44. Failing Better: How to Learn From a DNF
In ultra running, failure is part of the sport. If you stay in this long enough, you will experience it. The real question is not whether you will fail, but whether failure will stop you or make you stronger.
In this episode, I talk about why DNFs and missed goals feel so threatening, and how fear of failure quietly shapes the races you choose, the risks you take, and how hard you are willing to push. I break down the common pattern runners fall into after a DNF, playing smaller, choosing safer goals, and doubting themselves, and why that reaction actually makes you less capable over time.
I also show you how to fail better. Failing better is not about avoiding DNFs. It is about learning deeply from them so you race smarter, build real confidence, and keep improving over decades. I explain how to treat every race as an experiment, how to extract useful information from both failures and finishes, and how this approach is what allowed me to finish races I once dropped and eventually complete more than 150 hundred mile races.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why a DNF does not mean your training or effort was wasted.
How fear of failure causes runners to tense up and race worse.
What it actually means to fail better in ultra running.
How to use DNFs to refine your race strategy instead of shrinking your goals.
Why every race, whether you finish or not, is testing your personal theory of success.
How learning to fail better makes you unstoppable over time.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
A DNF doesn't make you weaker. What makes you weaker is how you respond to it. There's a way to use DNFs to become unstoppable, and you can learn it.
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 44. Today's topic is failure. Such a fun one, right? Now when I say failure in this episode, what I'm talking about are DNFs, when you don't finish for any reason, and also when you don't hit your time, lap, or mile goal in a race. DNFs and not hitting your goal both count in this episode because we experience both of those things as failure. And failure is one of the most important forces in ultra running. It shapes everything: how you see yourself, what goals you set, the races you sign up for, what risks you take, how hard you push it.
So it's a popular topic, and you probably won't be surprised to hear that this comes up a lot in weekly coaching sessions. Getting past a previous DNF and managing fear of failure ahead is part of what I work on with clients every week. So, this is going to be a valuable episode you're going to want to save and listen to again. And here's why: You're going to fail sometime. The potential is there every race, no matter who you are. It's part of ultra running, and honestly, it's part of what draws us to ultra running. We can't help but be curious about this big, impossible, exciting-looking feat and our own potential and wondering, can I do that?
I talked about this in a recent episode on how I chose to do the 100-mile race version at Across the Years, something I could fail at because there was a cutoff, instead of the 48-hour version of the race that I couldn't fail at because there's no cutoff. The potential for failure is what drew me to the 100-mile version. It's what draws you to races. What we do is by nature challenging. So if you're in the sport long enough, you'll likely DNF a race just by sheer probability. But no one wants to fail. I don't, you don't. And the thought of it plagues ultra runners with fear because you invest untold hours and miles and cross-training and learning and all kinds of things into your goal.
And you work it into your life. You train around work and family and all your other real-life obligations. You temporarily set aside other important priorities to give this thing top billing. And what you do in this sport also becomes part of who you are and how you see yourself. Think about it. Every impossible finish line that you cross, every moment that you push through the darkest, deepest doubt in a race, every time you quit or fall short, it all shapes how you see yourself, your capability, and your strength, your identity. So when failure looms ahead, when it threatens, it's not just a race that's on the line, it's who you are.
And this is one reason that I love coaching my clients on failure. It helps them build unstoppability, no matter what happens in a race, and that feels so strong.
So, here's what I want you to know about becoming unstoppable. Becoming unstoppable isn't about never failing. It's about becoming stronger than failure, so it can't stop you. Let's look at how runners typically fail. It typically starts at the beginning. You do everything you can to limit your risk of failure. You try and control everything, at least everything you possibly can, so that the race goes your way. Like, we would all control the weather if we could because you have a lot riding on the big race, and you feel like you can't tolerate failing.
So the closer the race gets, the more nervous you get, but the fear of failing is unnerving. There's so much that's not in your control, and you don't know whether you'll be able to do it or not, whether you'll be able to finish this race or not. So when you finally get in the race, you tense up because you got so much riding on the line. And then a few things go wrong, and unexpected things happen, and your fear spirals out of control, and it throws the race. You make anxious mistakes that you would never make otherwise, and your mind's a mess, even before fatigue sets in, making thinking harder. And you're probably not problem-solving; you're just trying to survive through the race, through the fear.
So at best, when you're running like this, you miss your goal. And at worst, you get pulled by cutoff, or you end up dropping. So, now you've failed. You've lost everything. It feels like all that time and effort, all the work you put in, months and months of work, wasted. I hear this from so many runners. And on top of that, you're embarrassed for believing that you could do this thing, and you feel like you have to answer to everybody and explain why you didn't and pretend you're not as disappointed as you actually are. So the whole thing ends up feeling awful, something that you never want to experience again. Like all that work for nothing.
So now, you're probably going to want to avoid failing. You distance yourself from the risk that you will fail and stick to races and goals that you're probably not as excited about but are way less likely to fail at. And you call it being reasonable, and it works. It's a valid solution. I mean, you don't fail, or at least you fail a lot less, and you definitely don't have to stress as much about finishing, but here's what you also don't do.
You don't grow. You don't build your race skills. You don't improve your tolerance for uncertainty. You don't get smarter at when to push and when not to, how far up the climb that you want to run versus walk. You don't learn how to solve problems in your own unique way. And you don't discover how it feels to dig deep. And you don't get to prove that you can stay calm and laser-focused when you're mere minutes, maybe even seconds, ahead of cutoff.
You don't build confidence in yourself. So you end up looking around and thinking everybody else knows things that you don't, that they naturally know things and can do things that you can't. When you react this way to failure, you end up feeling less sure and less confident and less capable. You get caught in this cycle where it feels like you're weaker and slower and more likely to fail than everyone else. Like you're just not as good at this thing as the runners around you, but that is a lie.
Because failure isn't a waste. You are gaining knowledge and experience and wisdom every race you run, whether you finish it or not. You've got the raw ingredients to build real, honest confidence and capability, to develop your own understanding of what works for you. You just don't see it yet. So you're throwing that knowledge and that experience and wisdom away. And here's one simple thing that will turn this cycle around: learn to fail better. It's a skill. It's not an ability that you either have or don't and not a personality trait or talent. This, thankfully, is a skill that you can practice and get better at, starting with your very next race or your very next long run.
So, what am I talking about here? What does failing better actually mean? It means learning better from failure so you can race better. What I'm talking about here is deep learning. Now, most runners will say they learn from a DNF or they learn more from DNF than they have from all their finishes, but it's usually surface-level learning. And what they actually learned instead is just that they don't want to DNF again. They don't want to fail again. They don't want to feel that way again. That's not learning. That's just pain avoidance. And what it leads to is playing smaller and not racing stronger.
Real learning, what I'm talking about here, means mining your failure for what actually went wrong and how to fix it, in detail, not to limit yourself but to sharpen yourself. Here's how it works. You dig into your fails and your successes for what works and what doesn't. And you extract that data, and then you use what you learn to refine your theory of what it takes for you to finish. Now when I say theory, I mean a working hypothesis about what you need to succeed. Things like, I need to eat 200 calories per hour to maintain my energy, or I do better when I walk the uphills from mile 60 on, or I need to hit this aid station by this time to give myself enough time to go slower at night because I go slower at night.
Every race you run tests your theory, your current theory. Every race you run is an experiment. And every experiment, whether you finish it or not, gives you data about what's working and what isn't. When something doesn't work, then you don't just feel bad about it and beat yourself up about it. You adjust your theory and eliminate what failed. You refine your approach, and then you run another experiment, your next race, to test your new theory. It's a scientific method applied to ultra running. And here's how you know you're failing better. If you do fail again, you fail differently. You make new mistakes, and you make fewer novice mistakes. Your failures advance, if that makes sense. You fail at a higher level.
There's that familiar quote from Thomas Edison about inventing the commercial light bulb. He tested thousands of materials and ran reportedly about 1,200 experiments before succeeding. And about all of that failing, that's a lot of failing, he said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." You can do the same thing with a DNF. Think about it this way: failing better is progress because you're finding things that don't work and eliminating them. You're making your theory more accurate. Here's an example from my own racing.
Decades ago, I dropped out of Leadville 100 and Umstead 100 twice in the same years for the same reason at each race. That's a lot of getting the same result. It was painfully clear that I needed to do something different. But instead of thinking that the thing I needed to do differently was pick easier, shorter races, I decided to pick apart what hadn't worked, to actually figure out how to solve the problem, what the problem actually was, and how to solve it so that I could finish those races and then go on to run bigger ones. I decided to use my failures, and if I was going to fail again at those races, it was going to be for a harder, different reason. I was going to fail better.
My current theory at that time about how to finish wasn't working, so I had to figure out what was wrong and adjust it. That's how I came back and finished both races the third year. And it's exactly how I got to 153 100-mile finishes, because I've never stopped learning how to fail better. Here's where this gets even more powerful. I never stop learning how to fail better even though I finish races all the time. Because I don't wait to use this skill with just DNFs. You can use this even when you succeed. Even if you finish a race and hit your goal, you still make mistakes along the way.
Every successful race involves mistakes, things you'd do differently next time if you could. So you can expand this skill even further. You can use it with races that you succeed at, and you can also use it with long runs in your weekly training. Like, what mistakes or fails did you make on that long run last weekend, and how could you eliminate them or fail better next week? This just, if you do this enough, it just becomes the way you see everything. Failures aren't setbacks. They're steps forward. This is how you build a deep understanding of your own capabilities, how you gain real command over your ultra running, how you move from novice to experienced to veteran, and keep going beyond that.
There's really, literally, no limit to the mastery that you can build this way, and it is a deeply satisfying, joyful, sustainable way to be an ultra runner because you're always learning. You're always getting better. You never plateau. It is so fun to run ultras that way.
So here's what I want you to take away from this. Failure is part of ultra running. You can't avoid it. But letting it and the fear of it limit you, that's a choice. You can let a DNF limit you, you can play smaller, you can choose safer goals, you can doubt yourself more as a result of it. That's failing the usual way. Or, you can mine it for everything it's worth, extract all the lessons, build up what works, eliminate what doesn't work, and show up the next race with a better theory of what it takes for you to finish and then run a smarter experiment.
So even if you fail again, you're failing at a higher level. You're making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones like I was. You're learning and getting better at ultra running. That's failing better. Every single race you run, finish or not, gives you another chance to do this, to build your own deep understanding of what works for you, to become unstoppable not because you never fail, because failure can't stop you. That's how you keep growing stronger over decades. It's not talent or natural toughness. It's the willingness to fail better every single time you do.
So, what will you do with your next failure? Because the question isn't if, but when. And if you know how to use it, if you're willing to mind that failure instead of run from it, it's not a failure at all. It's the thing that makes you unstoppable.
All right, you all, that's this week's episode. Thank you for listening, and if you know somebody who could use this, please 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 44. Today's topic is failure. Such a fun one, right? Now when I say failure in this episode, what I'm talking about are DNFs, when you don't finish for any reason, and also when you don't hit your time, lap, or mile goal in a race. DNFs and not hitting your goal both count in this episode because we experience both of those things as failure. And failure is one of the most important forces in ultra running. It shapes everything: how you see yourself, what goals you set, the races you sign up for, what risks you take, how hard you push it.
So it's a popular topic, and you probably won't be surprised to hear that this comes up a lot in weekly coaching sessions. Getting past a previous DNF and managing fear of failure ahead is part of what I work on with clients every week. So, this is going to be a valuable episode you're going to want to save and listen to again. And here's why: You're going to fail sometime. The potential is there every race, no matter who you are. It's part of ultra running, and honestly, it's part of what draws us to ultra running. We can't help but be curious about this big, impossible, exciting-looking feat and our own potential and wondering, can I do that?
I talked about this in a recent episode on how I chose to do the 100-mile race version at Across the Years, something I could fail at because there was a cutoff, instead of the 48-hour version of the race that I couldn't fail at because there's no cutoff. The potential for failure is what drew me to the 100-mile version. It's what draws you to races. What we do is by nature challenging. So if you're in the sport long enough, you'll likely DNF a race just by sheer probability. But no one wants to fail. I don't, you don't. And the thought of it plagues ultra runners with fear because you invest untold hours and miles and cross-training and learning and all kinds of things into your goal.
And you work it into your life. You train around work and family and all your other real-life obligations. You temporarily set aside other important priorities to give this thing top billing. And what you do in this sport also becomes part of who you are and how you see yourself. Think about it. Every impossible finish line that you cross, every moment that you push through the darkest, deepest doubt in a race, every time you quit or fall short, it all shapes how you see yourself, your capability, and your strength, your identity. So when failure looms ahead, when it threatens, it's not just a race that's on the line, it's who you are.
And this is one reason that I love coaching my clients on failure. It helps them build unstoppability, no matter what happens in a race, and that feels so strong.
So, here's what I want you to know about becoming unstoppable. Becoming unstoppable isn't about never failing. It's about becoming stronger than failure, so it can't stop you. Let's look at how runners typically fail. It typically starts at the beginning. You do everything you can to limit your risk of failure. You try and control everything, at least everything you possibly can, so that the race goes your way. Like, we would all control the weather if we could because you have a lot riding on the big race, and you feel like you can't tolerate failing.
So the closer the race gets, the more nervous you get, but the fear of failing is unnerving. There's so much that's not in your control, and you don't know whether you'll be able to do it or not, whether you'll be able to finish this race or not. So when you finally get in the race, you tense up because you got so much riding on the line. And then a few things go wrong, and unexpected things happen, and your fear spirals out of control, and it throws the race. You make anxious mistakes that you would never make otherwise, and your mind's a mess, even before fatigue sets in, making thinking harder. And you're probably not problem-solving; you're just trying to survive through the race, through the fear.
So at best, when you're running like this, you miss your goal. And at worst, you get pulled by cutoff, or you end up dropping. So, now you've failed. You've lost everything. It feels like all that time and effort, all the work you put in, months and months of work, wasted. I hear this from so many runners. And on top of that, you're embarrassed for believing that you could do this thing, and you feel like you have to answer to everybody and explain why you didn't and pretend you're not as disappointed as you actually are. So the whole thing ends up feeling awful, something that you never want to experience again. Like all that work for nothing.
So now, you're probably going to want to avoid failing. You distance yourself from the risk that you will fail and stick to races and goals that you're probably not as excited about but are way less likely to fail at. And you call it being reasonable, and it works. It's a valid solution. I mean, you don't fail, or at least you fail a lot less, and you definitely don't have to stress as much about finishing, but here's what you also don't do.
You don't grow. You don't build your race skills. You don't improve your tolerance for uncertainty. You don't get smarter at when to push and when not to, how far up the climb that you want to run versus walk. You don't learn how to solve problems in your own unique way. And you don't discover how it feels to dig deep. And you don't get to prove that you can stay calm and laser-focused when you're mere minutes, maybe even seconds, ahead of cutoff.
You don't build confidence in yourself. So you end up looking around and thinking everybody else knows things that you don't, that they naturally know things and can do things that you can't. When you react this way to failure, you end up feeling less sure and less confident and less capable. You get caught in this cycle where it feels like you're weaker and slower and more likely to fail than everyone else. Like you're just not as good at this thing as the runners around you, but that is a lie.
Because failure isn't a waste. You are gaining knowledge and experience and wisdom every race you run, whether you finish it or not. You've got the raw ingredients to build real, honest confidence and capability, to develop your own understanding of what works for you. You just don't see it yet. So you're throwing that knowledge and that experience and wisdom away. And here's one simple thing that will turn this cycle around: learn to fail better. It's a skill. It's not an ability that you either have or don't and not a personality trait or talent. This, thankfully, is a skill that you can practice and get better at, starting with your very next race or your very next long run.
So, what am I talking about here? What does failing better actually mean? It means learning better from failure so you can race better. What I'm talking about here is deep learning. Now, most runners will say they learn from a DNF or they learn more from DNF than they have from all their finishes, but it's usually surface-level learning. And what they actually learned instead is just that they don't want to DNF again. They don't want to fail again. They don't want to feel that way again. That's not learning. That's just pain avoidance. And what it leads to is playing smaller and not racing stronger.
Real learning, what I'm talking about here, means mining your failure for what actually went wrong and how to fix it, in detail, not to limit yourself but to sharpen yourself. Here's how it works. You dig into your fails and your successes for what works and what doesn't. And you extract that data, and then you use what you learn to refine your theory of what it takes for you to finish. Now when I say theory, I mean a working hypothesis about what you need to succeed. Things like, I need to eat 200 calories per hour to maintain my energy, or I do better when I walk the uphills from mile 60 on, or I need to hit this aid station by this time to give myself enough time to go slower at night because I go slower at night.
Every race you run tests your theory, your current theory. Every race you run is an experiment. And every experiment, whether you finish it or not, gives you data about what's working and what isn't. When something doesn't work, then you don't just feel bad about it and beat yourself up about it. You adjust your theory and eliminate what failed. You refine your approach, and then you run another experiment, your next race, to test your new theory. It's a scientific method applied to ultra running. And here's how you know you're failing better. If you do fail again, you fail differently. You make new mistakes, and you make fewer novice mistakes. Your failures advance, if that makes sense. You fail at a higher level.
There's that familiar quote from Thomas Edison about inventing the commercial light bulb. He tested thousands of materials and ran reportedly about 1,200 experiments before succeeding. And about all of that failing, that's a lot of failing, he said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." You can do the same thing with a DNF. Think about it this way: failing better is progress because you're finding things that don't work and eliminating them. You're making your theory more accurate. Here's an example from my own racing.
Decades ago, I dropped out of Leadville 100 and Umstead 100 twice in the same years for the same reason at each race. That's a lot of getting the same result. It was painfully clear that I needed to do something different. But instead of thinking that the thing I needed to do differently was pick easier, shorter races, I decided to pick apart what hadn't worked, to actually figure out how to solve the problem, what the problem actually was, and how to solve it so that I could finish those races and then go on to run bigger ones. I decided to use my failures, and if I was going to fail again at those races, it was going to be for a harder, different reason. I was going to fail better.
My current theory at that time about how to finish wasn't working, so I had to figure out what was wrong and adjust it. That's how I came back and finished both races the third year. And it's exactly how I got to 153 100-mile finishes, because I've never stopped learning how to fail better. Here's where this gets even more powerful. I never stop learning how to fail better even though I finish races all the time. Because I don't wait to use this skill with just DNFs. You can use this even when you succeed. Even if you finish a race and hit your goal, you still make mistakes along the way.
Every successful race involves mistakes, things you'd do differently next time if you could. So you can expand this skill even further. You can use it with races that you succeed at, and you can also use it with long runs in your weekly training. Like, what mistakes or fails did you make on that long run last weekend, and how could you eliminate them or fail better next week? This just, if you do this enough, it just becomes the way you see everything. Failures aren't setbacks. They're steps forward. This is how you build a deep understanding of your own capabilities, how you gain real command over your ultra running, how you move from novice to experienced to veteran, and keep going beyond that.
There's really, literally, no limit to the mastery that you can build this way, and it is a deeply satisfying, joyful, sustainable way to be an ultra runner because you're always learning. You're always getting better. You never plateau. It is so fun to run ultras that way.
So here's what I want you to take away from this. Failure is part of ultra running. You can't avoid it. But letting it and the fear of it limit you, that's a choice. You can let a DNF limit you, you can play smaller, you can choose safer goals, you can doubt yourself more as a result of it. That's failing the usual way. Or, you can mine it for everything it's worth, extract all the lessons, build up what works, eliminate what doesn't work, and show up the next race with a better theory of what it takes for you to finish and then run a smarter experiment.
So even if you fail again, you're failing at a higher level. You're making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones like I was. You're learning and getting better at ultra running. That's failing better. Every single race you run, finish or not, gives you another chance to do this, to build your own deep understanding of what works for you, to become unstoppable not because you never fail, because failure can't stop you. That's how you keep growing stronger over decades. It's not talent or natural toughness. It's the willingness to fail better every single time you do.
So, what will you do with your next failure? Because the question isn't if, but when. And if you know how to use it, if you're willing to mind that failure instead of run from it, it's not a failure at all. It's the thing that makes you unstoppable.
All right, you all, that's this week's episode. Thank you for listening, and if you know somebody who could use this, please 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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