Staying Motivated Through Setbacks

If you love running, you don't need help staying motivated most of the time. But what about during an extended period of failure and discouragement?

This past winter was my best season ever - I set PRs all over the place. Training was amazingly fun. I almost always felt good and I was fiercely motivated, so the whole thing seemed effortless.

The last few months, training has been horrible. I won't go into too much detail about this - the important points are that my legs constantly feel weak and unresponsive, and there is no clear end in sight because I don't know what's causing it.

As energizing and uplifting as running is every day when it's going well, that is how discouraging and deflating it can feel when you have a persistent problem like this that makes routine training impossible.

By now, I've settled into a mindset that I really feel is the best way to survive a rough patch like this. It follows from this belief: The more you put into the sport, the more the sport gives back to you. This could easily be mistaken for a spiritual proverb, but that's really not how I mean it. I'm not saying some greater power is going to make sure your hard work is rewarded eventually. In my opinion, running should be done for self-fulfillment. It feels good to run fast, and it feels good to have hard work pay off. When it's not going well, you don't get the self-fulfillment right away. But it goes into the bank. I say this because, in my experience, success that comes after failure is a lot more satisfying than the same level of success would have been originally. If you stick with anything for long enough, you'll experience countless ups and downs. Every low levels off eventually and is followed by a high.

So during a tough period of training, you need to take a bigger-picture perspective. Think of it as paying your dues to the sport that you love. You need to prove how dedicated you are to it for it to reward you, and when it does, you'll remember why you love running.