Anyone can have a bad race. The restart is the skill.

The first time, I pulled out at 21 kilometres.

The second time I got to 44. Most of the way. More than twice as far, and still not to the end. If you have done that, come a long way and still stopped short, you will know it does not feel better for the extra distance. It can feel worse. You have seen how much you had in you, and it still was not enough on the day.

Two DNFs at the same race. Did not finish. Three of the bluntest letters in running.

What surprised me was how quickly I knew I would go again. Both times, standing there not finished, I had already decided. The disappointment was real, and it stayed with me for a while. But the deciding was instant. I would be back.

It took me a long time to understand why that mattered so much.

The race itself was never the hard part to recover from. My body knew what had happened and moved on well before I did. The work was in my head. There is a voice that shows up after something does not go your way, and it does not stay neutral for long. It wants the DNF to mean something about you. Not “that day did not go to plan,” which is true and survivable, but “maybe you are not the runner you thought you were.” At four in the morning those two sentences are almost impossible to tell apart. They are not the same sentence.

Leaders know this voice

You back a restructure and it does not land. You make a hire that does not work out. You walk out of a board meeting knowing the pitch fell flat. You step into a bigger role and cannot seem to get your feet under you. Lead anything long enough and you will have days you do not finish the way you planned, and the voice will start up, reaching for what the failure says about you rather than what it says about the day.

Most of us treat these as the problem to solve. Prepare better, decide more carefully. Worth doing. But it misses something, because the setbacks never stop coming. They get bigger as you go, and more public. Nobody outruns the bad race. Not runners, not leaders.

Which means the setback was never going to be the thing that set people apart. The restart is.

I have started to think of it as a skill in its own right, one that never appears on a development plan. We usually call this resilience, and we talk about it as though some people simply have it. I have come to think it is something more specific than that. Recovery time. The distance between the thing going wrong and you being back on your feet in the work, thinking clearly, moving again. That distance is where a lot of leadership is quietly decided, and hardly anyone trains it.

Recovery time is what can be trained

I had one part of this wrong for years. I assumed a fast recovery meant not feeling the hit. It does not. I committed to running Ultra-Trail again within minutes of not finishing, and I carried the disappointment for weeks. Both were true at the same time. That is what the restart looks like. You are not skipping the setback, or talking yourself into feeling fine. You are deciding to go again while you still carry the weight of it not having worked.

I have watched two leaders take the same knock and pay completely different prices for it. One disappears into it for a fortnight, replaying the conversation, doubting the call, carrying that unsettledness into every room. The other lets it land, feels it properly, and still commits to the next attempt early, before the story has time to set. Same event. The cost is not decided by how hard they are. It is decided by how fast they start again.

And the reason starting again is hard has almost nothing to do with the setback and almost everything to do with what happens in the days after it. The brain reads a public failure as a threat, and left to itself it will keep that alarm running far longer than the moment warrants, turning the story over, working out what it all means about you. It feels like you are processing. Often you are just not starting again.

The people who recover quickly are not pretending it did not happen, and they are not forcing a bright face onto it. They have a cleaner relationship with the thing. They can say what went wrong without letting it decide who they are. They take the lesson and leave the shame where it fell. They hold “that did not work” well apart from “I am not enough,” and they do not wait to feel ready before they say yes to going again.

That gap can be trained. The speed of it can be trained. It is some of the most useful work I do with leaders, and some of the least talked about.

Decide to go again, and decide early

I am training for Ultra-Trail Australia again in 2027. The third attempt. I cannot tell you I feel certain about it, because I do not. What I have instead is the part that turned out to matter more than certainty. I decided to go again, and I decided early.

That is a lot of what coaching with me comes down to. Not helping people dodge the days that fall apart, because no one can, but closing the gap between the setback and the restart. The inner work that lets you feel the disappointment, take what it has to teach you, and begin again before the story you have told yourself costs you a promotion, a fortnight, or the steadiness your people count on you to carry.

Anyone can have a bad race. Anyone can not finish. The restart is the skill. And a skill is something you can get better at.