Luck Has Nothing To Do With Racing Your Best

April 14, 2025 | By DLake

Comic by Mark Remy of Dumbrunner.com

“Good luck in your race.”

Every time I hear it, I throw up a little in my mouth. I get it because it’s a thing people say.

I feel like it’s similar to saying “hope your car drives well” to a master mechanic who’s been tuning every bolt, cleaning the fuel lines, and studying the road for months. It’s not about luck because there’s no horseshoe or rabbit’s foot that’s gonna save you.

A runner I know wanted to “will power” his way through his third marathon and run sub 3 hours and 30 minutes. Before this, the fastest he ran was 3 hours 50 minutes, so a jump of 20 minutes is quite a lot, but if we can put people on the Moon… this guy can, through smart training and a long enough time horizon, lower his marathon by 20 minutes, right?

His training was spotty at best. His biggest run was 14 miles (23km), and everything else was a half-hearted mess. What happened on race day? His brain shut all that sh*t down.

Because he never trained his body to handle it, his brain went, “No, Sir! We’ve never done this before. I’m going to slow down ATP production to all the vital muscles and make this hurt cuz you’re trying to kill us, and I can’t be having that.”

That’s not a lack of mindset but more like your brain/body doing its job.

So yeah, here’s what I really think mental prep is made of — and it’s not what the motivational quote accounts would have you believe. It’s these three based things:

1. You did the proper training.
   Yes, obviously. But so many people think intervals with recovery breaks are going to get them to the finish line of an uninterrupted 13.1 or 26.2. If you’ve been doing this for a few years and are really racing your hardest, then it most likely won’t.
   
   In training, you have to run as much of the race distance at your target pace (in a smart way) without stopping if you want your best time. Is there a risk of overtraining? Sure. Is it worth it? Depends.
   
   Do you actually want your best time or just want to finish feeling like a bad a$$ for Instagram?
2. You have the right pacing strategy.
   No, you cannot go out 20 seconds per km/mile faster than anything you’ve ever done in training and “just hope for the best.” That’s not strategy — that’s diabolic sabotage. Your brain/body is like, “Cool story bro, but we’ve never done this before,” and then you blow up at mile 18 and start looking for a medical tent to cry in.
3. You’ve been there before, either in training or in life — so you know you can do it.
   When it gets hard (and it will), there’s this magical moment where your brain checks for receipts. If you’ve never suffered like this before, it pulls the “danger-danger” alarm. But if you have, even just once — It’ll go, “Alright, we’ve kinda sorta been here before. Let’s suffer a tiny bit more… but I think we can survive.”

I’m just tired of the mind-over-matter, David-Goggins-lite inspiration porn (even though I do love David Goggins!). Everyone wants to talk about digging deep without planting the damn seeds first.

Racing is just the test. Training is the studying. Strategy is the cheat sheet. And luck? That’s for the casinos.

Instead of saying “Good Luck” to a runner, maybe try saying “I know you’ll do your best”. That puts the onus on the runner and not their crossed fingers and four leaf clovers.

But maybe I’m being too harsh on these Lucky Charms runners. Am I? Let me know in the comments👇🏽 or email t a l k a t 1 better run dot com. Or don’t. I’ll be over here doing strides and muttering about ATP in the corner.