First off, it was your race and your result so you’re allowed to feel however you want about it. If you’re happy, great. It’s fine to be disappointed. And extremely freaking frustrated can explain a couple dozen of my ultra results. Don’t let other people tell you how you should feel. Acceptance is step one.
Training for hundred milers are hard. Running them are hard. Recovering from them physically? Yeah, just as hard. And yet we never stop to think how difficult the mental aftermath will be. Like we’ll wake up the next day and will be completely (or even partially) satisfied with how things went. This year’s ES100 had a 52% finisher rate so I’m willing to bet that 48% of the runners were struggling mentally with how their race ended up. I’d also wager that most of the other 52% were at least partially disappointed with their result. This is hard for people who don’t run ultras/hundreds to understand. Like how could you be anything but ecstatic with finishing a hundred mile race? Especially one as difficult and challenging as Eastern States. The truth is that people who attempt these races are looking for big challenges so set aggressive goals.
Aggressive Goals = Likely Failure
No one likes to fail at what they set out to accomplish. It doesn’t matter if it’s an easy or hard goal. Failure sucks. You would think that it would be easier to brush off coming up short at something incredibly hard, but it’s just as difficult to recover from. Mostly because of the time and effort that went into it. The more challenging the goal, the more you put into achieving it. The more you put into the attempt, the more failure stings. [But I averaged 60mpw and did all those stupid hill repeats!] It’s impossible not to think of all that time and effort as being wasted. The reality is that it was exceptionally useful, just not in the way you thought it was.
Hundreds As An Exercise In Probability Management
Your typical hundred mile race has a finish rate of 65-70%. ES100 is in the 50-60% range. There is a long list of factors (you know them all) that will impact performance and your ability to finish a hundred. The whole point of training isn’t to magically get you up to a 100%, guaranteed finish. That’s not going to happen (LOL). It’s to nudge you up to an ES100 average chance if you’re less fit/experienced or up to the 70-75% range if you know what you’re doing. Maybe those of us with lots of experience crack 90% likely to finish. That’s not the chances to hit our top race goals, just the more realistic ones.
The Unhelpful Conclusion
The only solution I’ve found to dealing with a less than satisfying race result is to have a bunch of them. Like anything in life, the more experience you have in something, the better you are able to deal with it. Heck, this has happened so often to me over the years, that I can now get past my over-inflated expectations before I’ve even finished a race.
In all seriousness, practice self love. It’s OK to set big goals. It’s OK to fall short of them. It’s OK to be imperfect. If this was easy, we’d all be doing something different.