52. Handling Doubt Before a Race: 3 Questions to Replace “Can I Finish?”
That question, “Can I finish?” has a way of taking over your thinking before a race. It feels important, like if you could just answer it, the doubt would go away. But the more you try to solve it, the more it pulls you into worry, keeping your focus on something you can’t actually control instead of the race itself.
In this episode, I break down why doubt shows up so strongly before a race and what’s really happening in your brain when you can’t stop questioning whether you’ll finish. I explain why this question is impossible to answer ahead of time, how your brain turns uncertainty into fear, and why trying to get rid of doubt often makes it louder instead of quieter.
You’ll learn how to step out of the loop of trying to solve an unanswerable question and start directing your focus in a way that actually helps you prepare. I walk you through three better questions you can ask instead, so you can work with your brain, stay grounded in your race, and move forward with clarity even when doubt is still present.
The Ultrarunner’s Mastery Debrief Template helps you evaluate your races like experienced ultrarunners do - identifying what worked, what didn’t work, and what to do differently next time. Download yours for free here.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why asking “Can I finish?” creates more doubt instead of resolving it.
What your brain is doing when doubt keeps coming back.
How imagined outcomes start to feel like real evidence.
The cycle that keeps doubt and worry reinforcing each other.
Three better questions to ask that help you focus on your race.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Last week, when I asked a client how she was thinking about her race, she took a deep breath and said, "I don't know if I can finish." I love hearing that, because once you're not hiding from that doubt, you can do something about it. And that's exactly what I'm covering in this episode.
Welcome to Unstoppable Ultra Runner, the podcast for ultra runners who refuse to let anything hold them back. I’m your host, Susan Donnelly, veteran of over 150 100-mile races, and a coach who helps runners like you break through mental roadblocks, push past doubt, and run with confidence. Let’s go.
Welcome to episode 52. This week, we're talking about a worry I hear all the time as clients are training for a race. And it doesn't matter if the client is running a marathon or a 300-mile race. It also doesn't matter if the race is six months away or six days away. This is a universal worry that causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, and it's this: I don't know if I can finish.
Like you worry that you can't finish, and it's like nothing is going to make you feel the way you want to feel before a race until you know the answer. You have to know if you can finish. But at the same time, you don't want to know that you can't finish. If you found out the answer was that you couldn't finish, it would be devastating. It would be defeating. Like you'd already failed without even having the chance to run the race, and that would be even worse.
So what you really want when you ask this question is to feel certain, to feel confident that you can finish. What you really want is reassurance, or even better, proof that you can finish. And then, you don't want to have to worry about it ever again. The reason this question keeps nagging at you is the presence of doubt. Feeling all that doubt, it is uncomfortable. So it feels like it needs to be addressed and resolved. You think not knowing if you can finish the race is a problem, that you should know that you can do it, that you should be feeling confident instead of doubt. That the presence of doubt indicates a weakness in your training or your planning, or maybe you're the weakness. Maybe you don't have what it takes because if you could finish the race, you'd be 100% sure that you could. Somewhere, something is wrong, and you need to find it and fix it while you can.
This pushes you to look for ways to make the doubt go away, and that can take two different paths. The first path is that you try and make it stop, usually by adding everything you can think of to fill the gap. You add miles and speed work and hill repeats and strength training. You get a crew, add a pacer, switch up your hydration mix, and you count on feeling better when you do. And you do feel better for a day or two, but then the doubt comes back just as loud as before.
So you switch tactics. If you can't make the doubt stop, you're going to at least stop trying to feel it. So you ignore it. Stay busy, you distract yourself, you just try anything to not think about it. But it doesn't go away. And not being able to make the doubt go away starts to feel like a sign in itself, like the fact that you can't shake it means something about how the race is going to go. Every day you go without answering, can I do it? That question gets louder and the worry gets worse. The best you can do is hope, and hope doesn't feel like much.
But here's what I want you to see. The problem isn't that doubt, and it isn't necessarily a gap in your fitness or your planning. The problem is the question itself. You think you shouldn't be feeling this doubt, like the confident, capable runner you want to be, the ones you admire, everybody else in the world, it seems, wouldn't be lying awake with this. So, the doubt must mean something's wrong with you, but it doesn't. Your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and that just happens to be working very hard against what you're trying to achieve.
Here's why, and this is important. When you ask, "Can I do this? Can I finish the race?" You think you're asking about your capability, but you're not. You're asking about whether your capability will produce a specific outcome. You're really asking, "Will I finish?" And that's a question about the future. You can't answer it now. Nobody can, not even the race director, because the race hasn't happened yet. When will you know the answer? When the race is over, and not one moment before.
So every time you ask that question, "Can I do it?" you're asking your brain to solve something that is genuinely unsolvable right now. And not just because the race is in the future, but also because you don't control the whole outcome anyway. Like weather, course conditions, whether you roll an ankle at mile 30, you're trying to answer a question that is unanswerable about an outcome that you don't even fully control. So no wonder it's torturing you.
The brain hates an open loop like that though, especially a high-stakes one. So it keeps coming back to that question, looking for a resolution that just isn't there yet. And when it can't find one, it doesn't wait patiently. It decides that the missing answer must mean something bad, that there's a gap in your training, a weakness in you, or something wrong that you haven't identified yet. So it keeps looking. Now, that's what's happening.
And once you see it, you can stop trying to answer the question and start doing something that actually helps you get ready for the race. But knowing what's happening, knowing that's what's happening in your head, doesn't automatically make the question feel less urgent. And I get it. I get that it still feels like something you have to know right now.
So let's look at why. Because understanding what's driving that urgency is the first step to loosening its grip. Here's the first thing that your brain is doing without you even realizing it. As humans, our aversion to loss is built extremely deep in our psychology, like deeper than culture or personality or anything else. And get this: losses feel roughly twice as bad as equivalent gains feel good. A DNF doesn't just feel bad, it feels disproportionately worse relative to how good a finish at the same race will feel.
And this goes back to evolution. A loss, like loss of food, could literally mean not surviving. A gain just means better surviving. So the brain learned to wait losses heavily, and it's never stopped. It's not the risk of not finishing that actually scares you. It's the loss that you'll feel if the risk doesn't go your way. This is why it feels so life and death to answer that question about loss. It was.
In addition to that, not all loss is equal. Doubting you can finish a 50k is very different from doubting that you can finish a 300-mile race. The bigger and more important the race is to you, the bigger the potential loss that you might experience, and the more intense the doubt. That's not a weakness. That's not a personal weakness in you. That's your brain correctly identifying that more is at stake. That's all.
And there's another layer here too. If your training has gone well, if you've done everything right, you've built up an expectation in your mind that you'll finish. Like you've earned a finish, or at least you feel like you should have. So a DNF isn't just a loss of the finish, it's a loss of the expected payoff of everything you've invested. The months of early mornings, the hours of long runs, the times you prioritize training when it was hard to do so. The size of the training loss matters too. When you think about finishing, you think about the finish line itself, like crossing the finish line, holding that buckle, that moment, that payoff.
But when you think about not finishing, you don't just think about the DNF. You think about every early morning, every mile, every long run, every time you chose training over something else, all of it, wasted. The loss of the finish plus the loss of everything you invested to get there, that's what's actually at stake in your mind. So it's no wonder that the fear of loss feels bigger, way bigger than the hope of finishing.
And then there's regret. Before the race has even started, you're pre-living the feeling of not finishing. Like you can imagine watching everybody else finish, leaving quietly, the drive home, telling people, answering the "What happened?" question, seeing all the other people in the results who did finish, wondering what you could have done differently. That imagined future regret is vivid, and you're doing it right now. It's doing real emotional work on you today for something that hasn't even happened yet and may never happen.
Regret is one of the most powerful emotions the brain uses to drive behavior. It's designed to keep you from making decisions that you'll regret. But here, in this instance, it's working against you. It's trying to protect you from a future feeling by making you feel it now, ironically, in advance, about a race that you haven't even run yet.
Here's where this gets self-reinforcing. The easier a DNF is to imagine, the more likely it seems. That's how the brain estimates probability, by how easily it can picture something. And every time you worry, every time you lie awake running through the scenarios, you're practicing that DNF in your head. You're making that loss feel more vivid, more detailed, more real every time. Your brain is already writing the story of this race before you've even gotten to the starting line, and it's writing one where you lose. That's not preparation, that's your storytelling brain hijacking you in the present.
And the more vivid that loss is in your head, the more likely it feels. Not because the evidence says so, there's no evidence yet, it's simply because your brain is treating the imagined scenario as evidence. Every time you run that scenario in your head, every time you imagine a DNF, even if it is imagining the same bad scenario over and over, the loss feels more probable. The doubt makes the loss feel more likely in a loop.
Like the doubt generates worry, the worry generates the vivid scenarios in your head that keep you awake at 2:00 a.m. The vivid DNF scenario in your head feels like evidence. The evidence increases how likely the loss seems, and that generates more doubt and over and over and over again. You'd rather not lose than finish. So you spend more time thinking about how to avoid the loss than how to run the race.
And when you genuinely believe the loss is likely, when you talk yourself into that, you start making rash decisions to prevent it. That's why you add more miles, more strength training, hill repeats, speed work. You change your nutrition plan at the last minute, all to prevent a DNF, all to prevent loss. And in the final weeks before the race, you catastrophize every little thing. I've been there, believe me. Like it's too late to get fitter now. So the only move you feel like you have left is damage control. So you gamble, throwing last-minute changes at what already feels like a certain loss. And those panicked decisions often make the outcome worse, not better.
And here's the final piece. Whatever you're thinking about feels more important than it actually is. In the weeks before the race, you're thinking about almost nothing except the race and the fear of losing it. So that loss consumes a disproportionate amount of mental energy in the weeks before the race. The loss you expect feels like it will define you. It won't, but your constant focus makes it feel like it will. The doubt intensifies as race day approaches, not because the threat is growing. You're actually in better shape as the race day approaches. It's because your focus on the potential loss is growing.
And focus inflates importance, reliably, every time. Like six months from now, whatever happens in this race will be one chapter in a longer story of many races, part of you learning to master this sport. But right now, it feels like the whole book, like your whole identity is riding on this race. But it's only your continual focus that's creating that intensity, not the race and not how the race is going to turn out. And knowing that is the beginning of loosening its grip.
So, now you know what's happening. Your brain is doing exactly what brains do, trying to protect you from loss, pre-living regret, making the DNF feel vivid and probable and inevitable. And none of this is a sign that you can't finish. It's just your brain doing its job to protect you from loss, where loss is a part of this sport.
And once you can see that, you have a choice. You can keep trying to answer an unanswerable question, or you can ask a better one. Instead of, "Can I finish this race?" ask any of these three questions. Number one, I have a chance to run this race. How do I want to use it? Number two, what would running this race well look like for me? And number three, how do I want to run this race?
"Can I finish?" makes the finish line something that happens to you. These questions put you in the driver's seat. They shift your brain's power from trying to avoid losing to figuring out how to run the race, which is a much better problem to solve. The question you ask yourself about this race seems simple, seems like nothing, but it's an incredibly powerful choice. It puts your brain's power to use either for you or against you. The fear and doubt isn't coming from your ability to finish the race, it's coming from asking the wrong question and getting lost defending against loss.
When you change the question, you're working with your brain's tendencies rather than against them. You're turning those same powerful processes to your own purpose. That takes a fraction of the mental effort that it takes to fight your way past your own brain and all that doubt. And here's what changes when you change the question. You stop getting trapped in that worry loop, not because the doubt disappears, it might not, but because you know what it is now.
That doubt is a sign that you're asking a question you can't answer yet. That's all it is. It's not a warning, it's not a prediction, it's not a sign that you can't do it. It's just your brain stuck on an unanswerable question. So when the doubt shows up, you don't fight it, you recognize it. You know what your brain is doing and why, and then you redirect to a question that actually moves you forward. That's the skill, and like every skill, it gets stronger every time you use it.
The mental energy you're spending on "Will I finish?" goes into getting ready to run the race where it belongs. All right, you all, that's this week's episode. If you know someone who could use this, share it with them. It might be exactly what they need to hear. See you next week. Bye.
Thanks for listening to Unstoppable Ultra Runner. If you want more ultra talk, mindset tools, and strategies for running with confidence, visit www.susanidonnelly.com. This podcast receives production support from the team at Digital Freedom Productions. That’s it for today’s episode. See you next week.
Welcome to Unstoppable Ultra Runner, the podcast for ultra runners who refuse to let anything hold them back. I’m your host, Susan Donnelly, veteran of over 150 100-mile races, and a coach who helps runners like you break through mental roadblocks, push past doubt, and run with confidence. Let’s go.
Welcome to episode 52. This week, we're talking about a worry I hear all the time as clients are training for a race. And it doesn't matter if the client is running a marathon or a 300-mile race. It also doesn't matter if the race is six months away or six days away. This is a universal worry that causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, and it's this: I don't know if I can finish.
Like you worry that you can't finish, and it's like nothing is going to make you feel the way you want to feel before a race until you know the answer. You have to know if you can finish. But at the same time, you don't want to know that you can't finish. If you found out the answer was that you couldn't finish, it would be devastating. It would be defeating. Like you'd already failed without even having the chance to run the race, and that would be even worse.
So what you really want when you ask this question is to feel certain, to feel confident that you can finish. What you really want is reassurance, or even better, proof that you can finish. And then, you don't want to have to worry about it ever again. The reason this question keeps nagging at you is the presence of doubt. Feeling all that doubt, it is uncomfortable. So it feels like it needs to be addressed and resolved. You think not knowing if you can finish the race is a problem, that you should know that you can do it, that you should be feeling confident instead of doubt. That the presence of doubt indicates a weakness in your training or your planning, or maybe you're the weakness. Maybe you don't have what it takes because if you could finish the race, you'd be 100% sure that you could. Somewhere, something is wrong, and you need to find it and fix it while you can.
This pushes you to look for ways to make the doubt go away, and that can take two different paths. The first path is that you try and make it stop, usually by adding everything you can think of to fill the gap. You add miles and speed work and hill repeats and strength training. You get a crew, add a pacer, switch up your hydration mix, and you count on feeling better when you do. And you do feel better for a day or two, but then the doubt comes back just as loud as before.
So you switch tactics. If you can't make the doubt stop, you're going to at least stop trying to feel it. So you ignore it. Stay busy, you distract yourself, you just try anything to not think about it. But it doesn't go away. And not being able to make the doubt go away starts to feel like a sign in itself, like the fact that you can't shake it means something about how the race is going to go. Every day you go without answering, can I do it? That question gets louder and the worry gets worse. The best you can do is hope, and hope doesn't feel like much.
But here's what I want you to see. The problem isn't that doubt, and it isn't necessarily a gap in your fitness or your planning. The problem is the question itself. You think you shouldn't be feeling this doubt, like the confident, capable runner you want to be, the ones you admire, everybody else in the world, it seems, wouldn't be lying awake with this. So, the doubt must mean something's wrong with you, but it doesn't. Your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and that just happens to be working very hard against what you're trying to achieve.
Here's why, and this is important. When you ask, "Can I do this? Can I finish the race?" You think you're asking about your capability, but you're not. You're asking about whether your capability will produce a specific outcome. You're really asking, "Will I finish?" And that's a question about the future. You can't answer it now. Nobody can, not even the race director, because the race hasn't happened yet. When will you know the answer? When the race is over, and not one moment before.
So every time you ask that question, "Can I do it?" you're asking your brain to solve something that is genuinely unsolvable right now. And not just because the race is in the future, but also because you don't control the whole outcome anyway. Like weather, course conditions, whether you roll an ankle at mile 30, you're trying to answer a question that is unanswerable about an outcome that you don't even fully control. So no wonder it's torturing you.
The brain hates an open loop like that though, especially a high-stakes one. So it keeps coming back to that question, looking for a resolution that just isn't there yet. And when it can't find one, it doesn't wait patiently. It decides that the missing answer must mean something bad, that there's a gap in your training, a weakness in you, or something wrong that you haven't identified yet. So it keeps looking. Now, that's what's happening.
And once you see it, you can stop trying to answer the question and start doing something that actually helps you get ready for the race. But knowing what's happening, knowing that's what's happening in your head, doesn't automatically make the question feel less urgent. And I get it. I get that it still feels like something you have to know right now.
So let's look at why. Because understanding what's driving that urgency is the first step to loosening its grip. Here's the first thing that your brain is doing without you even realizing it. As humans, our aversion to loss is built extremely deep in our psychology, like deeper than culture or personality or anything else. And get this: losses feel roughly twice as bad as equivalent gains feel good. A DNF doesn't just feel bad, it feels disproportionately worse relative to how good a finish at the same race will feel.
And this goes back to evolution. A loss, like loss of food, could literally mean not surviving. A gain just means better surviving. So the brain learned to wait losses heavily, and it's never stopped. It's not the risk of not finishing that actually scares you. It's the loss that you'll feel if the risk doesn't go your way. This is why it feels so life and death to answer that question about loss. It was.
In addition to that, not all loss is equal. Doubting you can finish a 50k is very different from doubting that you can finish a 300-mile race. The bigger and more important the race is to you, the bigger the potential loss that you might experience, and the more intense the doubt. That's not a weakness. That's not a personal weakness in you. That's your brain correctly identifying that more is at stake. That's all.
And there's another layer here too. If your training has gone well, if you've done everything right, you've built up an expectation in your mind that you'll finish. Like you've earned a finish, or at least you feel like you should have. So a DNF isn't just a loss of the finish, it's a loss of the expected payoff of everything you've invested. The months of early mornings, the hours of long runs, the times you prioritize training when it was hard to do so. The size of the training loss matters too. When you think about finishing, you think about the finish line itself, like crossing the finish line, holding that buckle, that moment, that payoff.
But when you think about not finishing, you don't just think about the DNF. You think about every early morning, every mile, every long run, every time you chose training over something else, all of it, wasted. The loss of the finish plus the loss of everything you invested to get there, that's what's actually at stake in your mind. So it's no wonder that the fear of loss feels bigger, way bigger than the hope of finishing.
And then there's regret. Before the race has even started, you're pre-living the feeling of not finishing. Like you can imagine watching everybody else finish, leaving quietly, the drive home, telling people, answering the "What happened?" question, seeing all the other people in the results who did finish, wondering what you could have done differently. That imagined future regret is vivid, and you're doing it right now. It's doing real emotional work on you today for something that hasn't even happened yet and may never happen.
Regret is one of the most powerful emotions the brain uses to drive behavior. It's designed to keep you from making decisions that you'll regret. But here, in this instance, it's working against you. It's trying to protect you from a future feeling by making you feel it now, ironically, in advance, about a race that you haven't even run yet.
Here's where this gets self-reinforcing. The easier a DNF is to imagine, the more likely it seems. That's how the brain estimates probability, by how easily it can picture something. And every time you worry, every time you lie awake running through the scenarios, you're practicing that DNF in your head. You're making that loss feel more vivid, more detailed, more real every time. Your brain is already writing the story of this race before you've even gotten to the starting line, and it's writing one where you lose. That's not preparation, that's your storytelling brain hijacking you in the present.
And the more vivid that loss is in your head, the more likely it feels. Not because the evidence says so, there's no evidence yet, it's simply because your brain is treating the imagined scenario as evidence. Every time you run that scenario in your head, every time you imagine a DNF, even if it is imagining the same bad scenario over and over, the loss feels more probable. The doubt makes the loss feel more likely in a loop.
Like the doubt generates worry, the worry generates the vivid scenarios in your head that keep you awake at 2:00 a.m. The vivid DNF scenario in your head feels like evidence. The evidence increases how likely the loss seems, and that generates more doubt and over and over and over again. You'd rather not lose than finish. So you spend more time thinking about how to avoid the loss than how to run the race.
And when you genuinely believe the loss is likely, when you talk yourself into that, you start making rash decisions to prevent it. That's why you add more miles, more strength training, hill repeats, speed work. You change your nutrition plan at the last minute, all to prevent a DNF, all to prevent loss. And in the final weeks before the race, you catastrophize every little thing. I've been there, believe me. Like it's too late to get fitter now. So the only move you feel like you have left is damage control. So you gamble, throwing last-minute changes at what already feels like a certain loss. And those panicked decisions often make the outcome worse, not better.
And here's the final piece. Whatever you're thinking about feels more important than it actually is. In the weeks before the race, you're thinking about almost nothing except the race and the fear of losing it. So that loss consumes a disproportionate amount of mental energy in the weeks before the race. The loss you expect feels like it will define you. It won't, but your constant focus makes it feel like it will. The doubt intensifies as race day approaches, not because the threat is growing. You're actually in better shape as the race day approaches. It's because your focus on the potential loss is growing.
And focus inflates importance, reliably, every time. Like six months from now, whatever happens in this race will be one chapter in a longer story of many races, part of you learning to master this sport. But right now, it feels like the whole book, like your whole identity is riding on this race. But it's only your continual focus that's creating that intensity, not the race and not how the race is going to turn out. And knowing that is the beginning of loosening its grip.
So, now you know what's happening. Your brain is doing exactly what brains do, trying to protect you from loss, pre-living regret, making the DNF feel vivid and probable and inevitable. And none of this is a sign that you can't finish. It's just your brain doing its job to protect you from loss, where loss is a part of this sport.
And once you can see that, you have a choice. You can keep trying to answer an unanswerable question, or you can ask a better one. Instead of, "Can I finish this race?" ask any of these three questions. Number one, I have a chance to run this race. How do I want to use it? Number two, what would running this race well look like for me? And number three, how do I want to run this race?
"Can I finish?" makes the finish line something that happens to you. These questions put you in the driver's seat. They shift your brain's power from trying to avoid losing to figuring out how to run the race, which is a much better problem to solve. The question you ask yourself about this race seems simple, seems like nothing, but it's an incredibly powerful choice. It puts your brain's power to use either for you or against you. The fear and doubt isn't coming from your ability to finish the race, it's coming from asking the wrong question and getting lost defending against loss.
When you change the question, you're working with your brain's tendencies rather than against them. You're turning those same powerful processes to your own purpose. That takes a fraction of the mental effort that it takes to fight your way past your own brain and all that doubt. And here's what changes when you change the question. You stop getting trapped in that worry loop, not because the doubt disappears, it might not, but because you know what it is now.
That doubt is a sign that you're asking a question you can't answer yet. That's all it is. It's not a warning, it's not a prediction, it's not a sign that you can't do it. It's just your brain stuck on an unanswerable question. So when the doubt shows up, you don't fight it, you recognize it. You know what your brain is doing and why, and then you redirect to a question that actually moves you forward. That's the skill, and like every skill, it gets stronger every time you use it.
The mental energy you're spending on "Will I finish?" goes into getting ready to run the race where it belongs. All right, you all, that's this week's episode. If you know someone who could use this, share it with them. It might be exactly what they need to hear. See you next week. Bye.
Thanks for listening to Unstoppable Ultra Runner. If you want more ultra talk, mindset tools, and strategies for running with confidence, visit www.susanidonnelly.com. This podcast receives production support from the team at Digital Freedom Productions. That’s it for today’s episode. See you next week.
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