can recover from, you can take a more relaxed, curious approach. You can even play around with it—push a little higher to test yourself, then practice pulling back to sustainable. You might discover you can handle more than you thought—and that can actually be fun.
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How to Recover When You’ve Pushed Too Hard
Instead of panicking, simply adjust:
Back off to what feels sustainable — not too slow, not too fast. It may take a moment to find that.
Reinforce the recovery. Hydrate, eat, relax what’s tense, take a deep re-set breath or two—whatever helps your body reset.
Stay calm. Trust that you can find your sustainable pace again, and keep finding it—even if what’s sustainable changes over the course of the race.
It’s not a race-ending mistake unless you turn it into one in your mind.
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Think of It Like Sailing
When you’re racing a sailboat, you don’t keep the sails set the same way the whole time. You’re constantly adjusting—pushing right up to the limit of how fast you can go without losing power.
That means steering closer and closer into the wind, just one more inch at a time, trying to keep the sails filled with as much wind as possible. But if you go too far, the sails flap uselessly, and the boat slows down—or even stops.
Push hard, ease off, push hard, ease off. That’s how the race is won.
Ultras work the same way. You’ll have moments when you push a little harder, and moments when you pull back a little. The skill is in those adjustments—not in running perfectly steady the whole time.
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Final Thought
Next time you feel like you’ve pushed too hard, remember: racing is about the adjustments.
Trust yourself to find your sustainable pace and keep moving forward.
