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One Second Too Slow: Perseverance After Failure
We’ve all been there: months of dreaming, hours of training, and meticulous planning for the day when you meet that coveted qualifying standard.
And then you don’t.
To say that you’re crushed is the understatement of the century.
What went wrong?
There are so many factors that influence a bad race and not a single one of them has anything to do with your level of effort. Sleep, nutrition, hydration, ability to focus on race day, etc., but that is a separate conversation altogether.
Bottom line? Your teammates are traveling to that championship meet and you will be staying behind. The sting of that reality is almost unbearable.
So, what next? How do you live with yourself after failing to rise to your own standard of excellence? How do you maintain your level of intensity when in the end it was not good enough? How do you preserve your self-worth after missing that qualifying standard?
Focus on the positives.
When a race falls short, we pick it apart searching for what went wrong and then we dump it in the dust bin without further discussion. But every race, even the bad ones, contains positive elements and you need to identify those and preserve them in your race plan to be used next…
