Failure

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 240 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today how to handle setbacks, failures and disappointments.

Look, when it comes to going after big goals like losing weight and keeping it off or running your fastest marathon, it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will experience some form of setbacks, failures and disappointments.

There’s no such thing as success without some level of setbacks and challenges along the way. The problem is that when most people experience setbacks, failures, disappointments, they tend to see them as insurmountable obstacles, and oftentimes they lead to them just giving up altogether. Okay, so today, how to handle setbacks, failures and disappointments, so you can get back on track and actually accomplish all of those goals.

But first, if you’re interested in getting stronger, running faster, running longer, losing some weight, and getting leaner, you need to change the things that you are doing, because whatever you’re doing is probably not working for you. Nothing changes if nothing changes, right?

The secret though to all of this is doing these new things, making these changes and doing them consistently. So this is where coaching really helps, because trying to stay on track by yourself is very difficult.

It’s very challenging. I’ve done this a million times, and it’s very challenging, and I always slid back into old behaviors until I got a coach and I had somebody there, guiding me every step of the way, holding me accountable, calling me out when I started slipping back into those old behaviors, and, most importantly, never letting me quit.

So if you’re ready to start doing new things and you’re ready to, you know, make sure that you never quit. Let’s work on getting you there. Just go to my website, runningleancoaching.com, click on work with me, and I will show you exactly how to become the most badass version of yourself, yet cool.

Okay, so here’s the topic of the day, how to handle setbacks, failures and disappointments. So the reason I wanted to bring this up today is because I work with a lot of different types of clients, all going through a lot of different stuff. They all have different goals, but a few things happened recently where several people had some failures, disappointments or setbacks, and I talked them through how to deal with that stuff, but I thought we could all learn from this here today.

So one of my clients was training for a marathon, and had some personal stuff come up in her life, some stuff she had to deal with that’s going to take time and she needed to just drop out of training for this marathon altogether.

She was going to run a fall marathon, and made a decision. It was a tough decision to make, but she made this decision that she had to stop training for the marathon because it just didn’t work with the things that are going on in her life. And so she’s very disappointed with this.

It’s that’s a tough thing to do, to basically say, hey, I’ve got this goal. I’ve been working on this for a while now. You know, I’ve only got a couple of months now to go before my race, and to just say I can’t do it. I just can’t do it because these other things are more important.

Somebody else I talked to recently had been doing amazing in her training, amazing, and showed up for her race and for the first 16 miles, was on track for her marathon, PR, and then all of a sudden, experienced some weird cramping issue in her quads. You know, this is a very strange thing, and honestly, you know, we talked about all the things she was doing.

She was doing everything right, sticking with her electrolytes. She had been training properly, strength training, doing all the things. All her training runs have been great, and then this day shows up, and she ends up having this cramping issue, and ends up, you know, completely missing her PR. Okay, that’s very disappointing, right?

Somebody else I talked to recently just was diagnosed with covid, and so has to take time off. Has to, you know, cannot exercise at all, because it just does not have the energy for it’s going to take a little bit of time to come back from that, you know, she’s worried that it’s going to impact her marathon training, and it will set her back a little bit, you know, set her back a couple of weeks.

So all of these different things that have been kind of happening with people all recently. So I thought, you know, this is probably a good time for us to talk about when we have these setbacks, these failures, these disappointments, and how to handle them. And I’ll share my own story.

You know, recently I have been, I’m training for a faster half marathon to run a faster half marathon in the fall, and I’ve got, you know, a few months of training still to go, but I ended up with a weird like, uh, glute tendon, uh, issue that has set me back a little bit, and then when that started to get better, I ended up having this adductor pain that has really impacted my running, like running at all hurts a lot, and especially doing the faster training that I have been doing, like in, you know, high speed intervals, that kind of stuff, really makes that flare up.

And so I’ve had to take a little bit of time off, right? So I’m experiencing a little bit of a setback as well. And we look at these things a lot of times. A lot of people look at these setbacks, these failures, these disappointing things that happen, and they look at them as the end and a like the end of everything, like, you know, I’m never going to run again. This is the worst thing that could ever happen.

And I just want to share with you that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can learn how to handle these things and learn from them and actually come out the other side of these things better than where we are today, or even before we experience these setbacks or failures.

So the first thing I want you to understand is that failures, setbacks, disappointments, they are to be expected. So this is one of those things where people wish they didn’t happen, but honestly, life does not work that way. Have you ever had anything long term go perfectly well, like with no issues whatsoever? No, there’s always bumps along the road, always, always, always.

And so you have to expect that these things are going to happen. You know, I have this expectation that my training was going to go perfectly and there was going to be no issues whatsoever. And as soon as I had these little injuries flare up, I was reminded that we can never expect things to go perfectly, perfectly smoothly, right?

It’s kind of like the weight loss journey. You know, people think there should be this straight line from where your weight is today to where it should be, you know, six months from now, and it should just go down perfectly at a perfect angle, and there’s no bumps along that path, it’s just a straight line. And you know what? That is not reality.

The reality is is that line goes up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, and does that forever, and hopefully it’s trending in the right direction. But you have to understand that there’s no such thing as just like smooth sailing when you’re talking about these big, complicated, long term goals.

You know, training for a marathon, right there? You’re talking about four months, five months, depending on the plan you’re on or just the running part, you know, just the training part, not to mention the time that goes into building the base and everything else.

Do you really think you’re never going to have a bad workout, or never going to have a failure, or never going to have any kind of setback? It’s just got to be something that we expect. It is part of the process.

So as soon as you accept this and you understand that failure, setbacks, disappointments, are going to happen, it makes it much easier to deal with them when they do happen, and we don’t tend to see them as the end of the world like this is not the end of anything. It’s just part of the process. You know, you have to fail in order to succeed, you know.

So, it’s one of those things where once you understand this, and once you accept the fact that they are going to happen, then it makes everything a lot easier. And you know, it’s one of those concepts where once we have acceptance of the way things are, like when you have an injury or, you know, something happens, and, you know, you get a cramp and you don’t your race doesn’t go the way you want it to, then once we have acceptance of that, it it eases the tension within us, like the inner turmoil that we experience.

We experience that inner turmoil because we think things should be different than they are. Right? I’m going to say that again, we experience inner turmoil because we think things should be different than they are. What if we just accepted that this is the way things are and it’s okay?

It’s okay that I have an injury right now. It’s okay that, you know, there’s a little bit of a, you know, setback in my training. It’s okay that I may not hit this goal that I have for my half marathon in November. It’s all okay.

The important thing is that I’m going to continue to show up for myself every single day no matter what. I’m going to continue to do what I need to do to stay on track, even though we have these disappointments. Okay.

The next thing I want to explain to you is that you need to learn how to increase your failure tolerance. So failure tolerance is where you learn how to fail with some toughness. You know, you learn how to tolerate failure and stop looking at it as the end of the world. You know?

So you when we fail, often we get good at failing. I know it sounds really weird to say that. It sounds kind of counterintuitive, but it’s actually a really good thing to learn how to be a good failure, you need to learn how to fail.

Well, you know, because, listen, if failure is part of the process, and we expect ourselves to fail, and we know that we might have to fail 10 times before we succeed, then every time you fail, it’s like, hey, I failed.

There’s one step closer to my goal because I had this setback or this disappointment or I failed. So, you know, we just have to understand that failure is part of the process, accept it and then learn how to get good at failing. You know, develop a little bit of a tougher skin around this, because when we have more failure tolerance, when we’re better at failing, failure or setbacks or disappointments or challenges are no longer the end all. It’s just part of the process, right?

We develop strength, we develop mental toughness, we develop resilience. You know, you become unstoppable when you develop failure tolerance, because there’s really no such thing as failure. You know, there’s only feedback. You know, there’s either you, you fail and you, you know, keep going, you fail, you keep going. You fail, you keep going, or you just quit. That’s the only way you can really fail is if you give up, right?

So it’s either succeed or quit. Which do you want for yourself? So you may not have hit your marathon PR. Big whoop, guess what? Try it next time there’s another marathon in a few months, there’s another marathon next spring, there’s another marathon next fall.

It took me a long time to, you know, reach certain goals for myself and in running, and I ran with some friends who, one friend in particular, who really struggled for years to break four hours in a marathon, that was her goal, and she couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it.

And then all of a sudden, like she’s one of the fastest people I know now, she stuck with it. She eventually, you know, hit that goal, and then just kept surpassing it and surpassing it. So the only way you can fail is if you give up. So don’t ever give up, right?

Increase your failure tolerance. Good. Get good at failing. The next thing that I want you to understand here is that you’re gonna have to learn from your failures. You have to learn what works and what doesn’t, and then you’re gonna have to course correct when you need to, like, sometimes you’re gonna learn some things and you need to make some changes.

Great, make the changes, and then try again, make the changes, and then keep moving forward. Life is a learning process, and it’s completely different for each one of us. So just keep that in mind that nobody you know does all of this stuff exactly the same way.

We all have to learn on our own. We all have to learn our own way of getting through these failures, setbacks and disappointments. So you gotta try something, and it may not work for you, that’s okay, you know, it’s like when it comes to, you know, learning what foods to eat that help you to, you know, get fat, adapted, lose weight, you know, have all the energy you need for running that is not something that is a one size fits all.

I’m just going to tell you that it is very different for each person that I work with. And so each person, they have to learn what works for them and what doesn’t. And the only way you can learn is to try some things, and sometimes they don’t work. Big whoop. So they don’t work. Okay, try something else.

And you know, one of these things is that people think that you know, that the first thing they try should work, or else they’re gonna quit. And if you have that attitude, that’s the wrong attitude to have. We’ll just say it that way.

Okay, the right attitude is that you have to try some things, and then some of these things will work and some of them won’t work, but you always have to learn from your failures, from your setbacks, you’re going to have some things happen, like, you know, cramping during a marathon.

It’s kind of a weird situation. What causes that? Is it a lack of electrolytes? Is it, you know, the way you’re training? Is it that you ran too hard the first half? Like, there’s a lot of factors to consider here, so you have to look at all those different things and then determine, like, yeah, maybe I could have done a better job with the electrolytes, or maybe I just went out too hard for the first 13 or 14 miles. You never know.

And then, like, you got to practice this stuff in your training, you know, make sure that you’re making some minor changes and seeing how they work for you. And then you got to try again next time. And there’s no guarantee that the next time you try something that that’s going to work either.

So I know it’s a tough thing to accept, but we have to accept that this is all a learning process, and as long as you’re learning from these setbacks, failures, disappointments, that’s the key right here. You have to learn from these things, because listen, these things all cause you to grow.

Every challenge is a chance for you to level up. It’s a chance for you to learn something new. It’s a chance for you to grow, to evolve, to become more. It’s these challenges that change us. You don’t grow by, say, staying safe and small and never trying anything big or never failing.

You grow by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone by going for those big goals. It’s only through facing and enduring failures that you become the person that you want to become the most badass version of you is out there on the other side of failures and setbacks and disappointments and challenges. You just got to get there.

You got to get through all that stuff in order to get to the other side. So don’t look at these failures and stuff as the end. Look at it as a springboard to growth for you, okay, and listen through this whole process, you have to have your own back.

You cannot succeed in running your fastest marathon, losing weight and keeping it off, training for an ultra marathon, if you’re constantly beating yourself up every time you go off your food plan, or every time you have a bad training run, or every time you don’t hit a PR in a race, you cannot beat yourself up over this stuff. You have to you can’t hate yourself to your goals like you have to love yourself through this whole process, even when you do something dumb and you cheat, or you get lazy, or you don’t show up for yourself, you know, or you stay on the couch and binge watch Netflix instead of training like you’re supposed, who cares?

None of that stuff matters. We all do stuff like that sometimes, but you have to learn how to build trust in yourself and build a strong relationship with yourself and build confidence in yourself. So that’s why I always talk about making a plan, and it’s so important that we make a solid plan and then we stick to that plan.

We make a plan and we stick to the plan. That’s how you build trust in yourself. That’s how you build confidence in yourself. That’s how you make progress, and when you’re beating yourself up constantly, you’re just grinding yourself down. You’re not building trust in yourself. You’re breaking down the trust in yourself.

You’re not building a strong relationship with yourself. You’re breaking that relationship down. You’re not building confidence. You’re losing confidence. Sense. So you got to have your own back. Gotta love yourself through this whole process. Yeah, learn from your mistakes.

Okay, listen, what did I do that I could have done better, you know, and then go from there. But don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s great that you are introspective and you want to learn and stuff like that, but don’t, you know, beat yourself up and hate on yourself through this process. That doesn’t work.

And this might sound a little counterintuitive, but stop focusing on the end result. Instead focus on the process of change. Because when you commit to the process, and this is different for each person, whatever that looks like for you.

But you have to commit to what you need to do each day. So if that’s, you know, okay, I’m gonna run my fastest marathon instead of, you know, focusing on the end result. This is the time I need to see on the clock. Focus on what you need to do every single day to get you there because when you commit to the work, and you’ll fail along the way, and that’s okay, all of that stuff is expected.

It’s normal, right? It’s part of the process. We’re going to learn from all that stuff, but when we commit to doing the daily work, we will eventually get there. Yeah, it’s important to have that goal out there in the future, but commit to what you’re doing each and every day. That’s what’s going to get you there. That’s what’s going to help you to stay on track. Okay?

And then the last bit of this is that you really need to work on reframing these things, these setbacks, these failures, these disappointments. You got to stop looking at them as the end or as the worst thing that could possibly happen, you know. And one way of reframing is to stop asking yourself terrible questions and start asking yourself more positive questions. And I’ll give you an example here. So terrible questions are questions like this.

Why does this always happen to me? Why am I such a failure? Why can I ever do anything right? How come I never stick to my plan? Why is this so hard for me? Why can’t I ever catch a break? Okay, I’ll tell you why these are terrible questions.

When you ask yourself a question, your brain will go to work to find answers for those questions. Your brain immediately goes to work when you ask yourself a question inside your own brain, your brain says, Ah, let me go find an answer to that. So when you say, Why am I such a failure, your brain will go to work and find all kinds of reasons why you are such a failure. Does this help you at all? No, it does not.

Spoiler alert, it does not help you at all. You’re just beating yourself up when you ask yourself, like, why is this so hard for me? Your brain is going to go to work finding the answer. Why is this so hard? Well, here’s all the reasons why this is so hard for you Patrick, right. This is not helpful at all. Do not ask these dumb questions. All right, these are disempowering questions.

They relinquish you of your power. They caused you to play the victim, like you’re just looking for someone or something to blame. And so you go outside yourself, and you’re looking for answers like, you know, why is this so hard? How come I can never catch a break? And this is just negativity, negativity multiplied and disempowering. It doesn’t help you at all. Don’t ask dumb questions like that of yourself.

Instead, we want to look at how we can reframe our setbacks, our failures, our disappointments. And so I want you to ask yourself better questions. Here are some better questions you can start asking yourself, why am I making this mean about me? Like, what’s the story I’m telling myself about this setback or failure or disappointment? What’s good about this problem?

This is one of my favorite questions. You can ask yourself, What’s good about this problem? Because it’s something that sounds pretty counterintuitive, like it’s a problem. Of course, there’s nothing good, but there’s always ways that you can reframe a problem and start to look at it in the positive, and you can actually look at the silver lining.

Stop focusing on the cloud, and start focusing on the silver lining. What is good about this problem? There’s always something you can find. What can I learn from this? You know? What can I do to change this conversation.

What’s another way of looking at this failure, this setback, this disappointment, what am I willing to do or not do in order to make this work, in order to get through this? What can I do to turn this around? What can I do to get back on track right away? What’s my very next step towards improving this? What am I going to do differently next time? These are powerful questions.

These are empowering questions, because when you start to ask yourself stuff like, what’s good about this problem, your brain goes to work looking for answers. What can I learn about this? How can I change this? What am I going to do differently next time? What’s my next step towards improving this situation?

These are amazing questions to ask yourself. What’s another way of looking at this? Great questions, because you’re going to start to look at things much differently. You’re going to start to be able to reframe failure setbacks, you’re going to start to look at these disappointments not as the end of the world, but it’s just part of the process, and something that you can actually learn from and grow from.

You can become more, you can absolutely still crush your goals. These setbacks are usually just small little moments in time. You know, this injury that I’m dealing with right now, it’s getting better. You know, it’s been a couple of weeks where I’ve had to take time off of running. I’ve run, like, once in two weeks, and I gotta tell you, not super stoked about that, like, I’m not super happy that I’m not running right now.

I love running. It’s my happy place. It feels good. You know? And I know that my training has taken a little bit of a step back, and it’s okay. It’s a small amount of time, really, a few weeks, in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal. You know, when I look at how many years I’ve been running, and all the marathons I’ve run, over 20 marathons. I don’t know how many halves and Ultras and all these other events that I’ve done.

And I look at all of this stuff, and I’ve, I’ve dealt with knee injuries and other types of injuries that had me dropping out of races. You know, or not being able to run them, or not being able to run a marathon that season because of an injury. I’ve had all that stuff happen to me, and I’m still at it, I’m still running, and I’m still healthy, and I still feel amazing, and I still love running.

So look at these things as you know, just minor, little setbacks, little blips on the radar, that when you look back on them, they’re no big, they’re not a big deal. They’re not that big of a deal, you know, and sometimes they are a little bit of a bigger deal, and that’s okay too, you know, if you got to take a few months off or whatever, like, all of this stuff is fine, like it is all fine, just think about it that way. Okay, start reframing what this stuff means to you. And I know, as always, that you absolutely got this. Right? Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I’ll talk to you soon.