Reading their blogs I also glimpse their human side, the times they fall short, get lazy, or train too hard resulting in injury. In a recent 100 mile race one of the top distance runner's in the USA dropped due to lack of motivation, as she put it "my head and heart were not in it". I can recall only two other times when I have read something like this, one from a local ultra runner who gave up at the McNaughton 100 because he wondered to himself after mile 30, "why am I out here, I would rather be watching soccer on tv", so he quit and went home to watch sports on tv. The other runner is from Minnesota and prides himself on being a tough guts runner, a guy who will finish a race with a broken leg. This particular race, the Lean Horse 100, he dropped at mile 25 because he "did not feel like running". Later in the day he hiked for 10-15 miles up a mountain because he had a lot of energy and didn't know what to do with himself while his friends were still running the race.
What I find confusing about this is that they did not seem to feel any kind of remorse or sense of failure. Perhaps they did, but they never wrote about it in their blog (the elite runner has yet to blog about her decision to drop, so I don't know how she feels about it). The local guy sometimes mentions failure, but the kind of failure that exists only when one has the wrong attitude (goals are based on external circumstances). He recently ran the Howl and was hoping to run above 40 miles. He ended up with 33, and considered this a failure. However, I saw him on the course, I could see he was not feeling well, but he did not give up, and he ran the full 8 hours, pretty amazing when your feeling sick and low. In my mind the Howl was a success, and the McNaughton race a failure. He never mentioned the McNaughton race as a failure, yet it can be nothing but a failure - the moment he stopped trying, he failed. He did not have an injury, was not feeling ill, the weather was not bothering him, he just did not feel like finishing what he started. It would be like Churchill giving up against the Nazis in '41 because he was tired of the whole mess (fortunately this did not happen!)
I have yet to experience quitting a race due to lack of motivation. I could have dropped from the Devil's Lake race last year due to a painful knee, but the desire to finish was stronger than the pain I was experiencing. I am glad I did not drop because struggling with pain is something which makes me stronger and hardens my will.
If I ever write a race report which starts out, "I went to run the race, felt great, but dropped out because I didn't feel like being there", I will surely count it as a failure. If I do experience that kind of failure, I am sure I will feel regret the next day, but the next race I will get another chance to fight it out to the end. There is no shame in failing, as long as I forgive myself and move on to the next challenge.
